Losing My Religion

For the first three decades of my life, I lived under one of the most burdensome labels that the world has to offer: religious. My religion, Protestant Christianity, touched every aspect of my life from the books and media I consumed to the businesses my family patronized and the kinds of people that I met and associated with. It was weaved into the foundation of all of my thoughts and opinions and views. It was my primary identifier.

My primary identifier was something that had been given to me and expected of me. My primary identifier for nearly three decades had almost nothing to do with who I actually am.

I remember recognizing, even as a child, that there was a distinct difference between a person who was raised in church, as I was, and someone who had “found Jesus” later in life. My younger, religion laden brain concluded that it was the grace of God and the forgiveness of their sins that made the difference in their on-fire-for-God-ness and I recall envying those people because I had never felt the kind of genuine zeal in my life.

Now, as an adult who has spent a great deal of time pondering this subject and human behavior in general, I think I might know the real answer to the insight I made as a child: it’s about the search, not necessarily the destination. What I mean is: those people that I envied as a child had recognized that they wanted a change in their lives and they sought out a belief system that would help them enact that change. The journey and the search and the choice to live differently than they had lived before were the real reason that they felt so different from me.

Religion as a sociological subject has fascinated me for a long time, but many Christians viewed learning about other religions as dangerous or even heretical, so it took me a while to break out of that shell and do some research. I took a comparative religions class in college, which was a good start, but it realistically took another twelve years before I had the courage to break away from my primary identifier of being a Christian.

The courage was backed by my insatiable, intellectual curiosity as I was shown thread after thread of connection between the worlds oldest and most prominent belief systems. What I had been told was a unique truth and way of life to Christians was actually far more universal than I had been led to believe in church. Once my mind was open enough to consider different insights and perspectives on the interpretation of the Christian Bible, I could see even more threads. Not only that, but I equally couldn’t ignore how certain ideas had been twisted in order to serve the purposes of the papacy of old and, no offense to Martin Luther, but there were certainly more than 95 problems within the institutionalized and highly political Catholic church of the 16th century.

With that in mind, I did something completely irrational and wild: I read the book myself. But I didn’t just read, I went through a long, patient process of deep study, with prayer and meditation. I used my linguistics background and collegiate study skills to understand the words as they were used at that time and the cultural context of the time and place where Jesus had lived. Additionally, and more importantly, I read the so-called red letters, the words attributed to Jesus, by themselves, without the editorialization of the writer. Doing so made me realize that each gospel really could be its own religion within the spectrum of Christendom, the gospel of John being the most significantly deviated from the other three [Mathew, Mark and Luke].

John’s writings on the life and teachings of Jesus were the key to a significant change in my thinking regarding the ideologies that had been handed down to me in my youth. I began to recognize, more and more as I let the new perspective roll around in my heart, that I had been given the wrong priorities. See, in Christianity, at least my experience in it, you are heavily encouraged to “witness” to people about how Jesus died for their sins and they were going to go to Hell unless they believed that Jesus died for their sins.

To be perfectly honest, as an introvert and an empath, the thought of talking to someone about anything was terrifying, let alone trying to convince someone to join my religion. More than shyness though, I always had this catch in my heart…like I knew it wasn’t right to only interact with someone because it was my obligation as a Christian. As a young person, I understood that my interactions with other humans should mean more than that.

So I could get down with John’s perspective because John’s writings focused on Love. And so did Paul’s writing. In my younger years, when my faith felt weak because I struggled to believe the doctrine’s I’d been taught, I had a lot of issues with Paul. I thought he was a dick; I’m certain I audibly said that a time or two. (Sorry, Paul). But as I began to see that my priorities had been out of order before, and I began to understand that religion and love are not the same…I started to see that I had been taking Paul’s words all wrong.

That’s not to say that he wasn’t just a little bit of a dick, but now that I’m on the other side of Christianity, I completely understand why. He was fed up with the people who claimed to be followers of Jesus, but were still hanging on to the old beliefs that Jesus had spoken out against. His views on circumcision are particularly colorful. But when I’d been taking his words literally and without cultural, or even personal, context, I simply hadn’t understood his point. The tone of his writing carries the distinct flavor of irritation while trying to still be patient with the people he was addressing.

I know the tone. I hear it in my own voice often when I rant to my husband about this topic. He was also raised in conservative religion and also left it as I did. The thousands of words that have spilled over my lips on this topic have been ostensibly laced with this paper thin patience, whether I intend it to be there or not. I want to treat everyone with love, but, as a human, sometimes it does feel like the most difficult feat I’ve ever faced.

Especially when the people you're trying to love are choosing everything but love in their interactions with other humans.

An interesting thing started to happen though when I officially left my old religion behind and began a journey of investigating other belief systems and philosophies; I started to actually understand what Jesus–and even portions of the Old Testament–said. I started quoting Jesus and David and Solomon and Paul far more than I ever had before…because I finally understood what they were saying!

And I understood it in such a deeply spiritual, soul-felt way that made me grieve for my younger self who had been made to live in a tight box based on gross misinterpretation of these texts. These men had been speaking about incredibly esoteric ideas in the form of agrarian metaphors and poetry, but the further removed from that time and place people got, the further their true meaning sunk further into the esoteric depths. Like a cosmic game of “telephone”.

