The Pain of Abandoning One’s Faith!

 

Author’s Note

 

“If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”  

 

RENÉ DESCARTES 

 

Reflections

 

Let me ask you a question. Have you ever stopped to think how painful it must be for a person to lose his faith? You cannot help but empathize with people who have been agonized with doubt and uncertainty, forcing them to reconsider and often abandon their faith. This is not a new phenomenon but has been around since antiquity. People have struggled with their belief system since the Stone Age when they began using religion to help them understand their daily existence.

 

But before we get into why it is so difficult for a formerly religious person to lose their faith, let’s discuss the term faith and what it means. The word faith can be defined in several ways: complete trust of confidence in someone or something; a strong belief in God or in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual apprehension rather than proof; a system of religious belief; a strongly held belief or theory.

 

When people share with others, they are having doubts about their faith, they are often told they need to pray about it and read their Bible so the Holy Spirit can help them understand and help them fight Satan and his demons who are trying to take away their faith.

 

Here is what a seminary professor shared about what she tells her students about doubts her student might encounter when studying the Bible:

 

I tell them I think the Bible is the word of humans about their experiences with God.  Those who can think can then realize that’s perhaps not exactly the same as saying it is the word of God.  

            Most people in today’s world have faith in a religious conviction or faith in another set of deeply held beliefs. A person’s faith defines who they are and influences their goals and motivations. So, what are the reasons for the beliefs one holds? According to some scholars, some of the reasons for religious beliefs include fear of death, a desire for meaning in one’s life, the need for moral structure, the need for community, the need to control others. This faith or system of beliefs is fragile and if attacked can cause a loss of faith, leading to depression, loneliness, and despair.

 

The process of disentangling oneself from religion can be very difficult. The loss of faith during this process of “spiritual transition” or “deconversion” can be extremely traumatic. Because all humans have a need for security the loss of comfort and security provided by a like-minded community can be extremely unsettling.

 

            To get a handle on what it means to lose one’s faith, we must first try to understand why people lose their faith. To do this I will give the perspective of religion, faith, and/or loss of faith from two atheists, a deist, a Jewish scholar, and a Christian fundamentalist.

 

Bart Ehrman is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, and the origins and development of early Christianity. He labels himself as an atheistic agnostic or agnostic atheist. In his blog, he shared the following about his loss of faith:

 

Any of this sound familiar? You used to believe Jesus really did walk on water and magically fed thousands of people, but now you’re not so sure. You used to believe the Bible was without error, a perfect book reliable for all of life’s answers, but now you know otherwise. You used to believe that only people who accepted Jesus into their hearts would go to heaven when they die, but now you can’t stomach such a thought. And when you add up all these shifts in beliefs over the pastseveral years, you genuinely wonder “What happened to my faith?” and conclude that maybe, just maybe, you’ve lost it altogether. 

 

Amy Jill-Levine is E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, Department of Religious Studies, and Graduate Department of Religion. She is a self-described "Yankee Jewish feminist who teaches in a predominantly Protestant divinity school in the buckle of the Bible Belt." In her book, The Misunderstood Jew – The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, Amy-Jill Levine offers this major difference between Judaism and Christianity:

 

For Christians, the claim that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life is obvious: it is proved by Jesus’s resurrection, confirmed by the Bible, and experienced by the soul. For Jews, claims of Jesus’s divine sonship and fulfillment of the messianic prophecies are false. Since we live in a world of cancer and AIDS, war and genocide, earthquakes and hurricanes, the messianic age cannot be here yet. Since there is no messianic age, obviously the messiah has not yet come.

 

Mike Phleban is a prior Pentecostal pastor, who after years of struggle lost his faith and now is an atheist. He gives us the following reason he lost his faith.

 

In the end, the one thing that did it for me was observing, as a pastor, how Christians lead their lives when they think nobody is watching. Because if there was one fundamental promise of Christianity that I kept sticking to after years of disappointment, it was that God is changing people’s lives. I could live with God not giving me my daily bread and not delivering me from evil – after all, it could always be because of his perfect heavenly plan that I am just too limited to comprehend. But the one thing that I thought the Bible is clear about is that he is supposed to change people for the better. Maybe not instantly, maybe not completely (not in this life anyway), but by the power of Holy Spirit people should be transformed into the glory of Christ, becoming better, more compassionate, more moral, more Christ-like. But nothing like that happens – in church, they just learn how to masquerade better. This was the final straw, the ultimate promise of the Bible that turned out to be false too. The whole house of theological fine print finally collapsed.

