Thank you very much for your courtesy and civility, Lash. I’m quite impressed with you. I won’t take disagreements over religious or spiritual issues personally with anyone. And thanks for giving me time to respond. Sorry for my late posting this evening. I shall describe my own spiritual journey now.
I was raised in a “mainstream” Protestant denomination by my parents. I joined their church when I was 9 years old after I took a test on the founder of that denomination. I won’t mention which denomination because I don’t want to appear to be attempting to prejudice readers of this thread against members of that denomination. There are decent people in all religions, as well as decent atheists and agnostics. That goes without saying.
My parents attended what I would call a country club church, whose membership was exclusively affluent. Their building (which is now as large as a
high school) is located in the Congressional district that was once represented by the former President George Herbert Walker Bush. The hypocrisy was bad. Jerks in my Sunday school class were never reprimanded. The time was in the middle of the Cold War when the associate pastor once told my mother that he didn’t care if our country got into a nuclear war with Communist China because all those people were heathens and were going to hell, anyway.
A terribly hateful comment! Not many years later another associate pastor who was hired would tell me that he was afraid to let other members know that he admired Martin Luther King, Jr.
My best friend was a member, but many of the other kids were snobs who were not spiritual. I always felt like an outsider among them. By the time I was a sophomore in high school, I had had enough. So, one morning during the fall, I chose to play hooky.
Instead of reporting to my classroom, I wandered around the church grounds, taking in the scenery and hoping that I would not be spotted by an adult member.
Very soon I lost interest in the worship assembly. So, I deliberately started staying up late on Saturday nights, watching B movies from the 1950s and early 1960s on TV (in other words, bug-eyed monster movies).
When my dad would knock on my bedroom door to wake me up the following morning, I’d say, “Dad, I stayed up too late last night. Why don’t you and Mom go without me.” Fortunately, my dad was not zealous (although he was personally close to the head pastor); and he never insisted that I get out of bed and get ready to leave for church.
More hypocrisy: The Sunday school teacher would always take roll. Surely my prolonged absence was noted (not to mention my absence from the assembly), yet my parents never received a call inquiring about their son. “We haven’t seen your son for over a month. Has he been ill?” At least they never told me they received a call. I assume I wasn’t missed.
I never attended there again. After I had graduated from high school, I heard that most of the kids my age (once they were no longer living with their parents) left the church. There was nothing to hold them there.
This will sound contradictory. I had become an agnostic, but I was looking for a body of unchanging truth. I had a deep appreciation for the physical sciences (as I still do). But I knew that science was always changing (for example, modern atomic theory from John Dalton to quantum mechanics); so, the sort of truth I was looking for would not be found there. I thought it might be found in politics, but soon realized I was wrong.
When I was 21, I had a meeting with the head pastor of my parents’ church. I told him, “I just don’t know if this Jesus of Nazareth really was what he claimed to be; namely, the Son of God.”
The pastor’s response was, “That’s okay. Just as long as you believe that he was a good man.”
Of course, this tepid answer was no help at all. As a result, for six years I had no interest in spiritual issues, not even when my mother was dying of cancer.
Then my best friend (who had also left our parents’ church) and his wife invited me to attend their church, which was nondenominational. Wary of any church, I reluctantly attended a morning Bible class followed by the worship assembly. I was quite impressed. I could tell that these people were spiritual. After three private Bible studies with one of the two preachers, I became a scriptural Christian.
For the first time in my life, I had really started studying the Bible. Their approach was logical (using the Bible as its own commentary) and not driven by emotion. When I had been a member of my parents’ church, I had believed that the Bible could not be understood. I was delighted to find out that I could learn what the Bible says. I was amazed when I found out how many denominational doctrines, both Protestant and Catholic, contradicted plain Bible teaching. I had found the body of truth that I had been looking for.
I will have more to say tomorrow. Thanks for your interest.
