Can I really put into words for all the world to see where I feel like I am right now?
I keep listening to this song, “Because of You” by Kelly Clarkson. I love this song, and right now it describes how I feel. “You” would be the world that I created around me in order to be who I thought I needed to be…it includes God, Christianity, friends, and family.
I will not make the same mistakes that you did
I will not let myself cause my heart so much misery
I will not break the way you did you fell so hard
I learned the hard way to never let it get that far
Because of you I never strayed too far from the sidewalk
Because of you I learned to play on the safe side so I don’t get hurt
Because of you I find it hard to trust not only me but everyone around me
Because of you I am afraid
I lose my way and it’s not too long before you point it out
I cannot cry because I know that’s weakness in your eyes
I’m forced to fake a smile a laugh everyday of my life
My heart can’t possibly break when it wasn’t even whole to start with
I watched you die
I heard you cry every night in your sleep
I was so young you should have known better than to lean on me
You never thought of anyone else you just saw your pain
And now I cry in the middle of the night for that same damn thing
I want to step away from the safe side. I want to trust. I don’t want to be afraid. So here goes.
I do believe in God. That’s a given for me. But I don’t think He is really the God of Christianity. I’ve looked, but I haven’t found that all loving God. I see a God who set the universe in motion and then left us alone to make of it what we will. I’ve come to the realization that I don’t really believe in heaven or hell. I don’t know what I believe about an afterlife. I think there is one (this can’t really be all there is), but I have no idea what it looks like. I believe that Jesus did exist, but I’m not sure about the whole Messiah thing. I do think that modeling the characteristics of Jesus in your life is a good thing, regardless of what you believe. There’s something to be said for loving your neighbor and being a good, moral person. Jesus was a fantastic teacher. His lessons are good – and I don’t intend to forsake that Christlike character.
Since I’ve begun to admit this to myself and to other people, I’ve started to be happy with who I am. I know this is going to break some of your hearts. But this is a path that I have to explore for myself if I’m going to be true to myself.
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Well, at least you are being honest with yourself now. That’s a great place to start.
You actually are correct – God is not just an all loving God. He is also a God of wrath who hates sin and condemns it. He is also a God of mercy Who gives man a free will instead of making him a puppet who can only do as he is told. He is also s God of compassion Who cries when we cry and wants us to run to His arms for comfort. He is also a God of judgment Who keeps His promise that sin will always have consequences. Most of all, He is a faithful God Who will never leave us or forsake us and Who never breaks His promises.
I will keep praying for you and will follow your journey with interest. May God bless you and reveal the truth about Himself to you. No matter what happens, you are loved.
I really admire your courage to put yourself out there like this. I know it will not be easy, considering that it seems you have pretty strong Christian community, but blogging and personal. I think it takes courage to question and to break away from the pattern.
Though I am Christian, I am often considered a “bad Christian” because though I believe in Christ’s authority in my life, I don’t necessary think He has to be that for other people. I know…I’m a bad, bad Christian. I find that there is a certain level of commonality in who God is when you look across different faith practices, and I think we often put God in a box when we say God can only be one thing for one group of people.
Embrace this journey. Who knows, you may end up coming right back to Christianity, or you may not. But no matter where you go, I think you will come through a more contemplative and spiritual person, no matter what path you end up on.
I look forward to reading. Thank you for sharing.
My Dear Amanda,
Strength and courage such as this are all too rare. It’s a scary thing you’ve done.
But you are not alone, and we are here for you.
Kisses,
alluvus
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Congrats on figuring things out, at least to this point.
At the risk of sounding different than the rest, I don’t understand your decision. I mean, I can understand from your experiences here and your conversation on atheist blogs how you could come to doubt the foundations of Christianity. I just can’t understand how a belief that Jesus was a good teacher and some one to emulate jives with your other comments about not believing in an active God or Heaven or Hell.
Since Jesus was the one that a) said He is God, b) said that He specifically was preparing a place for His disciples, and c) told people to believe in Him– just letter (a) would say that you shouldn’t follow Him if He was not God because He must be that or a lunatic.
In any case, I appreciate that you want to be true to yourself. I can understand wanting to make sure for yourself what you believe. I do fear that you may find your way in places that would seek to lead you away from the truth.
But at least you’re being honest with yourself. When Elijah was honest with God, God brought him back– and I pray the same happens with you.
MTG, that’s a false dichotomy.
Whether or not Jesus was/was not or claimed/didn’t claim to be God is irrelevant to whether he had anything worthwhile to say.
“Do unto others…” is a valuable piece of advice whether it comes from a god or a man, whether it comes from a good man or a bad man, or whether it was written in a book printed yesterday or two thousand years ago.
Saying that whether a person should heed the teachings of a man hinges on whether or not that man was a god is plain silly.
To go a little off topic… this has nothing to do with how I feel about anyone hear…. I just thought it would be interesting to type up… a little devil’s advocate… whatever…
What was it CS Lewis said?
I don’t really recall the exact words, just know it was along the lines of, “Whoever simply calls Jesus Christ a good teacher or a good man is an idiot. He called himself the Son of God and God incarnate. So either he was telling the world’s most amazing truth, or he was the devil telling the greatest lie.”
