Episcopal Review

My room mate (hereafter referred to as RM) and I have embarked on a journey to visit at least 20 different kinds of churches. The Episcopal was our first.

I had attended an Episcopal church in the past, but my RM had never been. So, I was familiar with the ritual, candles, liturgy, music, communion, etc. It was like putting on an old, familiar shoe.

If you've never been to an Episcopal church, or a Catholic one for that matter, it's hard to describe how different it is from a typical protestant church service. The Episcopal church has been called "Catholic Lite," or "Catholic without the Guilt." They have a rich appreciation for history, heritage, saints, creeds, old ways of doing stuff. It's kind of a step into the past. Whereas, most protestant churches try to stay on the razor's edge of contemporary and relevant.

Another thing that sets apart a liturgical service is the active participation of the congregation. There is much more sitting, standing, kneeling, praying, responsive reading and the like. Much easier for an ADHD person like myself to tolerate than the typical protestant service where you just stand and sing forever and then sit and listen forever.

There was a procession at the beginning of the service. There was a fine choir and organ. The sermon was interesting and relevant and customarily short. I actually remember some of it now, 3 months later!

But the sermon is not the focal point. Everything in the service points to the celebrating of communion, called "Eucharist" in liturgical churches. This is when we remember and venerate the suffering that Jesus did on our behalf. After numerous readings and singing on this theme, we all filed forward, knelt at an alter, were given a wafer and then we could either put the wafer in our mouth and drink from the subsequent wine goblet, or we could dip the wafer in the wine and then eat it. (The taste of real wine on a Sunday morning when I have usually not eaten yet is quite potent.)

For me this was all a familiar and oddly comforting ritual. I coached my RM through it, since this was his first time, and to be honest, there's a lot of stuff to keep track of and have ready in your hand if you're going to participate actively with everyone else. You probably need to go 3 or 4 times before it starts to become automatic and you don't feel lost and clumsy anymore.

The Episcopalians don't pretend that the Bible is the infallible, inerrant Word of God. They do believe that truth is contained IN it, as is true of most mainline churches. However, they all agree to follow the Book of Common Prayer (BCP). This is a collection of rites and rituals to be followed throughout the church year. It is the one thing that binds Episcopalians together, regardless of how much they disagree about everything else.

One of the things that dogs at me in an Episcopal service, with all the pomp and circumstance and ritual, is the feeling that I am just "playing church." That there's nothing real or vital or supernatural going on here... just people who've been conditioned to blindly follow ancient traditions and are going through the motions. It heightens my sense of skepticism in some way.

My RM thought it was interesting that the Pastor/Sermon wasn't the focal point, but was concerned that the liturgy itself had become the focal point, and in so doing also missed the main point... God himself.

It was a small church building by Episcopal standards, but was on lovely grounds on a river, and has a proud heritage in that Harriet Beecher Stowe was one of its members. The service was well attended by a cross-section of white folks, with many blue-hairs, which is typical of Episcopal churches. They typically have a lot of elderly and wealthy congregants. The bulletin boasted a bevy of church activities. Episcopal churches are generally active in social work in the community.

So, I'll probably visit the Episcopal church occasionally throughout my life, like visiting and old friend, not to make my home there, nor for serious religious questing. The theology is so liberal it almost doesn't matter what you believe... as long as you follow the Book of Common Prayer!! :)

Steeple Chase

My room mate and I are in the midst of visiting 20 churches, including non-Christian religions.

So far we have visited...

• Episcopal
• United Methodist
• Presbyterian
• Spiritualist
• Buddhist
• Non-denominational

Yet to visit...

• Lutheran
• Mormon
• Baptist
• Charismatic
• Assembly of God
• Messianic Jewish
• Jehovah's Witness
• Catholic
• Atheist
• Unitarian Universalist
• Hindu
• Muslim
• Christian Science
• Seventh Day Adventist
• Mega-church
• Jewish
• Black

Nostalgia

Listening to some old Christian albums today. I miss my faith!! :(

A Faith Journey: Part 1 "Setting the Stage"

I was born into a fundamentalist Christian home, of the Wesleyan Methodist persuasion (Today the name has been changed to simply Wesleyan.) Both of my parents and their parents were members of this denomination, which is akin to Nazarene or Free Methodist.


The Wesleyan Methodists broke off from the Methodist church in the early 20th century as part of the “Holiness” movement, which emphasized the doctrine of “Christian Perfection” that John Wesley had taught. This doctrine posited that sometime after one had become "saved," one could have a second work of grace and be "entirely sanctified," eradicating the inborn sinful nature, and enabling one to live without sin.


