The great (human) story

The bible is known as the greatest book ever written.  As an apostate, I can still agree to that. 

As a Christian it was the only necessary literature to guide my life.  I dabbled into C.S. Lewis and Tolkien, however, I was adamant about guarding my mind against the heathen’s literature, lest the devil takes my soul.  

One of the first things I did when I renounced my christian faith, was to engorge myself in books.  Books I was not allowed to read, books that were thought to be demonic, aka "science books".   I have also re-read certain books of the Bible after leaving the faith.   Boring genealogies aside, the bible is, at its core, a story about humans being human.  

The scribes have recorded the depths of human courage, of sacrifice and love. 
There is also a plethora of evil: men who lust for power, and stories of incest and infanticide, to a horny king (a voyeur that watches women bathe and  has her husband killed).  Indeed, the Bible comes alive outside of the Christian cave.  I still wonder, however, what other caves am I in?  There is only one way to find out, and find a way out. It’s to dig.   
Be it the inerrant word of god or not, the bible has many stories to heed, stories to think about and laugh about. 

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 Jesus Interrupted by Dr. Bart D. Ehrman

And so I did not leave the Christian faith because of the inherent problems of faith per se, or because I came to realize that the Bible was a human book, or that Christianity was a human religion.  All that is true - but it was not what dismantled my acceptance of the Christian myth.  I left the faith for what I took to be (and still take to be) an unrelated reason: the problem of suffering in the world.  

There came a time in my life when I found that the myths no longer made sense to me, no longer resonated with me, no longer informed the way I looked at the world.  I came to a place where I could no longer see how-even if viewed mythically-the central Christian beliefs were in any sense “true” for me, given the oppressive and powerful reality of human suffering in the world. 


Music Dreamville by Reaktor