Why I am a Christian (heretic)

This is unlikely to be an exhaustive explanation of my religious conviction, but I've been putting it off for long enough now in trying to get to the point where in one sitting I could do that, and not managed, so I'll have at it with what I've got.

I have always been a sceptic. Science thrilled me even when I was very young, because I could see that it had a principle behind it. My favourite character in Bagpuss was Professor Yaffle, because when the mice played tricks on him, he investigated to find out why things weren't behaving as he expected, and he unravelled the tricks and revealed whatever it was the mice were doing to produce the illusion.

For my USAian readers, I should explain that we do not have any "separation of Church and State" in the UK, and in fact the law required a daily "act of worship" in state schools, even those that are not officially linked to any Church (I'm fairly sure that law is still in place). Said act of worship is generally assumed to be Christian worship, although I understand that in areas with high numbers of Muslim or Hindu families, the appropriate religion's customs are observed instead. Certainly, at the school I went to from the age of 7-11, it was Christian worship, every morning at assembly, singing hymns and listening to the sermon from the headmaster. Almost every morning, he would tell us kids, "We as Christians..."

This was a problem to me back then. I was pretty much an atheist. The theology we were taught at that age was of the "fairy-tale" type, "big beardy bloke in the sky" version of God. The biblical stories were presented with very little examination, but were about the magical "miracle" performed by the various prophets. The only thing I can think of, is that they thought we were too simple as children to understand anything more, or to challenge and question the truth of what we were told (after all, we believed in the tooth fairy and Father Christmas, didn't we?) Well, I did question. I tested the stories I was told against what I saw in the real world, and by the age of 7 I had already decided that miracles didn't happen, that there was no God up above in Heaven looking down on us (I'd read books about space, and they showed the moon and the sun and the planets, and the stars, but no "Heaven" or "Pearly Gates" or "God"), that there were no shiny winged people running/fluttering around delivering messages. And so on and so forth. Of course, they never showed us the actual text of the Bible, they gave us the stories in simplified versions. After all, the Bible has rather a lot of sex and violence in it, which they didn't want us kids knowing about!

So the ultimate effect of their eagerness to indoctrinate me into the Christian religion was the direct opposite of the intended. The stories they told to convince me, when tested against the real world, didn't measure up, so I became less and less interested in believing in their fairy tales (and, by the time I was halfway through that school, I'd already discovered that there was no Father Christmas and no tooth fairy either, so I knew adults have a tendency to make up magical tales with no truth to them!)

I therefore rejected as nonsense the Christian religion, based basically on what I had been told by grown-ups.

Aged 11, however, the sceptic in me questioned this attitude. How, I asked myself, could I reject it without having read the Bible and seen for myself what it was all about? Nobody had ever read to me the Gospels start to finish, they had only taken random short stories and put them into their own words, presenting them out of context. I decided I didn't know what I was rejecting. Since the school had handed out copies of the "New Testament and Psalms" provided by the Gideons (side note: I can't think of that now without thinking of Bill Hicks "I wanna catch me a Gideon..." routine), I decided to sit down and read it for myself. In the end, I skipped over St. John's Gospel, because the opening of it didn't engage me much then. I also skipped over the Letters, because they looked boring, and went straight to the gory "Revelation" at the end.

Anyway, that meant I read Matthew, Mark, Luke and Acts in my quest to find out what it was all about. And I was surprised by something. Still very much doubting the existence of God (and therefore, the possibility that Jesus could have been His Son) yet the ethical teachings and principles resonated in a way that the laws we were told about from the Old Testament, didn't. This was a very different book from what I had been led to believe by those who had "taught" me about Christianity before. For one thing, Christ never mentions Hell. For another, Christ in the Bible is a passionate man, who cares very strongly about His message. Yes, there are "fairy-tale" miracles described, but they aren't just miracles. Each one delivers a message about how we see one another. Jesus, to me, ceased to be a character in a fairy story once I had read the Gospels. And reading Acts and how the early Christians struggled to put Christ's teachings into practice, showed me that it was a powerful ethic and one that belonged in this world.

So, aged 11, I accepted that maybe Jesus of Nazareth was a great teacher of men, but I rejected every miracle (including the central resurrection) as "unproven". I now described myself as an "agnostic Christian".

I retained that view for most of my teens, but each time I re-examined the Bible, I found myself becoming more open to the possibility of God. I find the Gospels (including St. John, which I now had read for completeness) to contain some beautiful writing, and the storyline of Christ from birth to death is compelling in itself. I also read parts of the Old Testament, in particular, Genesis (full of sex and violence!). I built up a better idea of what the texts said. While always doubting, yet I couldn't quite convince myself that it couldn't be true.

I also started to attend church regularly, and there I came into direct contact with believers and saw how being Christians worked for them. I saw how the church worked as a community and how they related, as Christians, to the world at large. There were early-morning sessions called "Praise&Learn" through which I was introduced to some of the ideas behind the theology and practices of Christianity, and I started to realise just how shallow and devoid of Truth those early lessons in school had been. I certainly realised that the "beardy bloke in the sky" story had nothing to do with the way God is seen by the Christian faith.

At 'A' level (16-18), I studied a course called "Christian Theology" and so got a much deeper understanding of some of the issues and questions involved in faith. For example, how come "God made man in His own image" didn't mean that God was a beardy bloke in the sky!

And, shortly after I started University, I met God personally. By which, I mean that I believe I have personal experience of God. This is the ultimate argument in the question of "does God exist?" but it is of course, a proof that is only valid for the person who has had the experience. Nobody else can verify whether or not it truly was God, or indeed if it's just a story made up on the spot. Suffice to say, I was convinced by it. I couldn't say it was a "road to Damascus" type revelation or a sudden conversion. It is just that the evidence I had been gathering since that first decision to "see what it was all about" had given me enough that I was finally ready to see for myself. I won't go into details, but it wasn't a "vision" or "hearing voices", but neither was it the sort of nebulous vague feeling either, it felt very specific.

Since that moment, I have always felt or known that God exists and has a personal interest in all the people of the world. That this is shown in Scripture is one thing, but to know and feel it is another.

As I said, I have always been a sceptic, and I remain so today (there's a lot more to be said about that and its relation to my religious faith, but this post is long enough already!) I have therefore, not accepted the doctrines and orthodoxy of the Church without questioning them. For example, I have never accepted the concept of "original sin" as I have heard it outlined. Through research, and reading T. H. White's "Once and Future King", I learned that this is a heresy, and it has a name: the "Pelagian Heresy". As I understand it, Pelagius was a Celtic Christian from the British Isles in the 3rd or 4th Century CE, who studied in Rome and wrote rejecting the idea that humans are born tainted by sin, instead declaring that sin is an inevitable consequence of living as humans. Later Pelagians, it seems, abandoned the "inevitable" part (personally, I think that's the most insightful bit!). This is because I couldn't find anything in scripture to support it directly, but I could easily find a way to explain the view that I arrived at (and which I later learned that apparently Pelagius had also reached).

Since I have followed this route, and my faith has been tested with a sceptical mind, I am confident in my beliefs. However, the ad hominem attacks on religious believers made by some atheists are naturally all the more galling because of the way I personally came to believe. I do not expect others to believe simply because I do, nor do I expect them to accept that the evidence and proofs that have convinced me. I do, however, ask that they respect that I believe, and that my belief is not the sign of a weak mind!