Fallen Angel (My narrative on Faith and discovering Truth)

This is post is a self-reflection I have always wanted to share about myself, but never had an audience interested in asking the necessary questions to get me to open up about it. Not ever hearing certain words uttered, or having certain questions asked of me, have been problems that held me back for most of my life. I wish to continue to break free of such bonds by expressing what I am capable of sharing.

All images in this post are from pixabay.com

It strikes me that I now live in a culture that requires too much separation of minds. Sometimes it is okay to develop effective strategies and share them for mutual success to a group. Opinions based on preferences that run counter to the feverish race of success that others are on, such ideas may cause others to target you as a toxic individual. I recognize that my views often fall outside the majority, and so I have went through life keeping most thoughts to myself. Though I was born an extrovert, my environment has forced me to be an introvert. Any negative perceptions on my reputation potentially impact the security of my jobs, family, and home. To exist in this world, that means humility and willpower must be exercised on a daily basis to put the needs of those around me above those of the self in order to maintain certain bare minimum needs for the self. That is common sense ethics to me, though it is possible I learned this through my religious upbringing which we will explore together.

That's what this post will begin to delve into today.

Sit down, get comfortable, and consider saving or bookmarking this post to read for later. You may not have time to get through it all in one sitting. I will be narrating on the subjects of faith and spirituality over many years of my life, and I will start at the beginning. If you are not open to considering other philosophical perspectives, you should cease reading and definitely do not upvote this post.

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One thing I can always be fortunate of, is that I grew up in a large family. Three older siblings, a mother and a father, they are still married, and everyone is still living 37 years into my life today. My family would go to church every single Sunday. Originally I felt like we did it because it was free daycare, to give my parents a break from watching four kids. Later on I felt like my parents believed it was a moral obligation. I learned all of the Bible stories acceptable for children to know. I knew a little bit about Jesus, but not very much about the meaning of his life until around 6th grade, because talking about death and resurrection were heavy subjects to discuss around impressionable kids.

We went to a Presbyterian Church, and I adjusted well into this. I even went through and in-depth church study program to become a full dedicated member. Through the coursework, I learned about the different church denominations, what they believe, and what members of my church have affirmed to believe. I really liked what we learned about Martin Luther and John Calvin, and thought the church seemed like a good fit for me.

In the Jr. High Youth Group program, things went to a whole new level. Sunday church was mostly hymns and sermons, and the youth group had adventure trips, charismatic praise music, rock guitars, and crazy sports games pitting hormone-driven teens against one another. This was the first time in my life I was allowed to join Bible study groups, and my voice and opinion on an intellectual level was actually welcomed. Similarly I was allowed to connect with others on an emotional level in prayer teams, which involved people sharing deeply emotional subjects in their lives that they wanted support for.

Things got a bit paranormal in these years also.

Certain youth leaders at our church also taught their experiences with the mystical realm of Christianity. Lectio Divina: meditation and inspiration drawn divinely from specific words harmonized in the mind was one such mystical activity. We did it by candlelight and with a prayer to invite the Holy Spirit to reveal inner Truth divined from scripture to open our hearts and minds. In a totally unrelated mystical exercise, leaders would ask us to close our eyes as they described a visual vision quest to relax our nerves and open the imagination to new images and ideas. We might be asked to describe any other persons, things, or signs that appeared to us. "Were there any hidden words spoken to us in these visions? Did we sense a connection with the divine and holy?" Can you see where this is leading? After many hours of prayer, scripture study, and meditation, eventually a person will naturally begin to let their mind dwell on certain related ideas. I felt that I had a connection with the holy spirit, and I felt that Jesus offered his love to me, and I believed that I needed that in my life desperately. I made a personal dedication in prayer to commit my life, heart, mind, and strength to serving Jesus, and accept his grace into my life. I would be asked repeat this dedication many times publicly as well. From that first day forward, my perception of reality itself had changed permanently.

For the next ten years or so I physically felt a divine connectedness with The Holy Spirit, which connected me to God and Jesus Christ. This awesome paranormal feeling would often nurture my faith in God on even the darkest of days.

