Pete's conclusions

A Call to Action

Hello and thank you for taking the time to read this.  This is not something I would have ever imagined writing before now, but I want my friends and family to know what has happened to me in the last year or so.  

When the pandemic began, I (like so many others) found myself with much more time on my hands then normal.  After a couple months of hanging out at home and working, it became apparent that the time we were to “shelter in place” was going to be much longer than initially anticipated.  There were many options for a way to pass the time, but one day I decided I was going to make a conscious effort to get closer to God and bury myself in His Word.  It only made sense to commit my time to something that every Christian is called to do on a daily basis, strengthen our relationship with the Lord and search for His Wisdom.  So, I did just that.

Initially, things went well.  I was reading more than I ever had of The Bible.  I was watching sermons and reading commentaries.  I was participating on online forums for Christians who were also studying and reading.  No issues arose in those early couple months.  Then, my reading brought me to a particular passage in The Bible, 1 Peter 3:15, which reads as follows (bolded, with context):

13 Who is going to harm you if you are eager to do good? 

14 But even if you should suffer for what is right, you are blessed. “Do not fear their threats; do not be frightened.”

15 But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect, 

16 keeping a clear conscience, so that those who speak maliciously against your good behavior in Christ may be ashamed of their slander.

To put it simply, reading this verse filled me with a call to action.  I needed to have good reasons for why I was a Christian and be prepared to give those reasons to anyone who inquired.  Well, that is easy enough.  I had plenty of good reasons for my deeply held beliefs, I thought.  However, as I considered what those reasons might be, it slowly dawned on me.  I didn’t actually have something that could be told to another that I would consider a “good reason”.  Of course, I could tell them about my life as a Christian, the joy it had brought me and peace I had felt by having these beliefs.  But, was that enough?  Surely I should have an answer (if not many!) ready to provide should the situation come up.  With this new way of thinking in mind, I began to look at why people believe in God and The Word He had provided.  

This idea of having something to tell another person quickly morphed into a singular focus: I was going to investigate Christianity the way a neutral party would.  It stood to reason, I thought, that if there was sufficient evidence to convince a non-believer, I would find it and it would strengthen my own beliefs in the process.  A 2-for-1, of sorts.  I was going to investigate Christianity from the perspective of someone who did not believe.  This is a good strategy for most investigations, it’s the tactic we use when investigating a crime, for example.  You can not find the truth by going into your research with a preconceived agenda or perspective.  I knew this, so I began to read the Bible and investigate Christianity as a whole with this new outlook in mind.  If anything, it would only strengthen my beliefs and show me that the confidence I had in those beliefs was not only warranted, but the only reasonable outcome.

My Christianity

Before I go further, I think it’s important you understand exactly what I was taught a Christian believes, according to my upbringing.  These are the beliefs that a “True Christian” had to have:

1. The universe was created by an omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent (typically called “tri-omni”) being.  This being had many names, but God was the common term for Him.  He was actively involved in our lives and wanted to have a personal relationship with us, His creation.

2. This God provided The Bible as His Word to us and as guidance for us.  The Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible in every way, being written by the hand of man, but supernaturally authored by God.  Everything in it is as true on the day it was written as it is today and can be applied to our modern lives.  It contains no contradictions of any kind and is completely historically and factually accurate. 

3. God sent His Son, named Jesus, to die on a cross as a mechanism of salvation for sin.  Jesus was God in the flesh, who lived a mortal life on Earth and then died, resurrected after 3 days, and ascended back to Heaven to be with God, His Father, to rule until the last days, commonly referred to as Armageddon.  This is spelled out in The Bible.

4. The Earth is much younger than modern science teaches, somewhere in the 6,000 to 10,000 year old range.  This belief is commonly referred to as Young Earth Creationism.  In turn, the Theory of Evolution is an evil and demonic idea that is spread by people who are trying to destroy Christianity.

