I am not sure what I believe. I was raised in a "Christian" environment by very flawed humans. (Is there any other kind?) As a child and young adult I suffered a lot of abuse - mentally, emotionally, physically and sexually at the hands of people who called themselves Christian. Some of these people were family members. Some were people in positions of authority in the churches I attended. Needless to say my ability to trust others was reduced to less than nothing.
In most of my adult life I have been a professional musician and performer for my professional career. That career included many jobs being paid to sing in a number of churches of different denominations and even differing faiths. I found the struggles and battles of the people in them to push me further away rather than filling me with a desire to pull closer. Every time someone has a differing idea or interpretation of scripture or of some doctrine they simply break away and start their own group.
So much of the teachings of the church strike me a fiction, poorly written. Historical research shows that most of the books we call the New Testament were written a hundred years or more after the actual death of christ and were stories handed down from person to person.
Anyone who has ever worked in an office or group ( or a theatre for that matter) knows the game of passing a tale from person to person. By the time it comes full circle, it bears little resemblance to the original. Time changes all truths. So it was with the stories of Jesus. They were added to and embellished to draw attention to the growing religion which at the time ( as it is now) was as much politics as it was faith.
As someone who believes that one has to have an intellectual understanding before one can truly have an emotional one, I believe in knowing what was really said in the books we hold sacred - meaning the Greek and Latin and various original languages as they are really translated, NOT the King James version which was not really a translation at all, but a simplification for the masses. So much of what we call the bible today was compiled by rich white men who were trying to codify and control the masses. Whole scriptures were left out because they challenged the authority of the one (then holy catholic) church.
I also do not follow the Catholic tradition that the masses need an intermediary (priest) to translate for them and to act as interpreter and to intercede for them with god. Would a creator be "too busy" to deal directly with each of its creations? Faith is a deeply personal thing that each person has to explore and discover for himself or herself. A personal discovery of what one believes holds the universe together, and gives each life purpose, is only achieved by self discovery, NOT by a priest telling you what to believe and how to live. I have never yet met a human being who did not in his deepest psyche know instinctually right from wrong, a good action from a bad one.
I do not believe in the whole heaven and hell thing, nor in life after death, a resurrection of this body, or everlasting life. Neither am I able to reconcile myself with the eastern philosophies of reincarnation or karma.
There is not one shred of evidence that we continue on after this life. Of course it is reassuring to hold on to that belief for so many reasons: Fear of the finality of death, Hope for a chance to do better next time, Wishing that human suffering now will be paid back in the future with bread and gold. but I am a realist enough to think that this life is it. We had best make the most of it while we have it.
Historical research shows that so much of what we believe as the codified doctrines of the church was taken from other cultural rituals and beliefs (check out the worship of the goddess/ virgin/mother/crone; or of Mithridate the sun god that is buried in the earth every night to rise to save us again each morning; the stories of ancient Egyptian gods like Osiris and Isis - Osiris butchered and dismembered by his "evil" brother, but able to be put back together to rise from the dead; the Pagan cultures of the Celts, and much more... ) The church - in its ever-constant belief that it must grow or die incorporated many of those stories in order to keep new converts involved and slowly wiped out the cultures and faiths that existed before it.
All this being said, recently my husband and I returned to church. Perhaps it is the fact that we are getting older. We wanted a sense of community. He was raised in the anglican/episcopal tradition and so we returned there. So Here I AM... beginning to reason explore and find for myself what I mean by faith and what it means to life a life based on belief of SOMETHING greater than myself.
I have no doubt that there is SOMETHING that has ordered life around us as it is. Evolution alone is not a sure enough reason for man to have developed into the state we now wear. (For the record I DO believed that what scientist call evolution is valid. I just see the hand of God in directing how selection of the fittest occurs.)
I know my musings will make some people irate - because I dare to stir up doubt in their own minds and most humans fear change more than they fear death. For that reason comments will NOT be activated.
I am not stating anything here in my blog as fact. I am searching out loud for MY answers to MY life, and MY doubt. But I am reasonably sure that if I have these question with this life-long struggle to reconcile what I've been taught with what I think, then there are sure to be others. If I can open other minds to think for themselves then perhaps I have done something good in the world with the little time I have here...
Create Beauty and Fill the world with LOVE!
Wynn