In my High School years, this newfound faith became a welcomed source of hope in a difficult phase of my life. School grades were a daily stressor. Many of my friends were very emotionally needy, and would suck my attention dry. Other students knew my personality weaknesses better than me, and would exploit them to succeed socially at my expense. My siblings were starting to develop plans to move out, find jobs, or join the military. None of us had any savings for higher education, and that weighed deeply on my hope for the future.

Worst of all, my mother was experiencing psychotic outbursts. For instance, she made assertions that our house was bugged. The pastor at our church, she claimed, was delivering sermons based on what he heard on our phones. Every Sunday, he was attempting to embarrass her and our family through the sermons. These are obvious symptoms of extreme paranoia. She always had a habit of bending, color, and completely altering facts, to make her gossip sound much more sensational. By getting my dad to react, sometimes aggressively, she could manipulate situations to make herself more influential without appearing to be a bad parent. As I would be working on math homework or reading assignments many hours after my 10 o'clock bedtime, I would become too distracted to remember anything I recently read or memorized because my mother would be yelling, screaming, slamming doors, and stomping through the hallways. In these rampage episodes, she was not interacting with my dad or my siblings. She would stage arguments with herself, and use the nastiest voice to imitate people. She would make these people in her mind say things she imagined they might say. Things these people would never dare say. Horrible accusations or slanderous questions. Signs of multiple personalities, schizophrenia, and manic depression. Sometimes I had friends who would want to sleep over for the night, and I would clam up when my mother went into another rampage, because I would have to explain this deeply troubling matter that I had not yet felt comfortable talking about with anyone. One time the police even came to our front door, because the neighbors phoned in, deeply concerned that our house might be involved in child abuse. In a way, we were all being abused on a deeply emotional level.

Every time such an outburst happened, and I was alone in my room, I would pray. "Please help my mother to heal from her mental condition." "Restore my mother's sanity." "Cast out any demons that might be in possession of her heart." Each time, I would invoke different words, as if the right combination, or the right amount of sincerity might empower my prayers to be better heard, or to make them more powerful.

Though it was extremely embarrassing to me, eventually I would ask other youth leaders and students to pray for my mother. They never pressed me for too much information, so I can only guess that they probably asked my older siblings about the subject. Other kids were praying because one of their parents were dying, divorcing, or struggling with addictions, so my requests did not seem entirely out of place, though mine felt more real to me.

Now, I'm going to skip over quite a bit here. We did have a major family confrontation with my mother one day, in order to get her some necessary medical attention for her mental problems. Going into the specifics would be very lengthy. The short story is that it happened, and she went on meds for a while. The meds and the praying seemed to solve very little.

By the time I was finishing high school, I was determined to come up with a plan so that I could get out of the house. That was the goal of all my siblings after all. If we didn't get out, we would go crazy, literally. Fortunately I attended a well funded public school, and it had a wealth of resources to help aim students towards seeking higher education. Now, I know in 2017 higher education is sometimes considered a waste of time for a truly intelligent person, but in 1999 it was considered the only option to avoid having to work a minimum wage job. Despite my family having no savings for me, and even certain high school teachers telling me I didn't have the GPA and AP credits to get into a private college or university, I allowed myself to research all of the top schools around the country to determine if any of them could be a good fit for me. I believed at the time, rightly, that computers would be THE new wave of the future, and attending a school that would teach me to be a computer expert would probably land me a good job afterwards. I prayed to God, and asked if I was making the right decision, and that I would faithfully change my mind in pursuit of other studies if I was making a selfish or greedy choice, as I wanted to live a life to honor God. No response... For those of you not familiar with prayer, that basically means it is possible that God approves, and that is how I decided to roll with it.

I ended up selecting a Christian college out of state to attend. It ticked off nearly everything I wanted. Lots of scholarship programs, including one through my church that I should easily qualify for based on merit of leadership activities. Some of my friends in church who I admired most were also planning to attend this college, so that was a definite plus. State of the art computer science labs and computer science degree program to major in. I was also an experienced musician in choir, and this college had a professional touring choir that meant I could join and be able to go on big vacation bus trips with friends. They had a theatre program, which I thought would be a good idea to get a minor in; plus many opportunities to audition for plays and musicals. This college was out of state, and had a variety of dorms I could choose from, and I really wanted to enjoy the college experience in this way to make lots of friends and become very social. A variety of students loans were also available to help cover the remaining expenses that my grants and scholarships would not fully cover. This was a beautiful college, by the way, and it was a dream come true to be the first in my family to make it this far in higher education.