Now, I suspect that at least a couple of these beliefs will be held amongst the majority of you reading this.  Almost all Christians hold to these tenets to some if not a complete degree, except for the 4th one.  But to me, these were Christianity.  I understood other people who claimed to be Christians did not adhere to these completely or as strictly as I might, but they were just duped.  They just had to open up their minds to God and the truth would be revealed, if they truly wanted it to.  

So, now that you understand where I was coming from, let’s look at what I discovered.

Research and Discovery

If you have already read Steve’s entries then you should have a good idea of the kinds of things I discovered in my newly configured perspective on scripture and Christian beliefs.  The funny thing is, I had no idea Steve was having a similar journey as I was having.  In fact, it was a major source of stress on me as I was researching and asking questions, because I felt terrible coming to him with questions about the things I was seeing in the Bible with fresh eyes.  I thought I was straining our relationship as I came to him night after night with another ridiculous query into why God would do something or why the authors of the Bible would make a claim that seemed far-fetched.  It wasn’t until months and months later that he would confide in me that he, too, was looking at things in a new light and asking similar questions.  

So, then, what are these discoveries I was making?  I’m going to touch on a few of the more troubling ones briefly and with just my thoughts as commentary.  These are things that I looked into over many weeks, sometimes months, for various reasons.  Either I could not believe what I was reading or I just could not reconcile them with how I understood the world to be.  Let’s see what we got.

Slavery in the Bible

Yeah, I’m starting here.  The topic of Biblical slavery was one of the first I stumbled on when looking into issues people had with the Bible.  It was not a topic I knew too much about beyond the general idea that, yes, there were rules about it in the Old Testament somewhere but that it was not a huge deal.  Besides, it wasn’t real slavery, like we abolished in 19th century America.  It was some form of bond servitude where you worked off a debt to someone and there were strict rules made to ensure you were treated right by your “master”.  This is not a view I currently hold.  

To get to the core of it, I would assume we all agree with this statement: Owning another human being as property is immoral.  It is one of the most repugnant institutions in world history and one that still continues to this day, sadly.  With that said, when you read what the Bible has to say about slavery, it never condemns it in any real way.  Steve touched on this, so there might not be much I can add.  I would just encourage you, if this idea seems ridiculous, to go yourself to the scriptures and see what it says.  In my view, the Bible condones and regulates slavery.  It regulates how they can be treated, who should be enslaved, and how you can pass them down as property to your children.  It discusses how harshly you can beat your slaves, how to trick them into lifelong servitude, and even when you can take virgin women to be your own slaves. Let’s look at some of the more concerning verses when it comes to this topic.

Exodus 21:20–21 says, “When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged. But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.”

The plain reading of this verse is that you may beat your slave with a rod and, as long as they don’t die within a couple days, you do not face a punishment because the slave is your money (property).  To me, if the issue you are trying to stop is people beating their slaves too harshly, why not just make a rule that says you may not beat your slaves at all?  Let’s look at another verse.

Leviticus 25:44–46 says: “As for your male and female slaves whom you may have: you may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly.”

One of the most common apologetics I saw in my research was that the term “slave” in the Old Testament law did not refer to the chattel slavery we think of in the modern day.  However, this verse describes such slavery pretty well.  You can buy someone from the surrounding nations or strangers who inhabit your land and you can pass them down to your children.  That’s owning someone else as property, y’all.  No real way out of it.  Of course, no buying or selling fellow Israelites.  In the later revision of the law in Deuteronomy, God forbids owning male (but not female) Hebrew slaves entirely, presumably because it is such a harsh situation.  But that brings us back to the statement made at the beginning: owning another person as property is immoral, right?  If that is the case, then I do not know how to reconcile my belief in it’s immorality and these (and many other) verses.  The Bible condones something immoral.  