 

 

In his article, “Dissecting Christianity's Mind-Snaring System,” Stephen Van Eck, a long-time freethinker and Deist writer, offers this:

 

Once sucked into the parallel universe of Christianity, the adherent is too intimidated by the existing framework of threats and rationalizations to attempt escape. Even thinking along alternative lines will induce severe feelings of guilt. And should one run the risk of losing faith by examining its true foundations, he is certain to be chilled by the dictum, in Hebrews 6:4-6, that "It is impossible for those who were once enlightened...if they fall away, to renew them again..." Those who originated a religion based on deception and delusion clearly knew that if the conditioning broke down or wore off, it could not work again. But that's when the true enlightenment occurs.

 

 

            Randy Alcorn In his article, “Losing Your Faith May Be God’s Gift to You,”, Randy Alcorn says this:

 

As I told Chris, there are probably many people who need to lose their faith—because their faith is in the wrong thing. I believe God can use this crisis to topple our idols, including but not limited to the idols of health and wealth, and clear the way for us to embrace genuine trust in Christ.

So, let’s fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. Let’s make Him the object of our faith. He will support us and sustain us and be there for us in a way that no other object of faith can.

 

It would seem, loss of faith is such a struggle because of our innate reason which demands to know and live-in truth. If there is a God, the search for knowledge, for reason and faith, is part of who we are. The truth indeed sets us free!

 

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, thank you for allowing us to discover

the laws governing your creation! Help us to

understand the meaning of life and our part in it!

 

Music

 

I’m Losing My Religion – Lauren Daigle

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIlnCfbaznE

 

LYRICS

 

I've been an actor on a stage
Playing a role I have to play
I'm getting tired to say the same
Living behind a masquerade

No more performing out of fear

I'm trying to keep my conscience clear
It all seems so insincere
I'd trade it all to meet You here

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion

 

Light a match and watch it burn
To Your heart, I will return
No one can love me like You do
No-no-no-no-no
So why would I want a substitute?

 

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
To find You

I'm losing my religion

In finding something new
'Cause I need something different
And different looks like You

I'm losing my religion

In finding something new
'Cause I need something different
And different looks like You

Oh, I'm losing my religion

I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
I'm losing my religion
To find You

To find You
To find You
To find You
You

 

 

Barry

 

 

 

The Mystifying World of Paganism!

 

Photo from Google

Author’s Note

 

“The metaphysical insanities of Athanasius, of Loyola, and of Calvin, are, to my understanding, mere lapses into polytheism, differing from paganism only by being more unintelligible.”

 

Thomas Jefferson

 

Reflections

 

All civilizations on our planet have a god, gods, and goddesses, or at least some important, mythical leader who created the universe and offered protection from the unknown forces the people of that civilization faced daily. These beings could be called on for a variety of reasons including help during times of trouble, help for good harvests, support during wars, healing during times of sickness, help to achieve financial prosperity, et cetera.

 

What is paganism? Paganism is defined as a religion other than one of the main world religions, specifically a non-Christian or pre-Christian religion, or a modern religious movement incorporating beliefs or practices from outside the main world religions, especially nature worship.  When historians use the word pagan in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman world, the term refers to a person who believed in any of the polytheistic religions that existed, who was neither a Jew nor Christian. However, in the fourth century CE, the word pagan became a derogative word invented by Christians to disparage polytheistic adversaries. The word was equivalent to calling someone a hillbilly in our culture.

 

At this point it might be interesting to give an approximate timeline of ancient civilizations and their religions, to give you an idea when the religious traditions might have begun. Prior to the Greco-Roman period which began in 900 BCE and 800 BCE respectively, other ancient civilizations existed including Ancient Mesopotamia in 3700 BCE, the Ancient Caral Civilization located in north-central coastal Peru in 3500 BCE, Ancient Egypt in 3150 BCE, Ancient India in 2900 BCE, Ancient China in 1800 BCE, and Ancient Israel in 1850 BCE.

 

            Here is a useful summary about the major aspects of ancient religions outside of ancient Israel and early Christianity taken from Bart Ehrman’s book, The Bible -A Historical and Literary Introduction.

