I am one of many who have been navigating the philosphical realms of logic and reason – trying my best to find meaning in the religion I was raised in.. I have made some progress! I really enjoy writing about it, so a blog is a natural next step. Not that I need therapy, but I find writing about my experiences feels really good! Quite honestly, writing IS therapy. 

I suspect there are a lot of people out there like me….people who have been raised since birth in one of the more popular Judeo-Christian religions, and who deep down have a pile of unanswered questions. We keep our unresolved theological issues to ourselves and go on with our lives.  I don’t know when I first realized I was not going to be able to choke down my questions and my doubts, but by the time I started college I was already feeling differently about church. I was raised in the Methodist church, the son of a choir director! My grandmother was the church organist for 30 plus years, and my grandfather sang in the choir…needless to say, church was a big part of my life. I was ‘automatically’ in the youth choir and in the MYF. (Methodist Youth Fellowship) I never really got into it that much, but in retrospect I was extremely susceptible to the subtle pressure exerted on me by my mom. My younger sister ‘joined’ the church when she was 9 or 10, and I immediately felt the pressure to do it too. (I was probably 13)  Nothing was ever said, but I felt it was expected of me. 

There was a definite sequence to joining the church. Unless you were transferring your membership from another church, you needed to start the process by answering an altar-call, normally extended after the sermon at the end of the service. During the last hymn, you could go up and kneel in prayer at the altar. The minister then would come and pray with you – the basic sinners prayer – the accepting Jesus as your personal savior prayer… then later you could in good conscience schedule your official baptism which made you an official “member” of the church.  I dreaded this process and found it to be embarrassing, but it sure made my mom and my grandparents happy! I chose a Thursday evening Spring revival service for my walk up the aisle. The guest preacher preached a sermon about respecting our fathers (or some such) I remember it was pretty lame, but it didn’t matter since I had decided that that night was my night to go up and go through the process.  If I was hoping to have company up there with me, I was hoping in vain. Between the weak sermon and the goofy closing hymn I wound up being the only soul to take the stroll.    

I don’t remember a whole lot about getting baptized or any of that, I just remember becoming great at apologetics, before I even knew what Christian apologetics was all about! I told my mom that it made sense to me that God and Jesus had done all the amazing things mentioned in the bible “back then”, since if they were to do the same things today they would be accused of performing simple magic tricks and illusions. I remember my mom nodding in agreement, saying that was probably true.  Basically I already had questions in the back of my mind that I was trying to ignore.  I’m willing to bet there are scores of religious people with a mental “belief survival kit” full of excuses and rationalizations that help them gloss over the inconsistencies and absurdities in their faith.

I kept my religiosity at a manageable level for most of my adult life. When my wife and I first moved away from home for my first job, I did continue to feel pressure from my family to “find a church” and get back into regular attendance. I resisted in a passive-aggressive fashion, always agreeing that church was a great idea but never going the extra step of actually ‘attending’ a church service. I think at this point I was a pseudo-mainstream Christian (belief-wise) – feeling that which church or which denomination I would affiliate myself with wasn’t really important…just a belief in Jesus and all that went along with that.  I had never found participation in church services to be enjoyable or edifying, really. The fact that my wife and I lived far away from my hometown for the first 15 years of our marriage (and moved frequently) made it much easier to not bother formally confronting how I felt about my faith. I felt that my beliefs were sufficient without seeking out a church to attend, and that was that.  My other doubts and questions about my beliefs were allowed by me to simmer in the back of my mind for years. I thought about it occasionally, trying to set mental stakes in the ground to at least mark my core beliefs…that the Bible was not meant to be taken literally…that no denomination represented the only true, correct doctrine.      stay tuned….