I was raised in Christian culture, specifically Southern California Southern Baptist Protestant.
I was entrenched in the SCSBP culture, but never really meshed with it. I became suicidal by age 10, and never really phased out of the preoccupation with death and the general feeling of futility. While other teenage boys were preoccupied with girls, I was obsessed trying to find inherent meaning in a world that didn’t seem to portray it.
Certainty
Among my endeavors, I dove deep into independently studying religion and philosophy while I was going to community college.
Since I figured by that point that all the meaning to life was driven by what made it, I sought certainty through understanding, and discovered the taxonomical grouping of deities:
- Atheist – no God(s)
- Monotheist – one God
- Polytheist – more than one god
- Pantheist – God(s) are an intangible force or cosmic energy
- Agnostic/Other – may or may not be God, but can’t be certain
I very quickly discovered via deduction the correct taxonomical framework:
- Agnosticism, to me, was cowardice. Something obviously happens after we die, even if it’s nonexistence, so it wasn’t a worthwhile risk to stay non-committal. This was partly inspired by the dysfunction from my family of origin.
- Atheism never seemed to fit for me because scientism only justifies “what” but never “why”. At some point, we smash against the unknown again, no matter how many quadrillions of years we conjecture with math calculations. Any finite explanation falls apart to explain the infinite.
- Pantheism couldn’t work to me because it defied any aspect of logic. Logical reasoning is certainly useful and certainly gives some meaning, so it must be part of the natural order of things, but every pantheistic doctrine requires killing logic somewhere in the dialogue. Pantheism wasn’t going anywhere for me, and was just Agnosticism with a vaguesauce God-thing.
- Polytheism seemed viable, until I read Socrates’ Euthyphro in a 100-level Philosophy class. At the end of the it, either morality came from the gods or the gods weren’t important. I had become rather fond of Socrates’ mythos at the time, and in one of his last works he gave his life to “the one God above all other gods”.
- Monotheism was my only choice then.
Deism
From Monotheism, I had two choices:
- Believe in a popular, known God.
- Believe in a “hidden” God, a bit like some ancient Greeks, the early Deists in the USA, or ufologists.
After more pondering and researching, I realized that this God, having created us, would want to interact with us. The implication, then, would means documented evidence about God that goes far back into history, which would still be an ongoing interaction.
From there, the only ancient society that did believe in one distinct God (and still survives) were the Hebrews.
So, I had stumbled onto Judaism, but found that it came in 3 versions:
- Judaism 1.0 – a set of 613 social and cultural laws that dictated a profoundly unique lifestyle (compared to the cultures around it) that alluded to a coming Messiah.
- Judaism 2.0 – eyewitness accounts that the Messiah came as Yeshua of Nazareth and died for everyone’s sins, with the purpose of bringing a worldwide sociopolitical revival grounded on individual changes (aka Christianity).
- Judaism 3.0 – an abrogation of the Hebrew people for their defiance of following God, with the prophet Muhammad leading the way with a demonstration of strength to bring about worldwide submission to God (aka Islam).
After examining the many prophecies Jesus fulfilled, and reading the many times God could have rejected the Hebrews earlier on (such as Hosea), I concluded Christianity was the right path.
However, I still needed to find a church I could connect with.
Next: Finding a Church