Basically one of the other, there was no, “just a good teacher” about him.
P.S. Amanda… you are still loved… hope you find the path you’re looking for…
That is of course, assuming he did claim that. Given that we have no reliable contemporary accounts of that, it’s sort of a moot point.
Sorry, but that makes no sense. You can’t say that his teachings were great, and then say we don’t know who he claimed to be because we don’t have reliable accounts. The same texts that tell us what his teachings were are the same texts that tell us who He claimed to be.
Without the Bible, there is no way to know what his teachings were. If you aren’t going to accept it at face value for its claims about him, then you can’t accept it at face value for what His teachings were.
Amanda:
I still am curious about what happened to cause such a sudden and radical change.
Do you ever think that you will post about it?
“Jesus told of a merchant who found one pearl so incomparable that he sold everything he owned in order to buy it. The joy in what he gained swallowed up any remorse for what he lost. That is the Adult image of the Christian life: not a grim-faced regimen of self-discipline but an exuberant new life easily worth whatever sacrifice may be required.
“Attaining that goal may take time and practice, of course. As C.S. Lewis said, “I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets.” Just as Lewis studied Greek grammar not in order to parse verbs but to read poetry, I play scales on the piano only because of what they will enable me to play. The reward comes after the practicing and will not come without practicing. To quote Lewis once more, “We act from duty in the hope that someday we shall do the same acts freely and delightfully.”
(an excerpt from Philip Yancey’s “Reaching for the Invisible God”)
I’ve thought of you often these past few days…wondered where this journey will take you. And as I read this excerpt today, you once again came to mind. I highly recommend this book, Amanda…as it’s helped me through the spiritual desert I’ve been traveling through over these past couple of years. I’m still not out of the desert…and actually I feel that much of my Christian walk (14+ years) has been very much in the desert. But for some reason, no matter how far I stray, I’m always feeling this ever so gentle nudge to seek God. If God were not real and active in our lives, would we feel such nudges?? Hhhhmmmm… Keep searching, Amanda!!
I don’t, and that’s the point. The message is what’s important, whether it came from a real person named Jesus, a fictional character, a god, or my Great Aunt Bess in a fake beard.
The fact that there are no reliable contemporary texts that even mention such a person is irrelevant to what he is reputed to have said.
Does the value of the tale of the hare and the tortoise hinge on whether there really was a race between a hare and a tortoise? I certainly hope not.
Janie….On what basis do you say there are no reliable contemporary texs?
Also, the tortoise and the hare is presented as a fable and has always been presented as a fable. While the message may not seem to matter, it does if the messenger is making claims about himself, the interpretation of the message, and where the message came from.
You can’t separate the message from Jesus because they are intimately wrapped up together.
“Do unto others” is a nice, general message that can be found everywhere, but does nothing to represent the larger truth about Jesus.
It still holds that if you don’t believe Jesus is who he says he is, than you have to view him as a horrible liar or an off-kilter, crazy person.
Sigh.
Terri, I couldn’t disagree anymore with you on this one. I too, believe that “Jesus” was nothing more than a nice guy who may or may not have even walked this earth. I consider it a story, nothing more. Take the time to watch the Zeitgeist video on my blog, and that should sum up everything nicely.
Regardless of who he might/might not have been, the messages in the text, written by who knows who, have some validity in today’s world. SOME, not all!
Your issue is that you ABSOLUTELY believe every word in the bible to be from the mouth of GOd. We don’t. I believe the Bible is a collection of pretty stories and FABLES amassed over the centuries. You are certainly entitled to your opinion, but so are Janie and I.
Go watch the video and then come back and talk about this stuff!
http://musicguy2723.blogspot.com/2007/06/blog-post.html
Musicguy:
What I said has nothing to do with what “I” believe.
So we are supposed to accept these teachings from these “mysterious” authors who blatantly lie to us on the one hand, but then have “some” truth in them. That kind of poisons the well, doesn’t it?
TO say that Jesus may not have even existed is ridiculous, regardless of what you believe about him.
I am not buddhist and don’t hold to buddhism’s teachings, but I still believe there was an actual person that the stories are based on.
The texts that we have from the gospels are more numerous and consistent than what we have for other classic Greek and Roman lierature, but we would never suppose that there wasn’t really a guy named Homer who wrote the Odyssey.
If you don’t believe what the gospels say, that’s one thing, but saying that there are no reliable texts and that Jesus may not have even existed is quite another.
Wow, this discussion took a different turn than I expected.
But that’s okay.
MIntheGap (and Terri too) – I myself have used that argument countless times. It sounds good, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t hold up if your perspective on the Bible as God’s word changes. When you’re really leaning towards thinking of the Bible as written by men with a specific agenda (there’s no such thing as an unbiased history book), then it’s not hard to make the leap that a very real man named Jesus existed, but not necessarily exactly the way he was portrayed in the text.
The Bible was definitely written by people with an “agenda”– their agenda was to say to the world that Jesus– God’s Son– came to Earth to save sinners that had fallen away. To say that they had another agenda is foolishness on its face, since the Disciples did not have any earthly gain (for them or their posterity) and they all (save 1) were killed in brutal fashion. What other agenda could they have had?