In order to promote the standards of "holiness," the denomination forbade it's members to drink, smoke, or gamble and required tithing 10% to the local church. Other activities were frowned upon, such as dancing and going to the movies. Divorce was not permitted, except in instances of marital infidelity.



Another part of Wesleyan doctrine was that you could lose your salvation. In the most conservative parts of the denomination it was believed that it took only one unconfessed sin to condemn someone to hell. And since the list of sins was so long, it fostered an eternal insecurity.


My Mothers’ Father was a minister his entire adult life. He quit Bible College to preach because the end of the world was coming so soon than he needn't waste time with schooling. There was a world going to hell that needed saved... Now! His wife was meek and mild and played the role of a “preacher’s wife” well. Prior to getting married she had been a travelling evangelist, playing her auto-harp and preaching to prisoners and other societal misfits. One wonders whether she was uncomfortable playing the subservient role of wife, but if so, she kept it to herself.



My Father’s parents were “saved” in their adult years and had charismatic leanings (i.e. 700 club and PTL). My Father’s Father was a farmer who made sure the whole family was in the car for the long trips to church... Wednesday night prayer meeting, and twice on Sunday.



My Mother testifies to being “saved” as a young child, and my Father as a teenager. Neither one of them has ever struggled with doubt. My Mother's sister relates that my Mother was taken to the doctor with swollen knees because she spent so much time in prayer. Both of my parents signed the Temperance Pledge as teenagers and to this day have never touched alcohol or tobacco.


My Mother had one sister who married a medical missionary and spent 20 years living and working with a stone-age tribe in New Guinea. Her other sister was the black sheep of the family, turning her back on religion as a teenager, and has remained spiritually aloof ever since. She had issues with her Father. My Father had three sisters. One married a minister and the other two married unbelievers. Well, one married a Catholic who drank and smoke, so that was just as bad.


My Mother went to Houghton College, a Wesleyan Methodist liberal arts school in a remote part of Western New York. My Father's Father was janitor of the large college chapel for many years. She met my Father during her senior year, although he did not attend there, and they married about a year after her graduation.

Coming to acceptance

As my friend, D'ma, posted on her blog, when you lose your faith you go through the stages of grief, like any other loss. I think I started with Denial, then Terror, then Depression, then Bargaining, and now maybe some sort of Acceptance.

Where am I at now? After 9 months of this process?

I'll never be able to look at the Bible the same way again. Having studied critiques of the Bible in depth, I have become convinced of numerous internal contradictions. Heck, start with Genesis 1 and 2, with very different accounts of what happened at creation; go to the various stories of the resurrection and try to reconcile them. Genesis 1-12 seems to be all mythological stories that strain credulity. I could excuse that, but the rest of the Bible builds on those stories as fact. Having studied how the Bible came to be, it is much more plausible now to see how it could all be a human construction. The JEPD theory of the Old Testament seems to explain very well why there are such different themes and doctrines cobbled together into such an incoherent mess. The God of the Old Testament is an ass. There's no other way around it. If he were a current worldly ruler he would be considered a egomaniacal, petty, despot. How do you worship such a person? The dramatic level of killing and bloodshed in the OT is mind-numbing. Some of the miracles, like the sun standing still for a day, may have seemed plausible to an illiterate person, but with our current knowledge about how the solar system works it seem preposterous. The flood story doesn't "hold water" on so many levels. Talking snakes just seems silly and fanciful. Having studied evolutionary theory in depth, I now see it as much more plausible than I had before; it has much better explanatory power of the evidence than a sudden creation of everything at the same time. We don't know who wrote the gospels, and they were probably written several decades after the events. Jesus was thoroughly Jewish, and never suggested his follower should be anything but; yet his followers have been anything but! Paul seemed to know nothing about Jesus other than his death and resurrection; at least he never mentions any details about his life. Jesus, and his followers, expected an imminent return - years maybe, but not decades, centuries, or millenia. Many Biblical stories have parallels in other myths... creation, flood, angels and humans mating, virgin birth, resurrection, etc. I no longer see morality, or good human relations, as being dependent on the existence of a god. I have come to see any religion that requires "faith" (believing in spite of insufficient evidence) to be absurd on its face; you can't argue with it. I have come to see how psychology can explain how and why most people can be lulled into believing all sorts of invisible, unproveable stuff. The universe, and the earth, are billions of years old. Prayer is no more effective than chance and coincidence. People believing they are led by the Holy Spirit come to remarkably different conclusions. The history of Christianity is a never-ending conflict over what the truth is, even on critical doctrines like the nature of salvation, and how to procure it, or what rules we are supposed to live by as NT Christians. The NT preaches an unhealthy level of pacifism. The teachings on divorce and remarriage are untenable. Christianity, for the most part, has participated in the subjugation of slaves, women, and gays, with Biblical justification. Christianity, for the most part, has resisted several significant scientific advancements. Most people's belief in God is based on what country they were born in. God never reveals anything of practical or scientific value in the Old or New Testament, i.e., antibiotics, or quantum mechanics. Nothing is added that wasn't already commonly known. The cosmology of the Bible is exactly as antiquated and wrong as the beliefs of the time... flat earth, waters above the sky, sun revolving around the earth, etc. Prime Mover does not prove there is a god; as difficult as it is to wrap our minds around what "caused" the first things, positing a god only removes the question one step back... who caused God? It doesn't answer anything; you are still left with the same conundrum. The "God of the Gaps" made a lot of sense in ancient times, when so little about the world was understood. Science, however, continues to chip away at those "unexplainables" at a breakneck pace. Because a belief is comforting and gives meaning and purpose to life does not make it true. Our current concepts of the afterlife - heaven and hell - didn't exist until shortly before Jesus' arrival. The more education someone has, the less likely they are to believe in god or the Bible. The idea of someone going to hell for ANY reason seems ludicrous.