Not only that, but as I broadened my study, I realized just how much almost every religion has in common. In fact, Jesus himself had either been directly influenced by Buddhism or he had tapped into the very same spiritual force that Siddhartha Guatma had because the similarities are too uncanny to be coincidence. I like to say Jesus was to Judaism as Buddha was to Hinduism; they both saw the problems in the society that they had been born into and chose to speak out against them.

They were also both part of the royal family of their society…they had the means to make a change and they did. As someone who still has love and reverence for the life of Jesus, I get emotional when I think how his life has been so overshadowed by his death and the theology that was built around it. Not only that, but I am sincerely confused about how modern Christians can justify their beliefs and subsequent behaviors when held up against the recorded words of Jesus.

Okay, I’m not completely confused because I know why. The truth that a lot of adherents don’t seem to know is that “christianity” was not formed by Jesus or any of his actual disciples. They called themselves “Followers of The Way” because Jesus is “the way, the truth and the light”. Cristendom was started in the city of Nicea by the sitting emperor of Rome, Constantine. I didn’t know that until I was almost 30.

In high school, before I knew this bit of history, I studied Latin for four years and I studied Greek and Roman Mythology and Roman history and culture. I made food from ancient Roman recipes and I even had the wonderful experience of traveling to Rome at sixteen years old.

Once I read about the history of the religion, which is oddly not discussed in churches, at least never in the ones I have attended, the twisting and the misinterpretation of the texts had an explanation. In a very real way, Cristendom is just Roman culture tied up with a bow and handed down through the generations.

Romans were conquerors, that’s what they did. They spread out all over Europe and the Near East, taking over lands and creating revenue-generating colonies for the Roman Empire. Although the Romans allowed their colonies to keep their traditions, which is how Jesus was born into the Judean faith and allowed to openly practice it while living in a Roman colony. The Romans were polytheistic, meaning that they held a pantheon of gods and goddesses instead of having one god, like the Hebrew people. So because they all prayed to and made offerings to different deities, they allowed their colonies to do the same.

But Constantine was brilliant. The teachings of Jesus and his students were spreading across the Roman army and a Roman Emperor is nothing without his army. Perhaps this was the original “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” in history because that is exactly what Constantine did! He saw the turning of the tide in a declining empire and made the crucial pivot that ensured the existence of his empire and his legacy in the coming millenia; he rebranded.

The Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire and, without missing a beat, continued its legacy of conquering and, arguably, still does today. For far too many centuries, the Holy Roman Empire used the loving message of Jesus to destroy any culture that wasn’t theirs and spread the “word” with convert or die force. Faith will never be born through force, only compliance. But modern Christians discuss the Council of Nicea as the beginning of the catholic, or united, church, because before this time it was a very loose belief system with no infrastructure and a variety of sects with different beliefs. I think it really should be called the Council of Constantine.

Or the end of genuine, grass-roots “christianity”. Whichever.

This leads me to the wonderful irony of writing this on Easter Sunday, or Resurrection Sunday as more in-the-know Christian practitioners say; the church did the same thing with Roman holidays that it did with the rest of itself; it rebranded them. Easter, or Istar, is a fertility ritual celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon following the Spring Equinox. It represents the new life of spring bursting forth from the darkness of winter. But now, Easter is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection…new life bursting forth from the darkness of death.

Because the things I am saying will probably make it seem like I believe that Jesus himself was a myth, I want to be very clear on this topic. I do believe that Jesus was a real man, who was really born into the royal family of Israel, and really did and said things that changed the lives of the people around him. I believe that there is real history in the christian bible and, honestly, real truth and beneficial life philosophies…however, and this is a big however, I also believe that these truths have been purposely twisted to serve the selfish motives of men.

I don’t even mean to say that these motives were necessarily nefarious every time, but to me, any purposeful alteration is nefarious in and of itself. But in all fairness, it is far more complicated than what I want to get into, so the nutshell explanation is that politics and culture had far more influence on the church than the church had on politics. For centuries, there was no difference between the church and the politics of most of Europe.

It genuinely upsets me that Jesus’s anti-establishment message of love was used as the proverbial carrot on the stick to keep illiterate subjects in-line. One of the very clear indications that Rome was the priority over Jesus is in that very name; Jesus. The man who spoke out against the established traditions of his people was called Yeshua, which literally means “Savior”; Jesus is the Latinized, or Romanized, version of his name. It is linguistically sound, due to the possible sounds in Latin versus the possible sounds in Ancient Hebrew, but names are powerful. The bible even says to pray “in the name of Jesus”...but that isn’t really his name. He was never called that in his life on this planet.

