Before I continue with my opinions of The Bible, especially the Gospels and Epistles, from an agnostic viewpoint, let me give you a brief tour of how my opinion of The Bible has changed in my lifetime. The blog series "So, You Want to Join a Cult" covers most of this ground:
I grew up in an Irish-Catholic family on the very edge of New York City in a neighborhood that was overwhelmingly Catholic, mostly Irish and Italian. There were a few Protestant churches, and there was a significant Jewish presence, but Catholicism was very much the default in this neighborhood, dominated by two Catholic parishes, St. Pius X and St. Claire's. We went to church every Sunday and attended Catholic grade school. As was usual with lay Catholics, at least in that era, we didn't trouble to much about doctrine or theology and left that stuff to the priests. I was familiar with the broad outlines of the Gospels and the major themes of the Old Testament, but really didn't think about religion at all. It was like the air - it was just there.
In my teens I visited some local Protestant churches. While I noticed some differences in the services, the broad outline was the same, or at least seemed that way. More to satisfy my curiosity than anything else I studied non-Christian religions, but it was more of an intellectual study and never really took.
When I was fourteen I worked as a clerk in a financial firm in the financial district of lower Manhattan. There I encountered a variety of street corner preachers and began to hear about some of the beliefs of Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity such as "the rapture" and the concept of becoming "born again". Still no changes in my overall belief system, but I was starting to entertain some serious challenges to my worldview. During my freshman year of college I encountered The Way. I eventually became convinced this group was a cult (again, see the link to Part I of "So, You Want to Join a Cult"), not so much their , beliefs but their practices. Their theology was for the most part similar to the strain of Evangelical Protestantism known as dispensationalism. Their claim to fame in theological terms was that, unlike almost all Christians, they did not believe that The Bible supports the belief that Jesus was God. A slightly less controversial position (although not unheard of) was that upon death you did not proceed to heaven or hell (or purgatory for Catholics) but were in a kind of sleep until the "return of Christ".
What attracted me to this group was that they appeared methodical in their study of The Bible and were able to cite specific verses to support all of their beliefs. I was with this group from 1978-2001, with a hiatus in the 90's and was very much a true believer. I believed that The Bible, in its original texts, was divinely inspired by God. The Way taught that, utilizing certain commonsense methods, one could easily determine God's will - The Bible, they taught, interpreted itself.
In 2000 the (married) top leader had been expelled after conducting an affair with a married woman. This caused me to question, not The Bible itself, but some of the things that this particular leader had been teaching that, to put it mildly, were "out there". I compiled a long list of things where the leader's teachings were at odds with what the founder of The Way had taught. My questioning got me kicked out of the group.
I became aware of many offshoots from the original group that had split off during the leadership crisis that accompanied the founder's death in the late 80's. Despite all of them using the same "keys to interpretation" in their understanding of The Bible they were coming up with wildly differing conclusions. I started to see that even the founder's theology didn't really stand up to the self-interpreting Bible model and that his own conclusions were his own and not necessarily the only possible conclusions to be made utilizing the "keys to interpretation". I briefly considered returning to mainstream Christianity, but it didn't take long to see that no one had a reliable grasp of "The Truth" and even though most denominations believed that they were right and everyone else was wrong, they were all using the same Bible to come to different conclusions.
It was at that point that I determined that there was no objective reason to elevate The Bible and Christianity over any other system of belief. This didn't mean that I had decided that it was definitely wrong, but that there wasn't any reason to assume that it was right either. I wasn't mad at God (something I was accused of), I just wasn't convinced that he existed, and if he did, at least not necessarily in the form that Christianity claimed he did.
This is the path that I have walked that got me to the point where I see The Bible as just another book. At best a collection of books and letters and essays and pamphlets outlining men's opinions about God, the world, Jesus and morality.
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