Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Who am I

My name is Robert. I'm a 32yrs family man, with a good and understanding wife, and a good son.
Let's start with my background... My first experience with religion prior age 12 was that typical of most people. We went to church for Easter, and Christmas. Except for the brief time I once went to vacation bible school, but that was for a girl... so I don't remember anything about the church or what they were teaching except for learning that damn song about "Germs" my invisible dog.... (I still find myself singing that chorus sometimes lol) . A few years later is when things really changed.... My parents joined a Pentecostal church, and things seemed to change over night. All my music was thrown out, movies at the theaters were out of the question, and I started attending the private school at the same church, just to name a few. To sum it up, from age 12 till 17 I spent around 6 days a week involved in church. After graduating it went back to just every wed night and both services on Sunday from age 17 - 21. After turning 21 I found myself in and out of church till around 25. During this time was when my biggest changes would happen. Although my journey actually began around 10th grade. I remember because it started in school with a course they called "New Testament Survey" and with the Science curriculum that they taught, if your curious the curriculum was ACE. First, let me get this out.... When I was in this private school, Dinosaurs never existed.... they were considered fake because there was no biblical background for them!! You would not believe my surprise when a couple years ago I heard that now Christians claim there IS biblical text that refer to creatures that could have been dinosaurs... wow what a difference 10yrs can make! Back to my story, My first glimmer of doubt came with how the Science course began to explain creation and the flood. Keep this in mind, you are hearing First hand account of what I was taught from 1986 - 1992. At the time the explanation of the creation and the flood went something like this. God created the earth same as you've heard before, by their counts with the whole "day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day to God" therefore the earth could not be any older than 6000 yrs. Next came the explanation for the earth/flood. Basically the entire planet was a tropical paradise. They explained this by saying there was a vapor like canopy of water encompassing the entire planet. This created a "global warming" effect making the planet a perfect place where there temperature was tropical everywhere. God cause the flood by allowing the vapor to collapse onto the planet, with all this water coming down (btw, they never explained the water that supposedly shot up from the earth) the planet was completely covered with water and remained that way for 40 days until the water receded. Even at my age, and even with my strong beliefs at the time.... this was very difficult to accept. I had so many questions that were unanswered, so many unknowns... Another thing that attributed to my yearning to learn more was the fact that I was always told it was "Wrong" to read anything that did not support our beliefs or did not give "God" glory. In that respect , my teenage years were extremely sheltered from real life. It wasn't until I finally started to work in the real world that I found other people who not only had similar doubts, but had completely different beliefs. The only other real interaction with those of different faiths I hung around with were those at the Martial Arts School. They gained alot of respect from me of course, not only because it's part of the study of the Arts, but because of their high level of respect for others regardless of how they believe. I suppose the biggest eye opener was when i began reading books on my own. Starting with of all people "Tim Allens - I'm Not Really Here" , that led to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, witch led to "What the Bleep Do We Know" (a very entertaining read), and "The Dancing Wu Li Masters" (Excellent Book in my opinion), other books I read around the same time but in no particular order include: "essential Philosophy Everything You Need to Understand the World's Greatest Thinkers" ; "everything's Relative and Other Fables from Science and Technology" ; "The Handy Religion Answer Book" (this was a hard read for me.. it's like reading a school book, but it's packed with tons of information about the 8 major religions Judaism,Christianity,Islam,Buddhism,Hinduism,Confucianism,Taoism, and Shinto) ; "Misquoting Jesus The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why" (another excellent book!) ; and "The God Delusion" (another pretty good book). After much conversation with the few people similarly minded, and much deep thought and meditation brings me roughly to where am i today. This post became much longer than I originally intended, but it's seems to be a pretty good background :) If you made it this far, glad you stuck around! Now, it's your turn! Let me know when you post your story, you can email me at rpkthoughts@gmail.com

2 comments:

tina FCD said...

Hi, I just came across your blog and I thought I would write my story also, it's not the full story but you know how that goes, trying to fit everything in a short post. My title is, "Who am I" in my post. I'll be back.

tina FCD said...

Oh, it's in Mr. Jebs blog.