Chapter Three: Exploring and Questioning
This growing awareness of the supernatural gave me a new perspective on people's understandings of reality. I mean... as far as I could tell, most non-christians either doubt or completely refuse to believe that supernatural activity is a reality. These apparently deluded people included my parents and school-mates. Yet in our own neighbourhood, the supernatural was being demonstrated. This led me to
an astonishing conclusion; most people are wrong about some fundamental aspects of life (like how our creator interacts with us). People who were older than me were wrong, people better educated than me were wrong, people more intelligent than me were wrong (1 Cor 3:19, Rom 1:22, Rev 12:9). And I also reached another serious conclusion; that reality is often unobvious, that it isn't always what the majority think it is, and that you may have to search deeply to find it.
I found getting letters published really exciting at times. I was a quiet sort of person, yet once or twice I was speaking in what was probably the most read newspaper in my country. But although I felt my publications made life good, I would also stress a lot about them.
What if those I criticised sued me? What if I said something incorrect and I was made a fool of? Luckily I didnt receive much criticism. The worst I was accusation of me that I read in print was that I was wearing "charismatic glasses". And criticism on talkback didnt hurt much because it wasn’t permanent.But some of the things I said in my letters to the editor I wasn’t 100% certain about. An example was my criticism of evolution. I felt that evolution contradicted the Bible and was ultimately misguided theory rather than fact. Although what I was writing was largely things I had heard from creationists, and they made sense to me, I still had doubts that it was all true. Evolutionary theory was so comprehensive, and the evolutionists seemed so confident that it was hard to believe that the evolutionists were wrong. But I decided that it was a good idea to speak out on evolution anyway. I reasoned that if I was right, then others ought to know that evolution was incorrect, but if I was wrong then I needed to know that too.
My writing started to expand to other areas. I started to write books; one a biblical perspective on difficulties, and then one on deception. For the deception book I collected Bible verses on deception and also explored what I considered to be modern examples of people being deceived. I researched and collected the opposing views on evolution, abortion and different forms of Christianity. Because I came from a charismatic church, I talked to and debated with some non-charismatics. To my surprise I found that some (though not all) of the things they said actually did make sense to me. I studied the beliefs of followers of the Watchtower Society (JW’s) in depth and was very surprised at how, from their perspective, what they believed was perfectly Biblical. I was also shocked at how deceived they were. I saw how they got deceived and I saw that if I applied the same deception-checks that I used on them, to myself,
I couldnt be certain that everything I believed was correct either.I realised that I explained away the doctrines of others by focusing on the small holes in those doctrines, yet I was now aware that my doctrines had small holes too. Heck, even the Bible had small holes. I noticed that you dont seem to be able to really disprove some ‘Bible’ doctrines, and that annoyed me.
If you cant disprove something, how do you know it’s true? It’s similar to how you cant disprove the existence of fairies. Just because no one has convincingly documented fairies, doesn’t mean fairies dont exist. The Bible contains enough mysterious and ambiguous bits that you can explain many things away. Eg: although Jesus is God (John 1 etc), no one has seen God (John 1:18) Eg2: Most Christians used to believe early Genesis is supposed to be taken literally, but when evidence of evolution arrived, they continued to "believe" the passages, but claimed that were in fact non-literal verses. Some say that if something in the Bible doesn’t make sense you dont need to worry because we know that God works in mysterious ways. I started to feel uncomfortable with that approach too because it meant you had to accept anything no matter how unsensible it seemed. Now parts of the Bible didnt seem as rock-like as I had thought in the past.Around this time my emotions were changing a bit. On the one hand I had my emotions together more than I had in the past. I felt that I was more in charge of life than before, rather than it being in charge of me. But Christianity was feeling like more of a burden than the joy it could be at times. I was at polytech and now surrounded by non-christians. Sometimes I felt like a foreigner. When friends apologised for swearing, I wished I could disappear. They would talk of buying new cars, stereos, computers and of partying. But I felt that as a 100% Christian (Mark 12:30 etc), I should devote my spare time and money to the kingdom of God, even though I didnt always enjoy that option.
About that time, I was going through a lot of anxiety about hell. The orthodox view is that it is eternal and the Bible illustrates it as including crying, torment and "gnashing of teeth"(Mat 13:42, Luke 16:23). What’s more, it’s understood that *most* people will go there (Mat 7:13-14). What makes it worse is that there’s no way you can convince some people to become Christians, so you cant stop them from going to hell. And we are talking about good friends and family here. I found that the idea of hell would blacken each day. I went to the beach on a beautiful day, but I couldn’t enjoy it because I had people all around me who were going to hell. I got my pastor to pray for me, but my problem remained.
Eventually I found that the only way I could cope was to simply not believe in hell any more. I detested that sort of theology-of-convenience, but I felt that my health was suffering and it was the only way I could go on.