I’m curious about other people’s journeys.
For me, I didn’t grow up in a religious household. When I became a Christian my senior year in high school I went to church with folks I knew. That was to a small baptist church in southeast Georgia. I ended up in your stereotypical First Baptist Church, was ordained and preached in various places. Pastored a small church, was an elder in a church plant. This whole time being pretty conservative, reformed, and definitely homophobic.
Mainly, church drama ran me and my wife off, and at the same time I was watching the complete silence from Christians about what was happening in our country (this was around the time of the murder of Tamir Rice, and the start of BLM).
In conversations with people not like me (ie, white and straight) I started learning a good bit. I decided a few years ago to only read theology or philosophy if it was written by a non-white person and/or not a guy. This ended up lasting a bit more than a year, and really impacted me.
I’m leaving quite a bit out, and I feel it’s already too long. I’m planning to attend my first Pride event this Saturday (Savannah Pride Festival). My asked what 20 year old me would think. He’d probably hate me.
What about you? What brought you here?
I grew up in a “culturally Christian” family in that we observed traditional rituals at Easter and Christmas, but we never attended church. My father was a narcissistic abuser, which doesn’t work with Christian values like humility, temperance, charity, etc.
I had some school friends who conveyed rather dire, exclusive Catholic doctrine. Their notions of God were a turn-off. I internalized my father’s dim view of religion.
In my late teens or early 20s, Ayn Rand held a brief fascination among some of my friends, and I’m a little embarrassed to admit it but I got pretty Randroid for a hot minute myself.
Following Rand’s admiration of ancient Greek philosophers, I got interested in formal philosophy as an academic topic. Rand doesn’t really hold up by comparison, her would-be contribution to the discipline of philosophy is regarded as unimportant by serious academia.
Somewhere in the branch of philosophy dealing with causality and existence, we eventually confront the question: what causes the universe to exist, or is the universe itself an “uncaused first cause”? Causality with no First Cause felt more awkward to me than living with the assumption of a Prime Mover, and we may as well call it God.
I reserve a healthy skepticism around most supernatural claims, but bottom line? It felt like a particular mistake to dismiss the Resurrection as mere myth.
Every major religion embeds some variety of the Golden Rule. It’s right there in the Great Commandment. Now and then I contemplate other mysteries of my relationship with the First Cause, but the Great Commandment is my pole star.
Thanks for sharing. The philosophical route is a bit similar to mine, though I was younger and more clueless about how to interpret certain things lol.