·       They were polytheistic, they worshipped many gods.

·       These gods had many functions: gods of war, gods of weather, gods of health, gods of agriculture, gods of forests, rivers, home, the hearth, et cetera.

·       There could be a chief god.

·       A person need not restrict their worship to one.

·       The people worshipped the gods because life was difficult, and the gods could provide people what they could not provide for themselves.

·       People thought the gods were powerful and deserved to be worshipped. By worshipping the gods, they were granted access to divine power.

·       The gods were worshipped through cultic acts (not some kind of bizarre and secretive practice). This refers to care of the gods by two chief ways, through sacrifices (animals, food, wood, etc.) and by saying prayers.

·       Almost all ancient religions had sacred places such as sanctuaries and temples where sacrifices and special prayers could be made.

 

Although these ancient civilizations were separated by vast distance and time, it is interesting to note they somehow had similar gods, only with different names. If you really think about it the logic is not difficult to understand. People, no matter which civilization they were born into are naturally in awe of things. When they could not understand something occurring around them, they would become scared. They found comfort from these things by creating or inventing gods, who they believed, if worshipped or praised, would protect them. They believed in return for protection, the gods required prayers of adulation and sacrifices.

 

Although many ancient religious traditions lack written texts, cuneiform documents dating back to 2600 BCE do exist from Sumer and Egypt. Cuneiform documents were formed by pressing a reed stylus into soft clay tablets that were later hardened in the sun.

From these sources, these traditions can be thought of as practices created by humans to compel gods or nature to obey human commands. These religious practices were then incorporated into daily life. 

 

The Assyrians recorded religious texts in cuneiform documents in the first millennium BCE. These documents were collected by the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal and included the Creation Epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the earliest account of the Flood. All ancient civilizations have creation myths, explaining how the world was created from chaos.

 

      The Creation Epic is an interesting creation myth that tells the story of the great god Marduk's victory over the forces of chaos and his establishment of order at the creation of the world. This text helped establish a religious context for the Babylonian state and its system of government. The Egyptian creation story describes how the sun god Ra, also called Atum, created his son Shu and daughter Tefnut and they worked together to create order in Nu - the chaos of the universe. They created humans from tears of happiness and then made Yah the moon, Geb the earth, and Nut the sky. Geb and Nut had four children - two gods and two goddesses - who represented the four forces of life. They were:

• Osiris, god of fertility
• Isis, the mother goddess
• Set, god of evil
• Nephthys, goddess of death.

 

            It is interesting to note the similarities of these creation stories with the account in Genesis of the Hebrew Old Testament.

 

Greek religious practices included the worship of household and local gods, sacrificial rites, and prayers, vows, divination, and omens. Although the polytheistic Greek religion included a multitude of gods, representing a certain facet of the human condition, the most important gods were the twelve Olympian gods, led by Zeus, who resided on Mount Olympus. These gods were given human bodies and characters, both good and bad. In the stories of Greek mythology, these gods directly intervened in human affairs. These stories were first passed on through oral tradition, but later were put in writing by Hesiod in His Theogony and in the poems of Homer, the Iliad and Odyssey.

 

Roman religious practices began with early Roman ancestor worship that evolved into a complex system of household and state gods. A turning point in Roman religion occurred with the deification of Julius Caesar, establishing the practice of emperor worship. Before the rise of Christianity led to the end of paganism, Roman paganism had other rivals such as Zoroastrianism and other various cults from around the Mediterranean world.

 

What was paganism and why did it flourish in the pre-Christian Greco-Roman period? Bart Ehrman describes it well in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, in this way:

 

“Pagan religions were almost entirely about practice, about doing things, about giving the gods their due – not through mental affirmations of who they were or what they had done, but through ritual actions that showed reverence and devotion.”

 

           Most of the rites and practices of Pagan belief systems died out centuries ago.  However, some modern spiritual seekers have recovered those ancient wisdom traditions and now proudly identify as Pagan. Modern paganism is one of America’s fastest growing religions. Modern Paganism encompasses a wide and rich variety of polytheistic religious traditions: Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman practices, as well as Wicca (modern witchcraft), Asatru (the worship of Norse gods, goddesses, and land spirits), and Druidism (as Indo-European priesthood).  

