“Goodbye Jesus”

For the past few evenings I’ve been reading Goodbye, Jesus: An Evangelical Preacher’s Journey Beyond Faith.

 

“As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.”

 

It was quite the slog because the first three quarters or more were all about how dedicated Tim Sledge was to sharing the gospel of Jesus (and boy howdy, was he ever!) and that isn’t why I bought the book. His book is largely about his journey through and finally beyond his faith in any and every God of every religion, which is what the subtitle sorta claims. I just thought it would be more about his journey from faith rather than his journey through  faith.

 

I bought the book to find out what finally convinced him that the Jesus fable, as promulgated in the Bible (and ever since then by the evangelical powers that be for some 1600 years) by the gospels of Mark, Luke Matthew and John (and the late-comer Saul/Paul, who was, in my opinion, a vile defiler of Jesus’s actual teachings), was just a concerted effort to deify (make a god of) one of the literally hundreds of apocalyptic prophets who trod Galilee and surrounding regions during his time on earth.

 

apocalyptic defined

“of, relating to, or resembling an apocalypse; apocalyptic events.

2 : forecasting the ultimate destiny of the world : prophetic apocalyptic warnings.

3 : foreboding imminent disaster or final doom : terrible apocalyptic signs of the coming end-times.

4 : wildly unrestrained : grandiose.

 

My purpose here isn’t to convince anyone that Tim Sledge is right. My purpose here is to let people know that I believe he’s right. He convinced me, once and for all, that there has been a bait-and-switch in the Jesus story.

 

Admittedly, saying this comes with a twinge of regret and with a twinge of gratitude that I was never an evangelist, trying to get unbelievers to believe in the same Jesus that I believed in for so long.  At least I don’t have to live with the regret that I fed people a false narrative. That must give Tim Sledge quite a case of “heart sick” from time to time.

 

But we all do what we do until we know better.

 

If you want to know what’s in the book that convinced me, you’re going to have to read it, because I’m not going to try to dissuade you from believing what you believe.

 

What I wonder now is how to define myself. The author went through this phase, too.  I’m no longer a Christian, although I’m a fan of the Jesus I learned about as a child, in the same way as I’m a fan of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.

 

Atheists are frequently as evangelical, fundamentalist and adamant about their non-religion as evangelical Christians are about their beliefs, and I’m not that way at all, so I resist that label. But not all are: I don’t want to stereotype them here. Most atheists I know are ethical, moral, conscientious, empathetic and decent.

 

Agnostics are skeptical about there being any god or gods influencing their lives. I’m not that. I don’t believe there are any influencing gods. There may be a being who started the ball rolling with the Big Bang, but I don’t think that whoever that was or is has any further interest in influencing what the universe or its occupants do with what we find ourselves living in and with.

 

There are humanists. I’m most likely one of those. Humanists are ethical, moral, conscientious, empathetic and decent. I don’t think most of them are species-ists (people who think human beings are the ultimate positive expression of nature’s evolutionary processes.)

 

Finally, there a Possibilianists, “a philosophy which rejects both the diverse claims of traditional theism and the positions of certainty in strong atheism in favor of a middle, exploratory ground.”  I hate the term–it’s too clunky–but I fit in there, too. It’s scientific. It looks for proof. Faith isn’t enough. (As Mark Twain described it, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”)

 

All I know is that it has been quite a while (more than a decade) since I stopped believing in Jesus as the son of God, or in God, or in heaven, or in hell. I don’t think we magically find ourselves in another place when we die, and I don’t think I’ll see my loved ones again after death. I don’t believe in reincarnation beyond the fact that our elements (if left to their own devices and not entombed) will help something else grow and thrive (the way fertilizer or a seed fosters new growth).

 

I think Christians, Jews, Muslims and all other religious people have been sold a bill of goods by power-hungry people who believe that the fear of God is the only thing that will keep them toeing their line, even when they don’t toe it themselves.