We're going to skip over some of my college life, except for a few key details regarding my faith and discovering more about my self identity. This was the first time in my life that I had ever studied the history of religions very deeply beyond the pages of the Bible or an encyclopedia (yes we had to use those tomes back then). The college required all students to take certain religious history, science, and philosophy courses, in addition to a Biblical literary study course. Since I was still a slow reader, I took the New Testament class, because I knew if I took the Old Testament class there was no way I could read the entire thing in time. In these various religious studies I learned some key things that reshaped my beliefs slightly.

Key Higher Learning

The New Testament was not written by the authors who title the various books within, and various parts within have been rewritten, borrowed, and re-translated by various persons heavily before the Bible had even been printed for the first time by Johannes Gutenburg. In some cases, it cannot be verified who wrote certain passages, and it cannot be verified which parts were written or modified by one author or another. Experts can only guess on these uncertain passages based on the literary context of the language used in ancient manuscripts believed to be the oldest and most authentic.

The concept of predestination and free will was apparently still a big deal, and a troubling point among pastors, professors, and authors. To my professors, it was merely an entertaining discussion topic to get students to think more deeply about seeded beliefs they had probably taken for granted. The reason it was a big problem was because believing exclusively in predestination (fate) or free will would lead to some rather uncomfortable conclusions about the nature of a God, no matter which side you were on. To assume that we are predestined, you could assume that God has a good plan for everyone, but then you must ask why there are so many horrible things happening in the world that God also allows to happen. If God planned for everything, then either God is not powerful enough to stop evil things from occurring, or God lacks the power to intervene in preventing all evil, or even scarier, maybe God doesn't care so much as we give him credit for. Maybe he started with a good plan, but now it has fallen to pieces as a result of sin and the fall of man. How can the fall of man even be explained if we were predestined to sin? Sin is separation for God, so why would our good, loving God make it our destiny to sin? Those conclusions were common among philosophers, and led them to consider the alternative. Free will on the other hand was an even bigger can of worms. Why would an all-knowing God build a perfect creation, and then allow humans to have the power of free will to destroy it? Does God not care that people are killing each other? Why doesn't God exercise free will and strike down people who do evil in the world? Again, is God powerless or too careless to intervene? So if predestination and free will theories both have flaws, how about a combination of the two? Nope, that doesn't work well either. Then you have to believe that God is subjective with his rules, morals, and expresses favoritism for some people to make certain choices or to have certain good or bad things happen to them. No matter what view point you pick, the conclusion is the same. Existence under any of these views of God would be meaningless.

Like the majority of Christians attending this college, we had to sort of ignore this puzzle a bit. Leave it for the scholars to argue over. We would rather spend our time arguing with the atheists about why their lives were utterly meaningless without God.

It was during these years in college that my faith grew enormously. I became much more serious in my studies. I became more firm in convictions to defend my stance on various moral beliefs, as backwards as they may seem to secular society. It was also in these years that I developed signs of my own mental disorders that would come back to haunt me. Mostly depression, but also strange delusional thinking that gave me social anxiety and sensitively in unpredictable situations every day. I would pray to God to help me to heal and overcome these hindrances, because I would rather trust in God to heal me than to rely on drugs to alter my mind. To this day, I still prefer not to use any meds if I feel that I can heal myself better in a natural way. God did not heal me of these maladies. Even though I proved to be possibly the most popular, well-liked student in my class evidenced by the yearbook photos, the school counselor recommended me to an outside private psychiatrist who promptly gave me a prescription of Paxil. The pink pill of bliss helped me to ignore my anxieties and ridiculous sadness, but it never solved any of the stressors in my life which were actually causing me to feel this way: grades, financial problems, lack of romance, etc.. When my ability to afford Paxil and a helpful insurance plan ran out, so did my happiness. As a result, I relied on my faith to carry me through all of my problems. If I could not fix something, then God would have to help. This made me more resolved to live my life according to scripture, to live obediently to it. My depression and my faith also made me more critical of others who claimed to be Christian, but showed little mettle or commitment to their beliefs.