Here’s some more verses with no commentary.  Please feel free to look them up yourself for additional context:

Exodus 21:7-9

7 And if a man sell his daughter to be a maidservant, she shall not go out as the menservants do.  8 If she please not her master, who hath betrothed her to himself, then shall he let her be redeemed: to sell her unto a strange nation he shall have no power, seeing he hath dealt deceitfully with her.  9 And if he have betrothed her unto his son, he shall deal with her after the manner of daughters.

Leviticus 19:20

And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free. 

Luke 17:7-9

7 “Will any one of you who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep say to him when he has come in from the field, ‘Come at once and recline at table’? 8 Will he not rather say to him, ‘Prepare supper for me, and dress properly, and serve me while I eat and drink, and afterward you will eat and drink’? 9 Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded?

Ephesians 6:5

Servants, obey in all things your masters according to the flesh; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God. 

Colossians 3:22

Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ. 

I did not want to accept this and I searched out every apologetic argument, sermon, and article I could to explain what I was reading.  Nothing really squared the two opposing forces in my mind.  Here are some of the arguments I found, just so you can see what I was coming across:

• Slavery in the day of the Old Testament was the way of the world.  God could not have forbidden it because the Israelites would not have listened.  They would have continued doing it either way, so better to regulate it and make it less harsh than other civilizations.  

• It wasn’t real slavery, you see.  They were more like modern workers, being paid for their labor and treated fairly.  They lived in their master’s house and were basically family.

• Slavery was actually very moral, because the alternative was death!  If you conquer someone, better to take them as a war criminal and enslave them then to kill them.  (Yes, people say this.)

• There’s no denying it, slavery is in the Bible and is OK by God.  Therefore, slavery is perfectly moral.  Who are you to deny God’s moral character?  Who are you to say what is and is not moral?  (Yes, people also say this.) 

None of these arguments are very compelling or hold up to much (or any) scrutiny.  In my opinion, the verses on slavery read just like they would if an ancient people wrote them.  I do not see the all-loving and merciful God I worship in these verses.  

Jephthah and his Daughter

This is a story and character that I was not aware of until the last year or so.  Jephthah was a mighty warrior who asked God to bless him in battle.  Here’s the abridged version from scripture:

Judges 11:29-40
Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah ... And Jephthah vowed a vow unto the LORD, and said, If thou shalt without fail deliver the children of Ammon into mine hands, Then it shall be, that whatsoever cometh forth of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return in peace from the children of Ammon, shall surely be the LORD's, and I will offer it up for a Burnt Offering. So Jephthah passed over unto the children of Ammon to fight against them; and the LORD delivered them into his hands.... And Jephthah came to Mizpeh unto his house, and, behold, his daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances: and she was his only child.... And it came to pass, when he saw her, that he rent his clothes, and said, Alas, my daughter! thou hast brought me very low, and thou art one of them that trouble me: for I have opened my mouth unto the LORD, and I cannot go back. And she said unto him, My father, if thou hast opened thy mouth unto the LORD, do to me according to that which hath proceeded out of thy mouth.... And it came to pass at the end of two months, that she returned unto her father, who did with her according to his vow which he had vowed. 

So.  This man made a promise to sacrifice via burnt offering whatever comes out the front doors of his house to meet him upon arriving home.  His daughter is the first that comes out, dancing happily at the sight of her father.  Jephthah is understandably distraught… but a promise is a promise.  God gets a human sacrifice.  This story blew my mind when I read it.  The questions that arise after reading it are apparent:

• Why would someone make such a promise?  Who or what did he expect to come out of his door?  A goat?  Did he have a dog?  It’s perplexing, to say the least.

• God knew that the daughter was going to come out the door first, so why didn’t He warn Jephthah that he was making a promise that would destroy him?  

• In that vein, why didn’t God stop the sacrifice or tell Jephthah never mind, I don’t want you sacrificing your daughter to Him as He did for Abraham?  

