Mini-Biography

A question on Facebook came up about my credentials when it comes to my commentaries about the Bible and the larger religious world.

It's a legitimate question, "How legitimate are you?  Are you an academic who will get peer-reviewed from time-to-time?  Are you just some random dude with an opinion and an internet connection?"

I won't bore you with the technicalities of what makes a source trustworthy;  I'll list out my credentials right here: I have none.  On the scale from "peer-reviewed academic" to "dude with an internet connection", I am most assuredly on the latter end of that spectrum. 

Most of what I say here is based on personal observations and self-taught research.  I try to make efforts to get my observations on Christianity reviewed by other spiritually-minded folk (read: fellow church members), give differing opinions the benefit of the doubt, and try to make earnest efforts to not just "rely on my own understanding".  I've fallen into the trap of listening only to myself before; and it led me down some dark, dark paths.

Back in high school (fifteen years ago), I was an atheist.  Part of it was (honestly) because of the group of friends I was with (a lot of nerds tend to be of the anti-religious bent), another part was the example I was shown about Christianity while growing up: superstitious and ignorant people being overly emotional and then blatantly hypocritic when it wasn't Sunday morning.  It made sense at the time: why are all these people falling down and acting crazy (my parents brought me to several churches which were charismatic or heavily charismatic-influenced)?  Why are people saying one thing and doing another?  What proof do I have of the supernatural and this invisible friend they keep talking about?

Someone once doubted the sincerity of my anti-religious sentiment when I was younger.  Trust me, I was an atheist.  I started off as a militant atheist, the type that thought bringing children to church should be considered child abuse, the type that thought Christianity was just a "2,000 year-old middle-eastern folktale", that it was a superstition for the ignorant and weak-minded, who didn't have the ability to cope with the challenges of life and had to cling to fairytales to allieviate their anxieties, that to believe in something that you had no proof was not faith; it was an act of extreme stupidity.

Later on, my father (who may or may not have been aware that he was raising a heathen) pointed out that churches helped establish universities, hospitals and charities.  I thought about this a bit longer, and came to the conclusion that religious people, while deeply mistaken and stupid, aren't completely bad, even if they did all this good out of fear of eternal punishment rather than from a true sense of alturism.  I decided that while religion had a purpose early on in the course of human history, that it was time to "shed the shackles of superstition", and embrace knowledge and pursue means to advance the human race.  In effect, I became a humanist.

That lasted for about a month, because I started to compare animal behaviour and human behaviour, and realized that squirrels don't attack each other because one is democratic and the other is communist (an overly simplistic and categorically wrong assumption in the foundation of its reasoning, but still somewhat true), and that I didn't have any good reason to believe that humans were any better than any other animal.  Humanism was quickly losing its luster, and the burgeoning concept of a world without morality or value was planted in my mind: I became a nihilist.

Nihilism has conflicting definitions, same as the anti-theism, atheism, Atheism, and ah-theism distinctions, but because I refused to believe that morals exist and that value was just a comforting and false illusion, I think it would be fair to say that I was a nihilist.  I also didn't believe in reality, or that anything existed or that everything else existed.  I thought that nothing mattered, that life was pointless and that I should smile and do what I can to not upset other people or myself too much.  I'll get into that stranger stage of my life in a later post, but I think you get the idea.

I settled on nihilism for a while, until I asked myself three questions: do I have any means to escape this currently reality? Do I have any proof that other realities existed outside of this one?  Do I have any reason to escape this current reality I am experiencing?  I didn't know of any way to escape this current reality, aside from committing suicide, and that wasn't a gaurantee.  I didn't have any proof that other realities existed, and I didn't have a good reason to escape this current reality.  By default, I'd have to assume that the things I was experincing wasn't an illusion; it was real.

Long-ish story short, I decided that things outside of my awareness could exist, that good and evil existed, and that because so much of what the Bible said helped established a stable society, and made too much sense, that Christianity and God had to be true.  I became a believer, but I still wasn't saved (that's another story).

Because of my past experiences, I like to believe that I take a much different viewpoint when it comes to my faith; the tools I learned while mucking around in the different flavors of atheism I now apply to Christianity and to my pursuit to learn and understand what my role and purpose in relation to the Universe is.  I know I don't have the prestige of academic credentials behind me, but I was wrong before, I might be wrong now, and I don't want to be wrong again.

So take everything I say with a grain of salt: I'm technically a layman, and I'm still learning (the more I learn, the more I'm exposed to the fringes of things I don't know), but I hope that what I say is reasonable enough to be true, while still put in simplistic enough terms that many people can have a deeper understanding of the Bible.  I'll try to do what I can to both without betraying either, but don't be afraid to call me on it stuff!

Next Tuesday, I'll be talking about the Baltimore Riots and a christian's role in politics.  See you there.