 

Unlike Judeo-Christian traditions that center around biblical authority, clergy and codified belief systems, Modern Paganism is all about the rituals, that often include drumming, dance, ceremonial fires, incense, and representations of the four elements earth, air, fire, and water.

 

 

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, we stand in awe of the beauty of nature!

 

Music

 

Yggdrasill - Viking Pagan Folk Song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS3MU3aqXkI

 

Barry

 

English Lyrics for Yggdrasill

 

An ash I know it stands -

It is named Yggdrasill.

High tree, sprinkled,

with white mud.

There from come the dews,

That fall on the dale!

It stands always green, above -

The source of Urdhr.

 

There from come the maids,

Much knowing.

Three, their dwelling,

Stands under the tree.

Urdh is named one,

The other Verdhandi,

They notched wood –

Skuld is the third.

They set up the laws,

They decided on the lives,

Of the children of time (the children of man)

They promulgate faith.

 

 

The Amazing Story of Mary!

 

Author’s Note

 

“Piazzas, churches named for a teenager who gave life to the Christ. Sculptures, paintings, frescoes devoted to her holiness. But the only thing about her we remember, she was a virgin.”

-Joy McCullough

 

Reflections

 

Next to Jesus, Mary may be one of the most revered people in the history of Christianity. If you rely on the accounts of her in the New Testament, you may be hard pressed to know who she is. Paul in his epistles, only mentions her when he refers to Christ as having been born of a woman, but he doesn’t say anything else about her and does not talk about Jesus’ birth. When reading the Gospel accounts, you can sense some tension between Jesus and his family, some estrangement between Jesus and his family. In the gospel of Mark, little is said about Mary. In the gospel of John her name is never mentioned, she is mentioned only as the mother of Jesus. She is clearly described in the gospels of Matthew and Luke as Mary, who was betrothed to Joseph, was a virgin, and gave birth to Jesus in Bethlehem, although the accounts differ significantly in details about Jesus’ birth.

 

So how did Mary become the leader of the saints in the Catholic Church, and beloved by many who call themselves Christian? The serious gaps in the amazing story of Mary are filled by the apocryphal texts. As David Bakker tells us in his course entitled, The Apocryphal Jesus, these texts provide the reader with insights into “her purity and holiness, her access to divine knowledge, her ability to intercede with God on behalf of others, and the unusual circumstances of her death.”

 

In the middle of the second century CE, the Proto-Gospel of James was written. This apocryphal text deals with Mary, giving the reader more information about Mary’s life. This text tells the reader Mary’s birth was miraculous, because her father and mother, Joachim, a rabbinic priest, and Anna, were unable to have a child, but through prayer, God intervened and gave them Mary. From an early age Anna believed Mary was special and she dedicated Mary to God. The text goes on to say because Anna thought Mary should only walk on sacred ground, Mary grew up secluded in the Temple. While in the temple, Mary spent her time weaving, praying, and receiving food from an angel. At the age of twelve, Mary left the Temple, under the guardianship of Joseph, chosen by the family. Joseph was an elderly man, who had sons from a prior marriage, and agreed to marry her and not to have sex with her. The text goes on to strongly emphasize Mary’s virginity before and after the birth of Jesus. After Jesus’ birth, Joseph has Salome examine Mary, who confirms Mary remained a virgin. This account of Mary became and remains authoritative for the Catholic Church.

 

Other apocryphal literature from the second and third centuries CE, speak of a Mary. Historians generally believe the Mary spoke of in the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary is actually Mary Magdalene, but some scholars suggest this Mary could be Mary, the mother of Jesus.

 

These last days of Mary’s life have been detailed in stories, hymns, and sermons from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. These sources differ in some details, but generally advocate that because of her status as the mother of Jesus, her body was not left in the ground to suffer decay and corruption. A delightful account of this can be found in the Six Books of Dormition where Christ, Michael, and the other angels take Mary’s soul and body out of the tomb, to paradise.

 

Some of these apocryphal texts also emphasize Mary’s special relationship with God. Because of this special relationship, she is given special knowledge of mysteries, allowing her to intercede with Jesus on behalf of other human beings.

 

The ascendancy of Mary to sainthood and worship is not without controversy. Jewish writings from the second and third centuries refer to Mary by her Jewish name, Miriam, and say that she's a hairdresser and that Jesus is the illegitimate son of a Roman soldier called Panthera. 