 

My favorite personal pastor, Alan Meenan, told us he was frightened into faith by the thought he’d burn in hell if he didn’t believe in Jesus and God. A lot of people “came to Jesus” that way. What a shameful legacy for a so-called “religion of love” to have!

 

I came to Jesus because of his love, the love I was told about as a child. I finally got baptized in 1999 after receiving an unspoken invitation inside my spirit from a loving, inviting, disembodied, voiceless voice that kept insisting over a period of weeks, “You need to be baptized.” It was an actual experience. I can’t deny it, and I won’t.

 

I interpreted the sensation as a direct invitation from Jesus. So I got baptized, post haste.  And I don’t regret it.

 

I just no longer feel as certain that the prompting didn’t come from my own broken heart after DeForest Kelley died and while I was in the throes of caring for Carolyn, which was a  horrendous undertaking given her rage at losing De and her underlying insecurity that led her to believe he loved me as much he loved her. I was hurting then as never before or since because of her false accusations and belief. (That’s what dementia and insecurity can do to an  otherwise-loving human being.)

 

The apocalyptic prophet Jesus (a real human being) talked about loving your neighbor, caring for the widow and orphan, going the extra mile, etc. It was Saul/Paul (long after Jesus was dead) who transformed Jesus’s message of love and compassion into rules that Jesus wouldn’t have recognized, let alone endorsed.

 

And it was church fathers in the following century and centuries who decided which “holy writings” would be included in  the Bible. Not a  single original Greek bible has survived. And some of what is in today’s various versions of the Bible isn’t found in the earliest existing scrolls.

 

So, in essence, the Bible (written in the Middle East by patriarchal Middle Easterners over the course of 1600 years) has been a 2000+-year game of telephone tag, with subsequent writers embellishing and changing the meaning of the original Bible.  It wasn’t until 1946–I repeat, 1946, just five years before I was born!!!–that the word Arsennokoitai was translated as “homosexual”, taking the teeth right out of the clobber passages that have proclaimed homosexuality “an abomination” and worthy of stoning and casting people into a hell that doesn’t exist except right here on earth for them because of the clobber passages. Read the article linked to the term above to get the true meaning of the word.

 

The other tangible thing that has convinced me that Christianity is bogus, sadly, is the way far-right evangelical Christians treat other Christians, not to mention people of other faiths, colors, creeds or lifestyles. They are cruel, bigoted and mean-spirited. Some of Tim Sledge’s experiences in the book show what  happens in churches among so-called “born again” Christians.  What he described, and what I see in  far-right Christian cults, puts me in mind of Gandhi’s quote, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians.” Truly born-again Christians would look and act more like Jesus than bigots and brutes (my apologies to brutes/animals for the slur against their various species).

 

Case in point: Donald Trump’s  and Mike Pence’s evangelical cultists. “Nuf said! They can proclaim Jesus until the cows come home, but they sure don’t emulate him or his teachings. They’re bad news, not good news. And that’s the gospel truth!

 

 

These people do not reflect the Jesus I learned to love as a child.  They are NOT forgiven. Their Jesus never existed.  He wasn’t God’s son or a  god at all. When he was crucified, he died. His bones, if entombed, are still in Galilee somewhere. They will never be identified as such, though. (The powers that be will see to that.)

 

And I think these far-right “proclaimers of Christ” believe, too, that there is no hereafter, which is why they can be as deceitful, hateful and predatory as they want, because they know they won’t be punished for it unless they get caught and imprisoned for it while they’re still here.  They just want YOU and ME to feel constrained by what we believe about God and the afterlife so we won’t compete with them in their depravity. (Not that you and I would. I think we have better morals than that. We’re not sociopaths.)

 

I do believe there was an apocalyptic itinerant rabbi named Jesus. I just no longer believe that he was who people later claimed him to be.  The pieces don’t fit.

 

If you want to know more, read Tim Sledge’s book.

 

If you don’t, and want to keep on believing, have at it. You won’t hear an additional  peep out of me. I’ve said all I plan to say right here.