Trey Smith
For the past 3 or 4 years, I have followed the various incarnations of Bruce Gerencser's blog. His current rendition is Fallen From Grace. Now an atheist, Bruce spent the majority of his life as a fundamentalist Christian minister. Because of his former profession, many current Christians have suggested that the reason he has left his faith behind must be because he's angry at God or he was somehow hurt during his years in the church. I suppose most of them simply can't fathom the notion that Bruce moved away from Christianity due to any other reason.
Unlike Bruce, I was never a Christian pastor of any sort, so I don't face the amount of vitriol he must put up with day in and day out. Still, as someone who grew up Christian and is now NOT, this same type of rationale has been thrown my way as well.
It seems to me that a common assumption among current followers of the religion of Paul (with Jesus as a supporting cast member) is that there must have been one seminal event that knocked once-believers down the path to non-belief. This event must have involved writhing pain, agony and self-doubt. In our hurt and anger, we blamed God and, to get even, we turned our back on him.
I hate to disappoint the people who hold onto this explanation, but there was no one seminal event for me. I never had a specific AHA! moment. It was a gradual thing that evolved slowly.
It gradually dawned on me that a lot of the stuff I had learned in church and Sunday School in my first 22 or so years of life simply didn't compute in my brain. In time, I came to the conclusion that man (humankind) was NOT created in the image of the Heavenly Father -- it was the other way around! The Christian God exhibits all the emotions, foibles and challenges that we do. That didn't make a lick of sense to me.
As I grew older and, somewhat, wiser, I no longer saw the hand of a god -- ANY god -- in the world. This is not to say that I don't see a common thread to life, but certainly not in the form of a personified being that plays THE crucial role in what happens to each of us on a day-to-day basis.
It's only been in the last year or two that I realized I was an atheist. It's not that I'm mad or felt that I was hurt by God; it's near too impossible to be angry with an entity that I believe doesn't and never existed...except in the imaginations of people.
Yes, that image once was in my imagination too. I have no qualms in that admission. I once believed in the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but I don't believe in them now and almost no one castigates me for giving up those silly beliefs.
It's not my fault that many still hold onto -- what I believe is -- the biggest fairy tale of all. I just no longer happen to be one of them.
that 'man was not made in the image of god but instead god was made in the image of man' is very clever :-)
ReplyDeleteI was innocently sitting in a park yesterday when an Asian guy approached me "hello" he said "I'm from the church of Korea and I'd like to talk about Jesus"
I laughed straight in his face which made him move to leave and as he did I called after him "I'd like to talk about spider man, come back!"
I need to remember that line!!
ReplyDeleteI know I have said this before, but "the Christian God" is more complex than just what you read in the OT, which is really a story about a covenant community. The NT is a revision of the OT. It is all rich mythology. And as Joseph Campbell has said, "Mythology is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energy of the universe is expressed." Your anger and abandonment of the (childish) fundamentalist perspective is not unlike the OT God's frustration with his people.
ReplyDeleteThe Tooth Fairy, Santa and the Easter Bunny are myths (largely for children). But myths are ways of conveying and expressing certain cultural values and guidelines...and fears. Santa is utterly fascinating (there's a lot of old religion and shamanism there) and the Bunny is all about fertility and rebirth, resurrection...Taoist cycles, really. The tooth fairy is conveying some notion about change and bodily decay. You don't have to "believe in" the personification to get the message. Fairy tales go very deep into the psyche.
I might add that the commercialization of Santa and the Bunny (and the Tooth Fairy to a lesser extent) says something about current cultural values.
ReplyDeleteBaroness,
ReplyDeleteIt all depends on one's perspective. When you write that the "NT is a revision of the OT," I am guessing that most Jews would object to that assertion. In fact, there are many Christians who would argue this point as well.
Further, I never "abandoned" the fundamentalist perspective because I never had it to begin with. I grew up Presbyterian which is one of the mainline and more liberal denominations.
Certainly I was commenting from the Catholic perspective, the "New Covenant" concept. Of course, Jews would not accept that. (But we were talking about "the Christian God".) And do forgive me for misattributing a fundamentalist perspective to your background. My father was raised as a Presbyterian. That Calvinism made him bitter, I think. Funny that his second wife was Catholic.
ReplyDelete