So... at this time, for me to believe in a god, or in the stories of the Bible would merely be wishful thinking. It would be akin to believing in Oz, without being willing to peak behind the curtain. That doesn't mean I have all the answers. It doesn't mean I know what the Truth is about life, the universe, and everything. It just means the explanations I once firmly believed in don't seem to make sense to me any more.

I have studied some of the best Christian apologists. A good apologist will come up with explanations and rationales for each thing I mentioned above... just like there are good Mormon apologists, or apologists for the Flat Earth Society. At some point you have to determine whether the apologists are honestly going wherever the facts lead them, or whether they have already committed to a belief and have become ingenious at defending that belief from all contrary evidence. Sometimes you just have to look at the weight of the evidence. At some point you realize you are having to work harder and harder to explain all the contrary or conflicting evidence. Most people cling tightly to their religious beliefs because of the turbulence usually experienced when changing them.

My Christian faith was very important to me. I loved it. I still do. It's a great story! And I love Christians (although I am increasingly seeing them as "having drunk the kool-aid," unwilling or unable to take a critical look at their faith).

My family and my closest friends know the struggle I've been having in this area and generally have not deserted me. I wish I had more friends, however, where we didn't have this unspoken rift in our relationship. I have come out to some of my counseling clients, and no one has left yet. There are others, though, that I dread telling. yuck.

And so I have been spending my free time with other pursuits lately. Watching movies, writing blogs I have on other topics. I can't think of any more religious topic to pursue that would have the hope of shifting my conclusions; I delved into everything that I had nagging questions about. I still love the academic study of religion... what we believe and why.

I wish I had a more satisfying existential "answer" to life, but I am learning to be ok with the unknowns. What other choice do I have?

Online chat tonight!

Our next online chat will be tonight, June 5th, at 10 pm Eastern time (9pm central, 8pm mountain, 7pm pacific). 

Please tell others you think would be interested in joining us. This is primarily for those who were once sincere evangelicals and are now, well, not that!

Here's the link... http://www.chatzy.com/269828013784. And, as always, you can go in the room any time you want and see if anyone else is hanging out there.

Let's do this!

Peace


PS I am interested in chatting about the book, "Evolving in Monkey Town," but we can talk about anything you want to talk about!

Reading Monkey Town

Well, I finally got my copy of "Evolving in Monkey Town" by Rachel Held Evans and skimmed through it. It has promise.

If you've read it, what did you think?

Next online chat will be Sunday night

Doordonot and I had a great chat this morning! It was  a nice start.

Our next chat will be this Sunday night, June 5th, at 10 pm Eastern time (9pm central, 8pm mountain, 7pm pacific). Hopefully this will be a better time for most folks.

Please pass the word on to those you think would be interested. Like I said before, this is primarily for those who were once sincere evangelicals and are now, well, not that!

Here's the link... http://www.chatzy.com/269828013784. And, as always, you can go in the room any time you want and see if anyone else is hanging out there.

Let's do this!

Peace

Reminder: Online chat Sunday

Our first online chat is tomorrow (Sunday) at 1pm Eastern time. (noon Central, 11am Mountain, 10am Pacific).