In the early fifth century CE, the bishop of Constantinople, Nestorius, denied Mary should be called the mother of God. His view was condemned at a major church council at Ephesus in 431. At that council meeting, Mary was declared the mother of God. Today many people, including some Protestants, object to the figure that Mary has become, a goddess-like figure, like the Pagan goddesses of Aphrodite or Artemis. In the 1950’s, Pope Pius XII, defined as official Catholic doctrine, the assumption of the Virgin’s body and soul into heavenly glory.

 

            So, just who was this person called Mary and who are those who belong to the Cult of Mary?

 

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, thank you for the beauty of Your creation!

 

Music

 

Mary Did You Know? – Pentatonix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifCWN5pJGIE

 

Barry

The Incredible Belief of Marcionism!

 

*** Photo from Google 

Author’s Note

 

“On the other hand, Christos descended from the realm of Light and brought humanity the light of true knowledge in the simple principles of love. Marcion de Sinope (85 – 160 C.E.) was an important leader in early Christianity. Marcion, in his two brilliant books, explained how the God of the Jews was not the God of whom Jesus spoke. He provided many examples that show that the Jewish god is only a jealous tribal deity.”

 

Laurence Galian

 

Reflections

 

Marcionism was a controversial form of early Christianity originating from the teachings of Marcion of Sinope, who lived in Rome in the second century C.E. (115 years and 6 months from the Crucifixion according to Tertullian's reckoning in Adversus Marcionem, xv).

 

Marcion affirmed that Jesus Christ was the savior sent by God—though he insisted that the wrathful Hebrew God was a separate and lower entity than the all-forgiving God of the New Testament. Marcion declared that Christianity was opposition to, Judaism. He rejected the entire Hebrew Bible and declared that the God of the Hebrew Bible was a lesser demiurge, who had created the earth, but was the source of evil.¹

 

Demiurge is a term for a creator or divine artisan responsible for the creation of the physical universe. The word was first introduced in this sense by Plato in his Timaeus, and others, most notably in Neoplatonism and Gnosticism. Three separate meanings of the term may be distinguished. For Plato, the Demiurge was a benevolent creator of the laws, heaven, or the world. Plotinus identified the Demiurge as nous (divine reason), the first emanation of "the One". In Gnosticism, the material universe is seen as evil, and the Demiurge is the creator of this evil world, either out of ignorance or by evil design. Alternative Gnostic names for the Demiurge include Yaldabaoth, Yaoor Iao, Ialdabaoth and several other variants. The Gnostics often identified the Demiurge with the Hebrew God Yahweh. Christian opposition to this doctrine was one factor in the decision of the Church to include the Hebrew scriptures of the "Old Testament" in the Christian Bible.²

 

          According to the Marcionites, the true God was the God of love. He had sent Jesus to redeem people from the God of the Jews. Marcion based his views on evidence provided by the apostle Paul in his epistles. Marcion created his own Gospel using Luke as a starting point but removed the first two chapters containing the biblical narrative and passages that referred positively to Old Testament scripture. In Marcionite belief, Christ was not a Jewish Messiah, but a spiritual entity that was sent to reveal the truth about existence, thus allowing humanity to escape the earthly trap of the demiurge.

 

Marcionism was an important type of early Christianity prevalent throughout the Mediterranean in the second and third centuries CE. Marcion established several churches throughout the Roman empire, and his members represented a large percentage of practicing Christians around 200 CE. Marcionism was denounced by its opponents as heresy and lost out to Christian orthodoxy in the third and fourth centuries.

 

Silent Prayer

 

Creator God, thank you for complexity of Your creation!

 

Music

 

Mozart Concerto No 3 Mysin Elisei Piano Елисей Мысин Young pianist composer Enisey reincarnation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q32C1vdU6mQ

 

Barry

 

¹"Marcionism." New World Encyclopedia. 12 Sep 2008, 22:46 UTC. 12 Sep 2021, 15:34 <https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Marcionism&oldid=805736>.

 

²"Demiurge." New World Encyclopedia, . 6 Nov 2017, 22:57 UTC. 12 Sep 2021, 15:16 <https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/p/index.php?title=Demiurge&oldid=1007616>.