As with the slavery, the apologetics on this story are pretty out there, for me.  People claim that no, the daughter actually wasn’t sacrificed, she was just banished from her father’s house.  You have to really stretch the verses to get there… but sure.  Others say that, yes, it is unfortunate but true.  If you make a promise to God, you have to keep it.  It’s a cautionary tale about making vows to God you can not keep.  Yeah OK, except the daughter still gets burned alive and she did nothing wrong.  This lesson could have been taught without a human life being extinguished, seems to me.

A World of Magic

This is not about any one particular verse, just something that occurred to me during my reading of the Bible.  If the stories of the Bible are historically and literally true, we should expect the world we live in to be full of magic and magical events.  The Bible presents magic and the acts of spirits and gods as real occurrences that should be detectable.  

We’ll start with Exodus 7:10-13, where Egyptian magicians turn staffs into snakes by secret arts. They also turn water into blood in Exodus 7:22 and raise frogs from the land in Exodus 8:7.  This suggests that even prior to Moses, Egypt had been studying the art of sorcery. They had experts and could even select from among the best in the field. These experts could literally turn wood into living animals, creating life. If the Egyptians were independently able to discover such magic, it should be discoverable by any.

Exodus 22:18 says to kill witches/sorceresses. This would be a silly thing to command if they are not real.  Leviticus 20:27 says to kill female mediums and necromancers. I'm not certain what necromancy entails, but again this implies these sorceresses are real. Women are somehow interacting with the dead.

This is probably all well known to you, but one story really threw me for a loop, one in 1 Samuel in which Saul gets a witch to summon the deceased Samuel’s ghost in a seance.  He has to convince her God won’t punish her first and it works.  Samuel appears (!) and he knows God’s will and the future.  This woman’s witchcraft is very real and very powerful.  The story is written in 1 Samuel 28:5-19, please take a look at it.  This one tale alone raises so many questions that I spent hours looking into everything I could on it.  The fact that some woman could learn these dark arts and call up literally anyone (even a mighty man of God) and just talk to them is pretty out there.  Imagine if, 100 years after you died, someone performed a ceremony and “called you up” to talk to your grandchildren?  You’d probably be more perturbed then Samuel seemed to be.  

Last one, Acts 8:9-24: A non-Christian magician, Simon, had impressed (with magic) all of Samaria into following him religiously. This suggests that even at the time of Jesus, magic was prevalent outside of Yahweh's magic. Jesus was not the only Miracle Worker in town. No reason is ever given for this kind of magic ceasing.

Simon converts to Christianity and sees the Holy Spirit passed from person to person by physical touch. He offers to buy the power off the apostles. To me, this suggests that Simon recognized their magic as a kind that can be taught (like his tricks, presumably), but the disciples scare him off.

The ultimate question for me is this: where did all this magic go?  Sure, we hear stories from other lands of people performing magic and spooky things.  I have searched high and low and not found any empirical evidence that such magic as described in the Bible has been seen, however.  So, where did it go?  You’re telling me that we just stopped teaching it to people?  The Egyptians just forgot how to turn wood into living things?  Mediums stopped passing down the ability to call up the dead?  I suppose that’s all possible… but I am skeptical, to say the least.  

Misc. Issues.

The issues detailed above are, of course, just a sample of things that I found out about in my research.  Below, I’m going to just list things that I came across and caused me to question the divinity of the Bible.  This will not be an exhaustive list, but it will be things that caused me to pause and consider the option that, no, everything written in the Bible was not authored by the hand of God.  

1. The virginity test for a newly wedded wife in Deuteronomy 22:13-21.  We now understand (and this has been understood for a while now) that looking for blood on the sheets during the wedding night is not even close to a good way to test for virginity in a woman.  The whole operation is pretty ridiculous and culminates in, of course, the woman being killed if she lied about her virginity.  If you search online for explanations of this, you will find untold women attempting to understand it in blogs and forum posts.  It seems, I was not alone in finding this particular law to be… not great.