As I said, the Roman Catholic church is essentially Roman culture wrapped up and handed down from generation to generation. One of the reasons I believe that is the glorification of the cross and the crucifixion. I know the modern explanation of using this symbol is that it is meant to represent Jesus’s sacrifice in dying for our sins, but I can’t help but have a different theory. The Romans didn’t invent crucifixion, but they did perfect it–and they were proud of that fact. And now, 2,000 years later, we still revere the symbol of their proudly perfected punishment under the guise of honoring “Jesus”. It’s like putting the scene of the mangled car on the tombstone of someone who tragically perished in a car accident–no one would do that. So why do we continue to treat the method of the assassination as a sacred symbol?

But if we’re going to discuss his death, I also take issue with the supposed story of Jesus’s immaculate birth. Knowing what I know of Greek and Roman mythology and the history of the Roman Emperors, it is easy for me to see the connections they have with the story of Jesus’s birth. Apollo, for those who do not know, is the god of the sun in both Greek and Roman mythology and he sits on the council of twelve on Mount Olympus. He is the son of the King of Olympus, named Zeus, who is also the god of the sky and lightning. Apollo’s mother, Leto, was a young virgin woman who was impregnated by “god”, Zeus, and was not able to find a place to give birth to her child when her time came, as she was being pursued by Hera, Zeus’s angry queen, until the moving island of Delos was created.

Interesting. Jesus is called the son of God. His mother Mary was a young virgin who was impregnated by God and when it was time for her to give birth to the baby, she couldn’t find a place to give birth for quite some time, before they had to improvise with a humble stable. Then mother and son were pursued by an angry king, Herrod. One day Jesus would be at the right hand of God, his father. Three connections is a significant number, and not just to me; three is even important in christianity.

That leads to something far more metaphorical but equally important in this discussion, however unpopular this opinion may be: the possibility that Jesus’s death was also a metaphor. In light of many stories from other cultures that claim the man we call Jesus did not die on the cross, but traveled to other places in his older years, I am certainly not the first one to posit that the story in the bible may be just that, a story. But when it became the entire foundation of salvation and salvation became the entire foundation of christian theology, even having an intellectual, hypothetical conversation about the veracity of the crucifixion became heresy. Here it goes anyway…

Jesus is a metaphor for the sun. He is the light of the world and the bright morning star, as the Bible says. When he dies, he is dead for three days and then he rises again. During the winter solstice, the sun is at its lowest point in the sky for three days and then the days begin to lengthen again. There was even said to be a solar eclipse on the day of Jesus’s death; the sun died the same day the son [of god] died. Interesting. Apollo was also the embodiment of the sun.

And Constantine was the embodiment of Apollo. Just as the monotheism of Christianity supported the claim of the “divine right of kings” that spread through Europe in the wake of the expansion of the Holy Roman Empire, Constantine’s association with Apollo and the sun, the source of all life, supported his divine rule over the empire and, eventually, the entire globe. Putting it all together, the truth becomes a little more clear: Jesus=Apollo=Constantine. He created the savior in his image.

If you know anything about Rome, ask yourself why the Emperor of the Roman Empire, who thought that he was the worldly representative of Apollo, would convert to a belief system where he is just another servant of the God of one of his colonies? Because I can't think of a single reason that he would genuinely do that. Combine that with the fact that the monuments that Constantine commissioned following his “conversion” to Christianity were distinctly not Christian in nature and were, quite obviously, in honor of Apollo and his father, Zeus.

In my humble opinion, it actually shouldn’t matter if Jesus had a divine birth or even if he died on a Roman cross and came back to life three days later. There is far too much time spent on Sunday mornings discussing petty points of theology in an attempt to earn salvation through behavior and doctrinal opinions and far too little time talking about how to live out “do unto others as you would have them do to you.” The wisdom he spread throughout the land, about having good intentions toward the people we interact with and loving people no matter where they came from and not pushing our beliefs on others should be the focus of study.

When it really comes down to it, there was a particular passage from the Bible that really let me walk away from the religion and primary identifier that had been handed to me in childhood: 1 John 4:7-8. It reads “let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love.” It is always important to contextualize verses within the chapter and book from which they are derived, and John absolutely makes it clear that he believes in the theology of Jesus’s divinity and magical, debt-paying death, but his focus and emphasis are still always on God’s core essence of being love. Not just being loving, as a characteristic, but the spiritual embodiment of love. If God is love, then Love is God.

That meant that if I wanted to live my life in the best way, the most Godly way, then I needed to live my life with love, there was no other option. It also meant that I couldn’t remain under the label of a religion that tried to tell me that there were certain people that I should love and others that I shouldn’t love. If love is the cosmic answer, then how could living in the embodiment of unconditional agape love be incorrect?

How could being kind and patient and compassionate with anyone and everyone, no matter who they are or how they live, be wrong? Especially in the context of “You have heard that it was said, Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” (Matthew 5:43-44) In order to be perfect, or complete, in our love, Jesus continues in the following verses, we must love those who are difficult to love. It is easy to love those who love you, he says, the real work comes in loving those who are a challenge just as much as we love those who aren’t.

That’s my new religion, if you want to call it that. Love, agape, is my faith and my belief and my moral compass. Love for all humans, of every faith, every lifestyle, every culture, every background. Because if our faith doesn’t make us try to better people, what is the point of it?

Photo: Glendalough, Ireland, 2017. Taken by Heidi Hahe.