There were a few things that helped me move on. One was the friendship of a lovely group of people from Honduras and a few other people from the "outside" who helped me make a transition back into some kind of life outside the church. Another was a woman I'd known from college who told me about growing up as a Jehovah's Witness, who said what finally helped her was the thought that if so many people were going to hell, at least she would be in good company. Another was a class I took about Judaism that helped me to see that there is more than one way to look at Christianity. One book we read was called The Christian Problem, and it talked about how Paul based his whole theology of Jesus on a faulty reading of a scripture in Deuteronomy. It surprised me to learn that the Jews didn't even believe in hell. And that the stuff about the Pharisees was likely revisionist history. This class gave me enough ammunition to leave Jesus pretty much behind for a long, long time.
However, as I've said before, that only worked for so long. I felt like there was something fundamental about the premise of the Christian religion that I couldn't quite believe, but thoughts about that Jesus guy just wouldn't go away. At some point I decided that I would consider myself a "fan" of Jesus. And that pretty much worked for me. It left me open to considering the things he said without being troubled too much by dogma. But one of the things about ACIM that has been so powerful for me is the thought that maybe, just maybe, I was right in some respects about Jesus. And that maybe there was a way to look at his teachings that would make sense in my mind.
My central Christian Problem was the idea of sin and punishment. If God was so all-knowing and everything, why would God create a world where he knew most people weren't going to follow him, and hence be doomed to everlasting torment? I mean, I would understand that if God were sadistic and mean and scary, but the Christians also wanted me to believe that God was Love. I just could never get that work for me. I could understand being scared of a scary, creepy God like that. But not feeling love and gratitude. If God created me sinful, and then is going to punish me for my sins, how can that God be loving? I know the arguments, because I've been around the Christian block. How they try to make this work in this logic that says God created us because he didn't want to be alone and it was OK that he did that knowing that most of us were doomed because he was going to have this dude show up in the Middle East 2000 years ago and get tortured and killed and that would make everything OK just as long as we could believe the whole story without much proof. Also, if you were like the people I used to go to church with, you had the extra added burden of thinking that grace would only go so far--I heard one guy say that "You are only as good as your last day on earth," to try to scare us into going out and relentlessly trying to "save" (or, more accurately, recruit) people. I just had a hard time buying that story, although I was afraid it was true for a long time.
What A Course in Miracles has offered to me is a way of integrating what I've discovered into a kind of comprehensive Theory of Everything. Now, I know a lot of Christians probably think that ACIM is of the Devil, telling us what our itching ears want to hear. But I don't think it's that simple. ACIM doesn't let anybody off the hook--far from it. But it also says that mainstream Christians are--let's just say confused. About the nature of Jesus, the nature of reality, the nature of redemption, and the nature of the world. That Jesus came to show us how to overcome the world by understanding its nature, not to offer payment for our sins. And that the only important message of the crucifixion was that Death can hold no power over Life.
I don't mean to pick on Christians in particular. If it's a path that is working for you, and if you aren't using it to hurt others, I don't have a problem with it (and I guess part of this path is learning to forgive you, even if you are using it to hurt others). I only mean to share something of the path that I've traveled in case it might be useful to someone else.
I don't think I'm anywhere close to "there" yet, wherever "there" is. All I know is that I feel a great gratitude to God for his (her/its) faithfulness in bringing me this far. Brings to mind an old Amy Grant song, Look What Has Happened to Me:
Look what has happened to me,
I find it hard to believe.
His love has taken my life
This far, so far....
Link:
The Christian Problem by Stuart A. Rosenburg, on Amazon.com
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