2. The whole concept of Original Sin.  Obviously, this is a complex topic and absolutely fundamental to the brand of Christian faith that I was raised in.  Suffice to say, if you asked 10 people about the concept of punishing someone for the transgressions of their ancestors, removed from Christianity, you would get 10 people explaining how that is immoral and ridiculous.  Mix it in with Christianity, and out come excuses and rationalisations.  The way it is described in the Bible (Eve, a completely innocent person, being tricked by a lizard into eating a fruit and thereby dooming all of humanity) is completely inept in explaining how Original Sin works and where it came from.  For such 

a foundational concept, it sure could use some better explanation.  To be fair, there are many Christian denominations and sects that do not believe we are inherently evil due to Original Sin, but hey.  

3. Steve goes into this, but the lack of substantiated miracles in the world is troubling. The Bible clearly says that followers of Christ will be able to perform miracles “even greater” then He performed.  However, in the substantial amount of time I spent looking for them, I could not find any verifiable miracles.  By this, I mean things that could only be explained from a supernatural perspective.  A regrowth of a limb, or a dead person coming back to life, for example.  We all know of various miracles being performed on almost a daily basis, but they could all be explained naturally.  As an aside, other religions also claim to perform and witness miracles.  Islam, Catholicism, Mormonism, etc all have dedicated websites and blogs showing the many, many miracles their followers see all the time.  Problem is, I could not verify any of their miracles, either.  

There are so many things that I found, both Biblical and not, that there is no point in listing them all here (again, Steve has done a much more exhaustive list of these issues) .  It really would not be an exaggeration to say I spent the better part of a year and a half researching everything I could find, both for and against my position.  I read more of the Bible in this time than I had in the rest of my life combined.  I watched dozens, if not hundreds of hours of sermons, debates, presentations, and more.  I read commentaries, articles, and books.  I looked high and low for anything that could help me understand this thing that I had believed my entire life.  This book, that I had literally made life changing decisions based around, did not seem to be written by the All Knowing Creator of the Universe.

A Stressful Result

The outcome of my research, as you have no doubt ascertained, did not result in me strengthening my faith in the Bible as the perfect word of God.  The very thing I was looking to do I inadvertently did quite the opposite.  I had more questions then I started with and my faith (in both the Bible and in general) was shaken.  My looking for answers turned into an obsession as I tumbled down the rabbit hole chasing understanding.  I was not sleeping well, sometimes barely at all.  There were nights I would notice light coming into my windows as the sun came up.  The sleep I did get was restless.  

Throughout all of this, I never stopped asking God to show me what I was doing wrong.  Surely, these thoughts and questions were coming from a place of lies.  What other explanation could there be?  I knew from innumerable sermons that God only wanted us to open our minds and hearts and He would show us the truth.  So why wasn’t that happening to me now?  I would open my Bible and pray for God to show me what I was missing.  Show me the truth I so desperately wanted to see.  But all I would find were things that caused me anguish.  

After a few months of this, midway through 2020, I started to really suffer physically.  I had had issues with my digestive system for a while, but things really started to ramp up at this point.  No need to go into detail, but everything culminated in a trip to the Emergency Room later in that year as my stomach was in such terrible pain and I was vomiting uncontrollably.  They sedated and scanned me and, while they found some inflammation in the digestive system, told me to go home and that I was fine.  Subsequent trips to the doctor would only result in asking about my stress level;  was it work?  School?  A bad relationship, perhaps?  No, nothing was happening in my life that was causing me undue stress, I thought.  Maybe it was the pandemic and the overall higher stress level that everyone was feeling.  

Then, in March of 2021, I had to take another trip to the ER.  This time, it would result in emergency surgery to remove my gallbladder.  Now the stress had gotten to me to the point where my body was really reacting in a major way.  I still was completely naive and did not understand where all this talk of “stress” was coming from.  Everything was fine!  I was just living, nothing out of the ordinary was going on in my life!  I was in complete denial.  The medical staff were starting to ask real serious questions during my recovery.  Was I abusing street drugs, narcotics, cocaine, heroin?  Absolutely not, what ridiculous questions, I thought.  How were things at home?  Any domestic abuse or emotional abuse?  Absurd!  No, of course not.  Little did I understand that the things I was living through, the stresses I was putting my body through that looked similar to domestic abuse and drug abuse, was me reading my Bible every night and desperately searching for something to stop the doubts.  It honestly never dawned on me that my nightly sessions, staying up for hours and combing through every corner of the internet, was starting to take a toll.  I was just doing what I thought I had to.  I was doing what God demanded  me to do.