Please consider joining us this once and we'll see how it goes! Please pass this message on to other deconverts you know who might be interested. Post it on your blog perhaps.

To join the chat, just go to http://www.chatzy.com/269828013784 and choose a user name. That's it!

See you there!

the last 15 years of my faith journey in a nutshell

(This is an excerpt of an email I sent to a friend.)


When I was in seminary I had come to a very similar place as now... finding the intellectual support for biblical inerrancy to be very weak. And once that is gone, well, a lot of things become fuzzy. I drifted aimlessly for awhile, but still wanted a connection with god, whatever he/she might be. It was a traumatic experience to lose my faith. It was horrible. It's not something I wanted to happen. That's when I got into spiritualism. There I seemed to find something that was a real, direct experience with the supernatural. It was experientially-based belief, not dogma-based. It was something to fill the void.

Then when I had an encounter with a hyper-charismatic prophetess woman I suddenly believed that Christianity could be like spiritualism... direct experiential connection with the supernatural. Plus, I could combine it with all the bible knowledge I had and have the "truth" to go along with the experience. It was the complete package. Add to that the fact that I was in a very low point of my life, with the divorce, and mounting debt and poor job/career situation. This is exactly what I needed. I was flying high for awhile, being a true true believer living life in the supernatural realm moment by moment. Disillusionments with that hyper-spiritual approach gradually crept in, as many of the woman's prophecies didn't materialize, and things that I had named and claimed didn't happen.

I left that environment and settled into a mainstream mega-church that my kids liked, got hooked up with a job at new life that i really liked, and just went on my way living a christian life, doing christian things, but with more of a sense of "supercharged" to it all than I had experienced before. I relied on my supernatural direct experience as the foundation of my faith. None of my previous intellectual questions had been answered, but I didn't seem to care. I just "knew," believing that God/Holy Spirit had invaded my life, opened my spiritual eyes, etc. Interestingly, I consistently held to a view that said you can't reason someone into the kingdom, you can't prove it to them... it's something they have to experience... it's something that god has to do to/for them. I didn't think apologetics was of much use.

What led to my faith crisis?

• Unending financial stress. All the prayer in the world didn't help. It just kept getting worse and worse.
• Deep depression. All the prayer in the world didn't help, even from the world-acclaimed Christian Healing Ministries. The only thing that has helped is medication.
• The teachings in the bible about divorce and submission. It was becoming more and more difficult to reconcile what the Bible said with what I thought was best for my clients.

I read the whole New Testament in a month. It did not help. It just increased my questions. I prayed and begged god for help. I asked many people to pray for me. It did not help.

So, when my faith is based on my experience, and my experience falls apart, what do I do? I turned to the more traditional methods for bolstering one's beliefs... apologetics. What we believe and why. But I did not want to have my head in the sand and only look at things that would prop up my faith. I wanted to really know what was true, so I dug deeply into both sides of the faith/Christianity/Bible issue. It did not help. It raised more questions, and gave me less certainty. So, when your experience falls apart, and the traditional intellectual arguments ring hollow, what do you do?

Then I was in that Jewish roots study for 10 weeks. I dug deeply into that issue. This forced me to look at the OT much closer than I had before. If I ever had issues with the OT in the past, I just dismissed it as old covenant... we have a new and improved version now. What was the outcome of looking at the OT more closely?

• The 613 laws are crazy. They're just weird. If you don't believe me, try living them.
• The god portrayed in the OT is crazy. He's mean, arbitrary, whimsical, petty, jealous, vain, and bloodthirsty. I'm not saying this because of anything I have heard from others. I'm just looking at what the Bible says he did and how he acted. I imagine a 4 year-old playing with toy soldiers, ordering them around, smacking them if they get out of line, etc.
• Genesis 1-11 is very mythological. In other words, the stories seem much more like fables than literal history. And they mirror stories in other cultures that pre-dated the Biblical stories. The problem with this is that the rest of the Bible treats Genesis 1-11 as literal, factual history. Since then I have done a lot of study on the origins of the Bible, old and new testaments. 

The upshot of all this is not that I do or don't believe in a god, but I have lost my faith in the Bible as an inspired, infallible, inerrant document. Having lost that, and questioning a lot of my previous experience that I ascribed to the supernatural, has left me in no man's land. Not a fun place to be, but I'd rather be here than somewhere false.

The worst part has been losing the fellowship. All my good friends were Bible-believing evangelical Christians. We can't be close like we used to be. And if I am myself, they are bewildered, or try to convert me, etc. Ugh. I need to find new friends.

I could go into a lot more details, but that's my personal faith story in a nutshell.