After college, I was dumbfounded by how hard life was. There were no opportunities that I could find for my line of work. I worked in various temporary positions, and found myself earning the same low wages I would have earned as if I had skipped college altogether. This wasn't right! I would apply for positions repeatedly that I felt qualified and overly qualified for, and never get so much as a call back. Every month, the tech industry seemed be becoming more competitive. I found out that programming languages existed now that I never learned in college were the big thing in demand. Even though I studied databases, I had no experience using any of the main database software systems currently being used in the industry. If I knew my job choices were going to be this bleak, I would have attended a technical college instead of wasting so much money on a liberal arts college. My choices were getting slimmer and slimmer, and the needs and requirements of the tech industries quickly outpaced my education and experience. My funds had dried out, and I was starting to go into a spiral. I called my sister up, and she encouraged me. She said she was praying for me, and believed I was experiencing a very normal thing she called a quarter-life crisis. Even though she was going through financial and emotional hardship in her life with her husband, she offered for me to come live with them, so they might help me find a more permanent job.

She meant well. My depression was becoming very bad living in a new city with nobody to make friends with. I joined their church. The members were extremely prayer oriented, and it disturbed me when I heard the way they prayed. "My husband had cancer, but now he on a breathing device and taking things day by day, Praise Jesus." "I lost my job, and now I'm living on past income until I can find something else, and yesterday my daughter told me she loves me anyway, Praise Jesus." These were some of the worst things I had ever heard of, and yet they were speaking as though they were extremely thankful for having to go through these hardships to get the sour results they got. Sometimes I would pray with them, asking for help to find a job, and I would hear my sister and others praying, "Lord, help him to be proactive and joyful in his search and to never give up." "Push him to not get so caught up in the things dragging him down, and instead bring positivity into every position he applies for."

Words meant to guide and encourage me, stung me to the very core, sounding more like insults. Do these people really believe that I am not trying 100%? They think because they are older and wiser, they can use prayer to teach me something, instead of using prayer to empower God to hear my cry for help. Even though these friends wanted me to succeed, and they used prayer as an opportunity to preach their advice to me, and use God's will as justification for their advice. In plain English, to a depressed person, I was being blamed for asking God for help instead of trying harder to fix my own damn problems. Every time they would ask me if I found a job yet, and I would tell them no, not yet, keep praying for me. I could see in their eyes that they thought getting a job should be easy, and didn't understand why I was making it so difficult. Even though I offered to make myself vulnerable to them, and to trust them for help, they continued to judge me because they were incapable of understanding the depth of the challenges I was facing. One of the few benefits of Depression is that you learn to read people's body language a little too well for your own good.

So here I was living in a new city unable to find work, unable to meet any friends who had any interest in me (I was a pretty miserable person to be around I admit), and not even sure how to actually succeed at anything since all of my attempts continued to lead to failure. I made a list one day called "10 reasons why I hate my life." I never showed it to anyone. Nobody seemed to care. My life was my own fault now in their eyes.

Seeking to recover from my Depression and Social Anxiety Disorder, a real condition I found I had through research, I sought out a specialist to help me to treat this invisible illness. Invisible because I was the only person who believed it was actually debilitating my life, or even believed it was a problem. I don't care what anyone else believes about Depression and Social Anxiety, they are as dangerous as any disease, and can even cause life threatening panic attacks or suicide. Social Anxiety was still a new disorder being researched in mental health studies, and the best that the specialist I found could do was to offer to help me interpret a self-help workbook. Apparently mental health specialists are only licensed to treat their patients in this way. Although she would listen to my answers to questions I wrote down in the workbook with a comforting concerned expression, she was never allowed to offer advice to me to fix any personal problems I expressed. "Read the book and follow the program", she would say. I learned a lot about the characteristics of social anxiety disorder and depression, according to mental health experts, but the workbook program did not work for me. It was like bailing water while sinking on the Titantic.

Eventually I did get a temporary job opportunity. This one lasted 9 months. I was heavily discriminated against for being the wrong race in an office where various minorities all competed for having the biggest sob story. Few there had more to sob about than I did, I'm sure. I was lucky to have a supervisor who recognized my daily sadness. She genuinely sympathized for me, and pulled many strings with people higher up to help request that I would get hired to a permanent job position. The truth is none of the temps ever got hired, and eventually would all be fired one way or another over something petty like leaving a mess or not clocking in from lunch on time. Despite my repeated attempts to apply for the multiple available positions in Data Entry and Tech Support, I seemed to be lacking a certain quality (ahem!). HR at this company I temp'd for never bothered to get back to me.

