40 Years in the Wilderness: Why I Left Christianity Behind

From childhood onward through most of my adult life, I was a very devout Christian Believer. My theological views ranged somewhere between Evangelical to Fundamentalist. I was active in church and endeavored to raise my children in a Christian Environment.

So why did I “abandon the faith”, as many would put it? To put it succinctly, I discovered spirituality.

It’s not that my Christian beliefs were not “working for me”. Prayers were answered time and time again. God appeared to be working in my life, and I thought I was living a spiritual existence.

However, ever since childhood, I was curious about the nature of reality. I asked God many difficult questions. I sought the answers through the context of my faith.

I never could shake the feeling that there was something missing, and that there was something more to be experienced. Most of my fellow believers seemed to feel secure and content to rest within the structure of their belief system, but I did not.

Certain theological incongruities nagged at me, such as the Paradox of the Origin of Evil, and why the Gospel of Matthew presents a detailed genealogy for Joseph, when Mary supposedly bore the Christ child as a virgin. I also had trouble reconciling the Love & Forgiveness theme of Jesus’ teaching with the Judgment & Condemnation message found elsewhere in the Bible. I wondered about the origin of the Bible and how we could feel so confident about putting our entire trust in its authority. For example, why are the Gospels written in Greek rather than Aramaic?

I realize that many would criticize me now, thinking that I never was really “one of them” and that the Devil must have worked on my seeds of doubt until successfully prying me away. However, I can also recall feeling a great love and attraction for God since childhood, and a strong desire for something glorious that I sensed was “out there” somewhere, perhaps dimly remembered from the past. I felt all the love and joy that Christians are supposed to feel, and knew that my heart was firmly anchored in that.

Eventually, the incongruities kept piling up, and when my marriage abruptly crumbled after 20 years, my existing belief system failed to provide answers. For a while, I kept praying that God would change her and restore things, because Christian marriages aren’t supposed to fail. But one day, while praying in this manner, I heard a voice speaking in my left ear, saying “These events have occurred for your highest good”. I was stunned and resistant to hearing this at first, but eventually the realization came that perhaps I should broaden my net a bit. I concluded that I must have missed something obvious along the way, so I sought to discover what it was.

I moved into a mode where I began listening instead of repeating the same tired mantra (Poor me, why did God allow this to happen). I asked God to show me what I had missed and to grant me understanding of what was happening in my life. The result of this simple prayer was to open the gates and allow a major expansion in consciousness to occur.

The next 2 years were quite phenomenal for me. It began with an incredible epiphany experience wherein angels appeared to perform an inner healing. I felt them leading me back through time to each instance where I had been wounded, beginning in childhood. I saw the wounds as crusty scabs, and it almost physically hurt as they were scraped away and scrubbed and cleansed. The pain was blended with an incredible sense of love and joy – it felt like loving beings were holding my hands and leading me through this experience. This all happened spontaneously while sitting alone in my house and back yard over a Memorial Day weekend.

Afterward, my sense of expansion grew, as insights flooded into me. Over the succeeding months and years, I had the palpable sense of a curriculum being presented to me, as my thirst for knowledge led to real answers to my life-long questions. Eventually this led to an understanding of the Soul and the meaning of true spirituality.

Looking back, I have developed several conclusions concerning Christianity:

Christianity is a rather materialistic belief system, as opposed to spiritual.

The truth about the soul and its incarnation into physicality is simply not taught. God is portrayed as an external being, external from creation, which is patently false.

Jesus is portrayed as the “Son of God” by virtue of his physical parentage, rather than his identity as an eternal soul. Thus the Virgin Birth is seen as an essential doctrine in order to confer god-like qualities to him. In reality, physical DNA only defines the soul’s physical vehicle, not the identity of the soul that inhabits it!

Since the truth concerning the soul’s nature is not taught, the afterlife is portrayed as simply an extension of physical existence in another location.

Christianity offers no answers or insights into the true meaning of life. Believers are taught to feel disempowered and unworthy. God is said to hold his nose while dealing with us because “we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness are as filthy rags”(Isaiah 64:6). We are threatened with eternal punishment, and the fear of this is supposed to keep us on the “straight and narrow path”. This is all a huge lie, and is contradicted by the overwhelming evidence accessible by simply looking within at the awesome beauty and power of the human soul.

The concept of “God is Love” is seriously at odds with the teaching that we are sinful and inadequate, and that God will judge and punish us unless we somehow change.

This fosters an extremely dysfunctional concept of parental love, which certainly is at odds with healthy emotional well-being. This concept of God is neurotic and damaging. Fear is supposed to keep us good and immune from the wiles of the Devil, but I say that fear is not a positive force for change. The “God is Love” part is on the right track, but is neutralized by the vengeful God persona.

The Bible contains some inspired thinking, but for the most part is the product of human invention and projection.

The religion of Christianity was actually constructed long after the supposed time of Jesus’ life. The events portrayed in the Gospels took place during an extremely chaotic and turbulent period, and there is no chain-of-custody between actual participants and those who authored the texts in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

The Jesus of the Gospels may actually be a composite of more than one historical figure – a mystical healer and teacher who drew upon an ancient esoteric tradition, and a messianic political figure that fomented rebellion against Rome.

The Virgin Birth and a God-Man sacrificing blood for the people’s redemption are actually common elements found in mystery schools and cults of the period. Some of these predated Christianity by hundreds of years. It’s easy to see how Christianity was constructed by borrowing from several well-known traditions.

The God of the Old Testament is clearly the result of human projection. The authors projected human attributes of anger, jealousy, insecurity and cruelty. God is portrayed as encouraging acts of unthinkable violence upon the “enemies” of Israel, and is seen as endorsing the belief in racial superiority of the Jews.

Religion is primarily about control

A universal theme is the need to seek assistance from ecclesiastical authority in order to access God. It’s almost like a licensed franchise business model – you are expected to go through proper channels. Those who choose to seek their own spiritual path can face severe retribution, as under the Catholic Church prior to modern times, and even to this day in Islamic countries.

For this reason, the Catholic Church created the Devil archetype, and burned witches and anyone else who dared seek their own path of enlightenment and empowerment. The Franchise must not face undue competition.

A flip side to the control aspect is the tendency of most people to submit to it and accept a structured worldview. It’s actually tough work to question established belief, and even scary to depart from traditional faith and blaze a new trail. It’s so much easier to let others do your thinking for you. However, even this is beginning to change, with the shifting energy of Ascension beginning to stir over the land.

It can be argued that Catholic and Islamic authority played a valuable role in anchoring and stabilizing civilization over the past two millennia. During Medieval Europe, the Catholic Church was the only game in town. Monasteries kept the flame of knowledge alive during the darkest years. All through that period, however, the thread of esoteric alchemical knowledge was maintained by the priestly and intelligentsia classes – there was even a so-called “hermetic” Pope, Sylvester II. Ecclesiastical leaders wink and nod among themselves in a knowing manner even as they dispense a different “version of the truth” to the masses. This is a fascinating area of study in itself.

Ascension 2012

We are at the end of an age and on the doorstep of a new golden one. The Iron Age of rational materialism is about to end, along with its associated ignorance of spirituality. It’s almost hard to believe that modern society has been built upon a prevailing philosophy that refuses to acknowledge any reality outside of the material universe. Religion would purport to promote a countervailing approach, but as discussed here, it has not pointed us toward true spirituality.

At the heart of true spirituality is the understanding of the Soul and its purpose in this physical world. This theme will be further explored in upcoming articles.