9. May 2008 by Frank.

The stroke disconnected the part of my brain that lets you have faith.  It was just gone in an instant.  I didn’t care that it was gone but I knew it had happened.  After the fog began lifting I began to realize that when it came to faith I had made an 180 degree turn.  I may not have cared but something that radical deserved some thought.

It deserved a lot of thought.

One of the first things I did was get a newer computer and get my first 56K dial-up internet service.  I began looking for stroke survivor groups.  I gradually discovered a number of survivors online and began learning that many of the effects of our strokes were very similar if not exactly the same.  Loss of emotion wasn’t unusual at all.  And what I call “The I Don’t Care Effect” was quite widespread.  So was alienation from family and friends.  Many people were struggling with their faith but it was mostly a matter of wondering why god had let this happen to them.  I never came across anyone who flat out felt their religion was gone.

I could write a book about all the effects of the stroke but I’m trying to stay focussed on religion for the purposes of this blog.

Like I mentioned previously, I was a member of two churches.  The entire amount of compassion and concern I got from those churches consisted of one visit from each pastor (at the same time no less - they competed to see who could say the best prayer!) and one visit by two families while I was in the hospital.  That was it.  No one ever called me, wrote a letter, paid a visit, or showed any interest at all outside of a church service.  While at church I was assured they were praying for me but I doubt that since no one could be bothered to even ask how I was doing.  I had been extremely active in both those churches teaching and preaching and filling in for the pastors.  But the most traumatic event in my life did not even make a blip on their radar.

This got my attention.  How could the love of god be real if this many of his people had no interest or campassion for one of their own?  I had seen this sort of thing before when my mother-in-law suffered a series of strokes that left her completely vegatative for 8 years.  She had been a member of the church for 35 years or more, only 2 or 3 of her friends from that church were ever around for support.  It was like they couldn’t deal with the situation so they chose to ignore it.  I found that disgusting.  They treated me the same way only they ignored me entirely.  But once again, I didn’t care.

I did, however, wonder how it was possible that someone (or more precisely, a group of someones) could claim to be filled with the love of god and show no love to one of their own who had had their life destroyed.

It began to occur to me that maybe I might be wrong in my understanding of god.  Maybe the things I was expecting weren’t accurate after all.  Maybe all that stuff I thought was still for us today really was over 2000 years ago.  Obviously something was wrong.

But for the first time I was able to think maybe it wasn’t something wrong with me, maybe it was something wrong with god.

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9. May 2008 by Frank.

A pastor who is fond of telling everyone the specific day in 1957 that he became a Christian is also fond of answering serious religious questions with, “Don’t ask me to explain it.”

51 years of being a Bible student and teacher and he still can’t explain the Trinity, the virgin birth, speaking in tongues, or other controversies.  But he believes it because he knows God’s word is the inerrant word, it is the absolute truth.  Christianity takes faith because so many of its concepts make no rational sense.

The Old Testament is quite emphatic that there is only one true god, that all others are false impostors.  Yet somehow the one true god becomes three true gods in one in the New Testament.  Somehow this one spirit god has a son and a holy spirit who are equal to and the same as himself and are just as eternal as he is.  But they are only one god.  You can see why he doesn’t have an explanation for that, I didn’t either back in my gung ho days.  But I accepted it.  By faith, because that’s the only way you can accept it.

Somehow this god devises a plan to save his own creation from his own wrath by becoming one of them and sacrificing himself to himself.  In order to become one of us and be without sin he has to be born of a virgin because sin flows through the bloodlines of the fathers.  He has to die because there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood.  And he has to rise again because our faith is in vain if he doesn’t.  Please don’t point out that God put the Tree of Knowledge in the garden himself and then told his innocent - ignorant - creatures to stay away from it.  Forget for a moment the fact that they had no idea of right from wrong and thus no idea what the consequences of their behavior might be.  Seriously, death came through sin and there was no sin yet so how did they know what it was?  And even then it still took in the neighborhood of nine hundred years for their bodies to figure out how to die.  Notice any scientific flaws with any of this?  It takes faith to believe these things.

Without it they’re just fairy tales.

I may look at this with some degree of sarcasm now but I was in complete agreement with the entire concept when I was a believer.  I even swallowed the whole confusing of languages at the Tower of Babel.  Theses people believed that God lived in the sky and that they could build a tower to reach his realm.  God didn’t like that so he came down and put a stop to it.  What makes no sense about this now is that we have skyscrapers the world over that make the Tower of Babel look like a one step step ladder and we still haven’t reached god’s realm.  And he stopped trying to stop us.

As long as you’re looking at Genesis go a little further and see how angels which are spirit beings can somehow mate with human females.  Apparently there is such a thing as angel sperm because these unions produced giants and mighty men.  Keep that in mind if you want an explanation of how a virgin birth could happen.  How can a spirit penis accomplish the same thing as a physical penis?  Is it really there?  Or - no, I’m being too offensive already.  All this stuff is in your Bible, I’m not exaggerating it to make a point.  It only makes sense if you read it with faith colored glasses.  Without them you can see how far out in LaLa Land these stories are. 

Christianity falls apart very easily if you look at it too closely.  If you actually question its foundations, if you actually look at what it actually says in the Bible with your faith blinders off, you can clearly see the multiple flaws and errors of logic.  How can something so precariously constructed stand so long?

Well, don’t ask me to explain that.

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