I grew up in a Catholic family and was pretty religious; I served as an altar boy, went to church every Sunday, prayed a lot, went to confession and thought about God and godliness quite a bit. For a long time I was unaware that there even were other religions. When I started noticing the other churches in our neighborhood I became curious. In Catholic school (which I attended through eighth grade) the view of the Protestant Reformation is skewed toward "rebellion" - these were people who broke off from the "true" church. But at some point my curiosity drove me to investigate some of these other churches, and on the surface their services didn't seem all that different from what I experienced at Catholic mass. But the fact that there were other Christians out there who were just as convinced as we Catholics were that they had the truth was a seed that would sprout into exploration and examination of other religions.
In high school I started reading about Buddhism and other Eastern religions. Even though I still attended church I wondered, with all the diversity of religion, how I could be sure that I was in the "right" one. I was equally perplexed that no one else seemed as curious as I was.
Someone attempted to give me an answer when I was a freshman in college.
The Way International is a small Christian group that was active in my neighborhood. I was invited to one of their meetings in the apartment of two young guys and was immediately intrigued. They claimed that they could explain the bible like no one ever explained it before, reconcile discrepancies and give proof that Christianity and the Bible were true. Although initially skeptical, this was what I was looking for. If these guys could show me that Christianity and the Bible was "the truth", then I wanted to at least hear what they had to say.
I took a three-week class that they offered and was hooked. One of their main selling points was that they claimed to teach keys to interpreting and understanding the Bible so that anyone could make sense of it without the need for priests and preachers. It made sense to me at the time, even though in retrospect their research was shoddy, their handling of the biblical languages was amateurish and, despite their claims that they would teach us how to interpret for ourselves, disagreeing with the leader just wasn't tolerated. But I latched on to this group and their teachings. Even though their explanations didn't really stand up to scrutiny, no one else had ever tried to make it all fit together before.
Family members were convinced that I was brainwashed, and even considered having me "deprogrammed" at one time. Looking back over the years I reject that explanation, not because I think I was too smart to get brainwashed, but because I made the effort to think outside the box - the box of my childhood religion. I was willing to question and to consider different boxes! Granted, someone a bit more sophisticated in biblical research might have spotted The Way's weak explanations right off, but it was more explanation than I ever received at church.
The problem with The Way was that it was a cult. Now, some people define a cult as any group that teaches heterodoxy, and The Way certainly taught some non-standard views of Christianity, but when I see "cult", I mean a group that is abusive and controlling, irrespective of specific doctrine. I was involved from 1978-1983, and got back involved from 1990-2001, although I maintained a lot of the same beliefs in that seven-year gap. I ended my involvement when I started questioning what The Way was teaching.
The leader of The Way had stepped down after a sexual scandal. This caused me to wonder whether what he had been teaching was to be trusted, so I started examining everything he had taught, using The Way's own methodology for interpreting the Bible. I came up with a lot of problems. The foundational class that this new leader had been teaching deviated in some respects from what the founding leader had taught. The rationale and Biblical basis for most of these new teachings was pretty shaky. This caused me to go back and examine doctrine from before this leader had taken over, all the way back to the fundamentals, and being a little more discerning than my 19 year old self, I saw more problems than I could count. I brought my concerns to the leaders of The Way, but received no answers beyond "trust your leaders, they know what they're doing". Eventually my questioning got me kicked out of the organization.
Even though I was questioning much of what The Way had taught, I still retained faith that the methodology, the "keys to research" were sound, and that they could be utilized to arrive at the truth.
A few years before, after the death of the founding leader, there had been a schism in the ranks and many offshoots, run by former Way people had sprung up. They all used the same research keys as the original group, but, freed from the influence of central control, they all came up with different answers. My conclusion was that maybe the Bible isn't as easy to interpret as I'd been led to believe if the same study methods led to such diverse results. I took this one step further and considered, not just the many Way offshoots, but the multitude of Christian denominations, some with minor differences, some barely recognizable as being Christian, all different. I decided that anyone who thought that they had "The Truth" based on a reading of the Bible was fooling themselves. Multitudes of people had read the Bible and claimed to divine God's will from its pages, but why did they come up with so many different answers?
So, where did people get their beliefs about what they believed about God? About Jesus? From the Bible. Why did they believe that there is a God? Yes, many people claim personal visions, or feelings, that they interpret as being from the God of the Bible. I contend that without the framework and presuppositions that the Bible and its attendant religions provide, none of these personal experiences would be interpreted as from a God that they previously hadn't known about. Logically, in order to have any opinion about God that is not entirely subjective, you have to go back to the Bible.
But if I couldn't be sure about the Bible, on what basis did I continue to believe that there was a Supreme Being, Creator of the Universe? There was none. Up until then, I had accepted that premise, but no longer felt that I had any evidence that that premise was true.
So, on that day I decided to stop believing in the God of the Bible.
Many ex-Way people joined Way offshoots and continued believing the same things that they always had, just in a different organization. Some went back to their family religion. Some got involved in evangelical or fundamentalist churches. Some became atheists. At this point I was not ready to abandon belief in the supernatural, and thought that one spiritual belief was as good as another. After a couple of years of reading and talking to people with different worldviews I began identifying as a pagan. My journey from a neophyte to where I am today is another post.
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