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Show me existence of a Jesus in any historical documents OTHER than the bible. They are few and unreliable. There are quite a few historical records available from the era, but you’ll not find the name Jesus anywhere.
As for an agenda, there certainly was one- control of the populace. So many other books written during/after the time of “Jesus” have been disregarded, including other Gospels that talk about a very different Jesus.
Also, I never meant to say the Bible has truth- rather you can take some items from it and use it to live a good life, just like the hare and tortoise FABLE.
You miss the point that minthegap made.
The authors of the gospels had NO “control.” Christianity wasn’t affiliated with any power until about halfway through the 4th century, well after the gospels were written.
Control can only be exerted by those in power. The gospel writers had no power. If they did, they certainly wouldn’t have been tortured and executed so ruthlessly.
That statement (and thus all the following ones based directly on it) is factually incorrect.
The texts we have from the gospels post-date the events in question by in some cases 200 years. They most certainly are not consistent in their various forms. They have been demonstrably edited and re-written as far back as before their canonization.
As far as other contemporary accounts, Amanda and I have had this very conversation on my blog, and as I am sure she can now tell you, five minutes of research will verify my previous statement. Google is your friend.
Not at all, Terri. First, poisoning the well is exactly the argument tactic you are advancing, and it’s a common and well known logical fallacy.
In this case, your argument is that if author X says one thing that is not true, then nothing he says can be true.
That is simply a foolish assertion.
Water is wet.
Water is dry.
One of those statements is provably false. By your logic, the other must also be false because the statement was made by me.
The idea that the worth of everything said in the bible hinges on the historicity of the actual story as presented is equally as foolish.
Actually, that is exactly the case. There really wasn’t a guy named Homer who wrote the Odyssey. And that fact also has no bearing on the worth of the literature.
Kisses,
JanieBelle
Ok, since Google’s my friend, it helped me find this:
New Testament
Written: 1st Cent. A.D. (50-100 A.D.
Earliest Copy: 2nd Cent. A.D. (c. 130 A.D. f.) Approx Time Span between original and copy: less than 100 years
Numbers of Copies: 5600
Accuracy of Copies: 99.5%
Check out the chart for yourself. Compare to the other works which we have no problem accepting the dates for or accepting the authorship of and compare.
For the gospel of John alone we’re talking 29 years between our copy and 95 AD (which would be in the ballpark for the disciple that was exiled to Patmos and did not die like the others).
I don’t think that everything you say is wrong, JanieBelle, I just think that you don’t have the best information.
Musicguy, you need to do more than to say that the references to Jesus are unreliable to prove that point rather than “poison the well”. However, the Biblical account does not need extra-biblical references, since the proliferation of the Gospels would have been accounts from eye-witnesses. We’re talking a much different time period with news moving much more slowly.
Again, as Terri mentioned, control of the populace is a laughable reason to fake a story about a person. Especially knowing that said person was killed in a terrifying manner and that the leaders of the day were killing all that believed it.
Put another way, if a person in Iran wanted to create a religion contrary to Islam proclaiming that some rock was a god, would they really want to go there, write works that could be traced to them that they would pass out to all the Imams and everyone and have a prayer of getting control of the people? of Iran itself?
I’m afraid that they would end up beheaded, drawn and quartered, or whatever is their practice over there. They would not stand a chance of gaining over control.
I understand that Mormonism, JW’s and the like have created religions based off Christianity in America for control, for prestige, or to get as many wives as possible, but that was not the environment in the early years A.D.
Again, the idea that they were trying to write for control of something or with some other message than that they actually believed what they were writing about is absurd. You can say they were mislead, but they believed what they were writing.
MindtheGap and Dearest Terri need to find a way to watch that movie before they continue to use incorrect information to validate their illogical claims.
Oh and Janie– we also need to teach these folks how to use Google. It’s not quite as easy as clicking on the sponsored first link. You sometimes have to search for unbaised research, in this case, research not sponsored by a church or other religious institution.
Hi Mandi. Scott Hatfield here, via JanieBelle’s blog, via Kristine. You keep good company.
Just thought I’d tell you that I’m a committed Christian and I think it’s OK for you to have doubts, to explore, to think for yourself, and to come to whatever conclusions you think allow you to best follow the example of Jesus. I agree with JanieBelle above that you do not have to buy any particular conception of Jesus’s ultimate status in order to emulate him.
In this sense, the God that I worship transcends concepts like ‘Christian’ and ‘He’, and even leaps beyond false dichotomies like ‘reason’ or ‘belief’. All of our images of God (‘imago Dei’) are ultimately fantasies in the sense that we can not really hope that our individual experience can map onto the totality of all that is, or ever will be, which is to say the ‘Cosmos’ we inhabit. And so, why should we be surprised that our conceptions of God are incoherent, and provoke conflict when compared with what we discover through investigation of the natural world?
Rather than chastising you, I say that you should be commended for recognizing that the conventional religious beliefs you have received from your culture may be incoherent, incomplete or even false. May your search for meaning connect you more fully with yourself and with others.