In the meanwhile I did the only thing in my spare time I could do to help take my mind off things at night to help me sleep. I read. I read Rick Warren's "Purpose Driven Life". One of the worst books I ever read. I threw it across the room in anger when I realized he was purposely changing the meaning of scripture to back up the lessons he was teaching in his book. It was his misquoting of Job (one of the few characters in the Bible I could identify with) that drove me up the wall. Why was this author making millions selling a book full of botchy quick fix lessons, while I, the fool with the problems was tearing his words apart with barely any effort? I also re-read some of my old college textbooks, such as John Calvin's Golden Book and The Rule of St. Benedict. For some reason, I was becoming more sensational in my faith by reading these books. They described Christians who would live joyless lives, performing the same monk routines every day, and being chastised for laughing, joking, or seeking self-gratification in any way. To live morally, pray to God, and study the word of God was Holy, and nothing else. Truly a sad, but respectable existence. These books also led to my fascination for wanting to know more about the history of the Bible, including the parts that are practically unknowable for certain. Through the internet, I began to learn conspiracy theories relating to the Masonic Order, Knights Templar, and the Catholic Church. Most of the conspiracies described a division in the church, leaving the faithful alone, and the Gnostics secretly controlling the Catholic Church through a dark Black Pope.

Hang with me, we're getting to the interesting stuff now...

I got a job! A real job. They had a health insurance plan, and planned to give me a raise every few years if I performed well. Regrettably, I did not achieve this job through my own merits. My dad found this opportunity in the small company he was working for. He told his bosses about me, and told me to apply for the opening. They flew me out for an interview, and hired me on the spot. My new job would be to scan digital film, and to analyze and edit aerial photography used for making maps. It was a computer job, and I was thrilled.

In these next years, I had the resources to fix every single problem that was ruining my life. I looked back at the "10 reasons why I hate my life" and smiled. With my new financial resources I purchased some new books about depression, confidence, and social anxiety. The meditation/hypnosis CD's were empowering my ego every day to breath easier, and feel bolder. They helped me to pretend unraveling years of baggage, by simply allowing me to hear words of encouragement I always wanted to hear, but never heard it expressed from anyone with real sincerity. One secret to solving my mental problem was to abandon myself, not to "be yourself" like everyone had pounded in my head my whole life. I re-invented myself to become something better than the old shell of a person I no longer wanted to be anymore. So long as I wanted to improve, there was always hope. As I saw myself becoming more like the type of person I longed to be and less like the weakling of a person I loathed, my sense of self-worth grew higher than it ever was. The truth became clear.

My family did not fix me. My friends did not fix me. Mental health specialists did not fix me. God did not fix me. Despite what experts claimed, I was not capable for fixing myself either. The only thing that could help me is what I had been asking those closest to me to give me, but they always refused.

Believe in me

Besides love, this Truth is the greatest gift a parent can ever give their son or daughter in life. It bewilders me why modern parents spend so much time trying to figure out what is wrong with their kid, and so little time reminding their offspring how capable they are in everything they do. I do not have kids, but I hope if you are reading this and you have kids that you will remind your children about all of the times in their life that you have been impressed by their superhuman abilities. Remind them every day about the time they tied their shoes by themselves, how they climbed a tree without help, or made the best tasting cookies you had ever eaten. This might be the only time in their life someone ever tells them why they will be successful in life.

New Philosophy

After restoring my life, I continued to study the origin of religions. I wanted a new book to read, but I did not want to study any more conspiracies from random nuts who make a living on the internet. I found an author who studied ancient archaeology, was fluent in hundreds of languages, including ancient dead languages and hieroglyphics, and specialized in pre-Christian civilizations. D. M. Murdoch proved later on to be my favorite author on the subject. Most of her books were filled with direct quotations from earlier experts who studied these subjects, and her bibliography was half the space of the entire text. She sourced every fact and opinion she expressed in her writing with evidence and research. None of my college textbooks presented as much historical information as thoroughly as she did. Certainly none of the Christian self-help books by authors I read, like Rick Warren, ever bothered to back up their opinions with real evidence outside the Bible like D.M. Murdoch spent her life meticulously engineering. By the time I finished her masterpiece "The Christ Conspiracy" my mind was finally well enough to consider re-evaluating the most important philosophical questions I had ever posed to myself.

