Wednesday, October 12, 2005

The Chrysalis Splits

That's right. The Truth is out there...
(Btw, House M.D. wasn't on yesterday, that lame-ass Commander-in-Chief show with Gina Davis was on instead).
So, one more miracle myth is shattered. I realize that this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. I start reading anything I can get my hands on in regard to Biblical Criticism, Christology, History, Heresiology.... anything.
It becomes a disease, an obsession.
I left the seminary a year later, I lived on the streets of Santa Barbara for a few months then went back to live with my parents in Northern CA.
1988 was a hell of a year.
I tried to be a good Catholic, I even got Confirmed the next year by the late Bishop Quinn of Sacramento. Why? Why did I go through the trouble to be confirmed (this AFTER my stint in the seminary, oddly enough) when I was questioning the very underpinnings of Catholicism and even Christianity itself?
I was still a church-going individual until late 1990. That year I committed a mortal sin and left the Church (and the Knights of Columbus I had heretofore joined).
Now come the desert years. The Time of the Search or the Quest.
I come to the conclusion that Jesus of Nazareth is not the Son of Man as the Jews knew the term, nor was he the Son of God in the Greek sense of the term.
He was a man in the mold of Apollonius of Tyana, or Simon Magus, or Socrates himself. Just a man. And though his name and myth changed human history, a fact I would be a fool to deny, his message and his very life were hijacked in order to promulgate a religion that Jesus himself would have classified as out and out idolatry.
I tried for twelve years to find a way to integrate the Jesus of history with the Christ of myth and could, in the end, find no compromise.
Now the stacks of books in my room, various tomes of theory and historical critiques, books by Jean Dorese, Elaine Pagels, Robert W. Funk, Dominic Crossan, Bruce Chilton, Albert Schweitzer, Karl Barth, et. al. just sit and gather dust. I already know the Truth. Now....what do I do with it?

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