But the answers never came.  I really want this point to be driven home, because I know people are not going to believe it:
I wanted (and still want) to find the truth.  I want God to show me the truth, whatever it may be.  Was everything I learned a lie?  Is the Bible just written by ancient Palestinians running around in the desert?  Is God completely different then I’d been taught?  Why doesn’t God talk to me?  He talks to other people.  Heck, he talks to people that aren’t even Christians so that He can reveal himself and convert them.  That sounds amazing, but why doesn’t it happen for me?  Presumably, God wants to have a relationship with me.  This is what I’ve been taught for as long as I can remember.  But that isn’t happening.  God is silent, even in the face of my tearful prayer with the Bible open and my head in my hands.  There are only so many conclusions I can come to:

1. God does not want to reveal Himself to me

2. God can not reveal Himself to me, for one reason or another

3. God is revealing Himself to me, but not in a way that I can perceive (which would not make God particularly brilliant and/or aware of the issue)

That’s it.  These are the only conclusions that can be drawn from my situation.  I can’t just keep throwing my head against a brick wall and hoping that it doesn’t hurt.  So, where do I go from here?  

The Result

Hopefully, you read Steve’s articles before reading this one.  If you have not, I encourage you to read them as soon as possible.  The information contained within is a much more concise and well researched collection of data then anything I have come across.  And, it is that information (and much more, honestly) that has led me to where I stand right now.  I hope I do not come off as egotistical when I say I have researched the issues regarding the truth of my beliefs more than most people do.  It’s just not something that we are taught to do in church or from other believers.  Maybe there are other churches that discuss the historicity of the Bible or the authorship of the gospels.  Maybe they have Bible studies where they go through the real tough verses and subjects and give people differing perspectives than what is commonly taught by a pastor.  I don’t know.  But I do know what my Christian walk was like and I know that nothing close to that happened to me.  The reason I’m saying this is because I decided to do that very thing for myself, because I wanted to strengthen my faith.  I wanted to get closer to God and discover new mysteries about His will and His plan for my life.  That, unfortunately, did not happen.  Now I must make conclusions based on that fact.

So the conclusion is rather simple, but completely life shattering.  I do not know what to believe anymore.  I am in a similar boat as my brother, in that there is no actual solid reason to believe the theology that I have since I was a child.  The truths of the Bible and of our particular flavor of Christianity are not truths to me at this time.  To borrow Steve’s wording, I have become a Might Be True believer rather than a Must Be True.  And because of that, I don’t think I can call myself a Christian anymore.

This does not mean that I am completely throwing the book out (both literally and figuratively) on the Big Questions.  I have no problem keeping an open mind to the possibilities of God and whatever truths about that God might exist.  Like Steve, I guess this makes me some flavor of agnostic.  I have not really thought about this next phase much, so much of my time has been spent on researching and deconstructing my Christianity.  So that will have to come with time.  For now, I just will keep looking into these quandaries the best that I can.  I really don’t have much other choice but to do so.

If you are reading this and are someone close to me, I ask you to be patient with me the next time we discuss this topic.  As I stated earlier, this has been quite literally the worst phase of my life.  Nothing comes close.  The anxiety and stress has not gone away, in fact it rises as we prepare to put these articles out into the world and get ready for what comes.  But it is also a relief to do so.  After months and months of questioning in silence, we can now put our questions out into the world.  Maybe someone will have answers that we have not considered.  I welcome this possibility.  

Thank you very much for reading and for your time.

- Peter