According to D.M. Murdoch's brilliant research, I learned that plagiarisms do likely exist in the Bible. Always having admired Truth, this discovery soured my faith in God and Christianity greatly. I also learned that Jesus Christ was never so named in the oldest books of the New Testament. It was always Jesus in the narratives, or Christ in the letters. Jesus and Christ were never placed side by side until after the Council of Nicea. Any time the two names were combined, it was a later addition/revision to the Bible. Most staggering were all of the critical histories of ancient religions happening between eras in Biblical history that were so lazily left out of my education from Sunday School to College: Bacchus and the Greek mystery schools, the Mithra Temple that existed prior to the Vatican, Goddess religions to Mother of the Savior, animal sacrifices to atone for sins to Marduck and Baal, Yashua and the other competing Elohim mentioned in the original Hebrew creation myths. Why do Christian ignore all of these coincidental religions that conveniently predate Christianity and Judaism in the same regions where they were invented, and only slightly before they were adopted into their religions? The reason is because of faith unfortunately.

To have faith is to hold true to what you believe is true, and requiring no proof. My religion needed to change to account for this. As long as I was believing in what is True, I decided it would be okay to believe in Christianity, or any other religion that passes the test of Truth. I would not even make the requirement that Christianity must have evidence of proofs, but merely that it did not fail the test of believing in something that is proven untrue. It is currently my belief that Christianity does in fact fail that test when you look at the key figures Theologians and Christian Apologists rely on to verify the authenticity of the Bible, namely the questionable testimonies of : Flavious Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Seutonious, and other Talmudic or Catholic references. Furthermore, D.M. Murdoch reveals the inconsistent good/evil nature of God and Jesus within the Biblical texts. This is troubling as it contrasts God's words and actions with the golden rule of "love they neighbor as thyself" and the Ten Commandments. What is the point of laws written by God if that Almighty God does not bother to follow them very carefully?

To disown my faith, I had to first deal with on important matter that frightened me more about Christianity than I realized it would. Fear of the Afterlife. This has been a driving force to convert pagans to become Christians since the earliest of ages. Would you rather burn for eternity in a realm of torture and fire, or to living in eternal bliss being one with God? Would you rather cease to exist entirely, or transcend this world to enter a new dimension known as Heaven? The answer is obvious to even the dumbest nimrods.

However, how can I assume that Heaven is real? It too is based on the Christian lies. Heaven is not even invented by Christianity. Many ancient religions believed in a Heavenly realm. The Greek gods all lived in a paradise in the sky called Olympus, but nobody believes that place actually exists. Why should I?

Am I prepared to live a life that now has a finite end? We're talking about cutting short a life that lasts eternity, and trading it in for a life that could potentially end tomorrow. This is the Truth that scared me the most. The big pension fund in the sky that I had been building up my whole life was potentially was 100% gone. The one thing I had always hoped I could rely on might not be there at all. The one thing that could save me from death and destruction was potentially incapable of granting my soul even 5 measly minutes of time in Heaven to experience, after a lifetime wasted pursuing it. Even after facing years of a miserable depressed existence, and years of being unable to succeed at finding a career I was skilled at, I had never been as disappointed as I was when it dawned on me that I might not be going to Heaven when I die, no matter how much I might hold onto my old faith. To think, I could have doubled down on my faith and lived according to John Calvin's miserable plan, and traded away a joyful life filled with hope, for one of blind pointless obedience.

Now I live my life knowing that I am no better than anyone else as far as the value of human life is concerned. I recognize that all people are valuable in this world for the short time that they live. If there is no God, then we must continue to exist and help each other without God's help. While I can still hold true to many of my Christian values, I no longer must be pinned to any rules that hinder people from experiencing happy, fulfilled lives. Rules designed for harm, power, and hate are devoid of ethical value.

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Thank you for reading this very long post. I have been wanting to get these words out for a very long time. Please do not judge me too much if my words offend you or ring of falsity. This my expression of vulnerability to the world. My journey to seek Truth is ongoing, and I will follow faithfully.

"Dear children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions and in truth." (1 John 3:18.)

... or are these words merely attributed to John?