DO YOU BELIEVE IT WHEN YOU RECEIVED THE HOLY GHOST, OR ARE YOU SAYING THAT IT WASN'T REAL? JUST CURIOUS? EVERYONE IS ENTITLED TO WHAT THEY BELIEVE IN AND I SURE DON'T CONDEMN THEM FOR THAT. I WAS JUST WONDERING WHAT LED YOU TO HOW YOU BELIEVE NOW? I JUST DIDN'T UNDERSTAND HOW AND WHY YOU CHANGED YOUR VIEW ON THINGS.
Did I believe?
I did believe the Bible was the infallible word of God and I believed in the God of the Bible at the time I had the experience of receiving the Holy Ghost. The experience I had was VERY real. I had a lot of experiences as a Christian and every one of those experiences were real to me. The difference is I no longer attribute those experiences to God.
I say all of that as a way of saying I think every one of those experiences that I had and you had and everyone else in the church had was very real. I just don't think it was supernatural. I think it was emotional. I don't think there is anything wrong with having emotional experiences, and I don't want to credit them where they shouldn't be credited.
I think some things that happen are learned behavior. One example of this for me is speaking in tongues. I can still speak in tongues and I can do it at the drop of a hat. I don't think there is anything supernatural about it, its just speaking syllables. In fact, I can remember a number of the people who spoke in tongues said the same phrase. "Ha la, la moe shy tie" is such an example.
I have also had a couple of experiences that I have no real explanation for. I've tried to figure them out, but I just can't. I still will not attribute those experiences to the supernatural, because I cannot know they are supernatural. The only honest answer for me is, I don't know.
Some experiences I can reproduce outside of the context of God and church. The most "spiritual" experiences I have ever had revolve around music, both listening and performing. This is something I've experienced both in and out of church.
As a musician, my initial lessons in how to draw emotion out of people was playing church services. The pastor we had at the time had a little hand signal he gave us when he wanted the church to start dancing and shouting. We adjusted the was the music was played and people were running and jumping and dancing. I think most of this happened at a level where we didn't even realize what was going on. I cannot even remember now how I first noticed it. Maybe it was because it started becoming more frequent.
I remember after I thought these "Holy Ghost" moments were being caused by the music I started testing it. I would change the way I was playing and sure enough, the Holy Ghost would come pouring down on the church. It also worked for setting a more "worshipful" mood. I remember one night, when we got the hand signal to crank things, I went very neutral and the tone of the service went down. I got a look from the pastor over that one. I've since observed this happening in other church services across a number of denominations. I've attended workshops where this was taught. They use words like "leading people into worship" but its really just using music to get an emotional response.
What changed?
The path that brought me from where I was as young Apostolic Christian to where I am now has had many, many events and it hasn't been a single thing that has changed my views on things. The irony is it was a desire to really know God and understand the Bible that led me to no longer believing in either. It isn't the path I wanted to go down, its just the way it played out.
There were many steps along the way. Maybe some of the earliest things that caused me to doubt was the idea that only "our" way of believing is right and all of there Christians are going to hell. To me that idea contradicted with some scripture. There were also some rules that were set down by the church that were not in the Bible. I was under the impression the Bible was supposed to be our final authority, but it didn't seem to really be the case. It also seemed to me early on that the Bible wasn't as clear as it should be on critical issues.
One issue that really jumped out at me was the path to salvation. Which was right, Jesus' way (according to Matthew), Peters way (according to Acts) or Paul's was (according to Romans)? Also the words being said over you when you are baptized, do we say Father, Son and Holy Ghost, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Name of Jesus Christ, a combination of both, or should we be saying Yashua so we are using the real name of Jesus? Also, where does it say in the Bible you have to speak in tongues to prove you have received the Holy Ghost? Sure there are examples of it happening, but there are also examples where it isn't mentioned. I had good friends who were Christians that believed as strongly as I did and served God just like I did, except they might wear shorts or they hadn't had the name Jesus Christ spoken over them when they were baptized. I could't look at them and believe they were going to hell, just because they had a couple of detail different than I did. In fact, one in particular is still a strong believer and hosts a Christian radio show and believes he is still doing the work of God. These doubts, along with a number of problems in the church, led to me no longer going to church for many year.
Some time later, I started getting around a few Christians, who where not Apostolics. I started questioning the legalism of the beliefs I grew up with and with great trepidation, started attending a non-denominational church. The church focused on the feel good aspects of Christianity and grew comfortable with it. I never really questioned the Bible and didn't really read through it. I slowly started playing music in church again, but in what I considered a less extreme environment. In the process I started seeing how ego driven worship music can be, so when I had the chance, I dropped playing music in church and started playing secular music. That was when I started discovered I could use the same tools I used playing in church in all types of music.
While all of this was going my personal life was slowing falling apart. I was clinically depressed, I was lacking in empathy and just a difficult person to be around. I had burned bridged with a lot of people and I ended up hurting a lot of people emotionally before everything came crashing down. I found myself with nothing and just a couple of people that could even tolerate me. I had to start my life over. During this reboot time, I still was hanging on to the idea of God and I believed that God was a critical part of me pulling my life back together. I had some very wonderful Christians who went out of their way to help me. I will always be grateful to those people. Without their help, I would have probably never made it through.
As time when on, I was starting to minister to other people. Not in the sense I was becoming a preacher, but just trying to help other people turn their lives around. I took it very seriously and I wanted to make sure I wasn't telling these people the wrong things. During this time of rebuilding my life I actually read the whole Bible for the first time. I was shocked and dismayed at the things God commanded in the OT and felt despair about things in the NT. The genocide in the OT and Jesus's attitude about hating your family, causing division and eternal damnation just didn't seem right to me. At first, I just cherry picked the words of Jesus, but I could avoid the things that bothered me in the Bible. I started finding serious contradictions in the stories in the Gospels. These issues drove me outside of the Bible to find answers about the Bible.
The biggest question I had to have answered was, how do we know the Bible is the infallible, inerrant, authoritative word of God? That lead me to looking at how different translations came about, which books were picked which were rejected. It also sent me wanting to understand better what was in the original manuscripts. What I discovered is we do not have the original manuscripts! I had always been lead to believe that the New Testament was translated from the original documents written by the apostles. Well come to find out, there are no originals and that many of the books were not written by the people that are said to have written them.
These discoveries left me with the conclusion that the Bible is not inerrant. The next problem for me was knowing which parts could be trusted and which cannot. I have since learned that a number of key theological points are textual variants. For example, the virgin birth is based a mis-translation of the book of Isaiah in the Septuagint that was used as source material for the writer of Matthew. If the words that are supposed to be the foundation of your belief system are not reliable, then you have to reexamine your beliefs. This is what I have done.
What now?
I now consider myself to be an atheist, just because I don't have enough evidence to believe. There was a time I wished I could believe, but I don't feel that way anymore. I'm very ok with I don't know. Knowing the origin of life isn't necessary to live life. Knowing what happens after life isn't necessary to live life to the fullest. In fact, my observation is a lot of Christians waste this life, expecting the next life to be better. I've just decided to make this life the most it can be.
