From Eagle Scout to Infidel

I was raised in an average Christian home. My parents were normal Christians (not the crazy snake-handling, hand-laying, spirit-filled, tounge-babbling type), and we joined a middle-of-the-road Methodist church in a Texas suburb.

I was also a Boy Scout, and an Eagle Scout no less! These days, the Boy Scouts seem to want to make themselves out to sound like a church. My troop was never very pushy about religion, though. The most we ever had to do was, at each campout, listen to a five-minute reading out of one of those little pocket Bibles (New Testament only, of course).

It wasn't until I was in high school that I started to get more religious. When I was a freshman, there was a boy on my school bus who had moved in from out of town. We'll call him Bus Boy. He always wore a sweater with its arms tied around his neck -- kind-of looked like a freaky Ken doll! What made him further stand out from the crowd was that he was always "witnessing" to the other kids. Granted we were in the so-called "Bible Belt", but most kids could not "talk Jesus" with a straight face. It wasn't cool. So, the fact that he did so impressed me -- nevermind the fact that he seemed to only witness to girls. At about that same time, a nice girl in my English class handed me a little card on which she wrote, "Jesus loves you." I guess I was tickled at the attention a girl was giving me, so I began to think that maybe there was something to these Jesus-People.

So, I started listening to Christian talk radio shows like Bob Larson and others. It offered easy access to the kind of evangelical or fundamentalist message I had heard Bus Boy speaking about. Within a month or so, I had accepted Jesus "into my heart" as my "personal lord and savior", believed the whole line of doctrine, and really thought I had found the answer.

My love affair with fundamentalism lasted about two years. But, Christian radio talk shows were actually my fundamentalist faith's undoing as well as its beginning! You see, many of the folks as either guests or callers for these shows were the type of people who liked to bash evolution, atheists, and the like, and to denounce this or that group of people as contributing to the general decline of western civilization, and the coming "end times". The sheer negativism which came bundled with these folks' "good news" was beginning to drag me down.

From those radio shows, I learned about Creationism, and about the apparent lie of evolution. I heard things like the notion that the world was only 10,000 years old, and that dinosaurs and people used to run around together (probably mostly people running away from dinosaurs!), and how God intentionally made the fossil record to look like it was millions of years old so as to make blind faith necessary. Maybe the average Fundamentalist might have taken this at face value, but I had always had a healthy respect for knowledge obtained through science. So, this was a bit of a tall order.

I went to a big backwoods summer camp in New Mexico, called Philmont Scout Ranch, with my Scout troop. There, I learned about the Tooth of Time, an igneous mountain which dated back several millions of years. Here was Scouting, a supposedly religious-based institution, teaching me about the old earth! I looked around at all the pine trees in "God's Country", expecting to find the wonderous fingers of Creation pointing to their Creator! Instead, all I found were a bunch of leaves, flowers, cow-pies, and horse-flies contentedly refusing to comment on the whole matter. It was then that I began to realize that you could be a Christian without being a extremist or a science-shunning Fundamentalist.

I continued association with my old church, though I did not find it particularly interesting intellectually. The hyped rantings of Fundamentalist theologians were at least exciting (which makes me wonder if entertainment isn't an important aspect of popular religion). Although I had walked away from Fundamentalist Christianity, the impressions which the radio talk shows had had on me remained for several years. During the time that I had listened, I heard speakers constantly droning on about the way in which the Old Testament so obviously predicted the deeds of Jesus. They placed such a high importance on the "witness of the Old Testament" that I continued to believe it it was important even after I had returned to Methodist Christianity. This eventually led to my faith crumbling away entirely because, a few years later, I made the mistake of actually reading the Old Testament in whole.

College was the state-run right-wing Texas A&M University, a place where, like the streets, the minds are narrow, come with many holes, and are closed half the time. And this is how the Aggies say they like it. Needless to say, there were many Fundamentalist Christians there, and very little to challenge their minds.

I had pretty much given up going to church because it was a waste of my time. Sermons were nothing but a one-way monologue espousing one man's rehashing of the church's official doctrine. Scripture readings were selective and there was no place for questioning. So, I continued to study on my own -- without peer pressure or spoon-fed sermons.

By the time I was half-way through college, I had read all of the supposed "messianic prophecies" in the Old Testament (Isaiah 7:14 and Isaiah 53 being two of the most highly touted). I read them in their actual context, and saw quite clearly that they fit quite smoothly into that context. But, to make them apply to Christianity required too much hood-winking, and sometimes some downright mistranslation.

I was sitting in the Memorial Student Center, reading my Bible, highlighting the places where contradictions existed, when a man came up an put his hand on my knee. Startled, I jumped. And he said, "Excuse me, but, I noticed you were reading the Bible." Thinking this was a rather odd come-on, I looked down at the book in my lap and then back up at him and said, "Yes. It's true."

He introduced himself as Pastor John (that's not his real name), from one of the Christian youth fellowships there -- as he noted, a "NON-DENOMINATIONAL group". "Well LA-DEE-DA!" I thought to myself, "Thank GOD, because you know those denominational ones can be SOOO frightening. Okay, let me guess what this guy wants."

Well, the good pastor just wanted me to join his flock, and I thought, "Oh, what the hell, why not see what it's like?" I had essentially realized that Christianity was a bunch of hooey based on unimpeded, personal study of the Bible, reading it for myself, and not just selected passages chosen for me by a study group leader. So, I half-expected what I was to encounter. At the Wednesday night meeting, I met the flock. They were sufficiently nice, though a socially awkward bunch of kids. One girl came up to me and said she was so glad I had decided to join them, and not a rival Christian student union, because, as she put it, that group was a cult! Of course, I later discovered that I could not rely on her spiritual discernment since, the next semester, she was always trying to get into my roommate's pants -- and he was gay.

Anyway, at the Wednesday night meetings, Pastor John and his kids gathered in a circle and read the selected verses. They were asked to discuss how they thought they related to another preselected topic. At one point, they talked about the various ways in which Satan cound hinder the believer against God's plan. I decided to get the ball rolling, and noted how, according to the Old Testament, Satan was merely a servant of God. Well, didn't this raise some eyebrows!

Then, whenever I was asked to read the selected, New Testament passages, I would (when I could) read just a little further, and sneak in anything which included Jesus promising his followers that he would return in his second coming within their lifetimes. That was always a real "Bible-burster" for me, I guess. But, I don't think this little failed prophecy even registered in the brains of those kids who were sitting in the circle 2,000 years after the deadline!

After that, I pretty much wrote off all Christian denominations as intrinsicly blind to the the errors of their religion, and proceded to study the writings of other Biblical critics. Since then, I've learned about the contradictions of the gospels; the discrepancies in the resurrection accounts; the incongruity between the god of the Old Testament, and the god(s) of the New Testament; the bogus nature of the messianic prophecies; and the bloody history of the religion down through the centuries. Ideally, Christianity has some good points, like teaching that we should be nice to people and stuff, but none of that originates from Christianity, and is convered in Buddhism amd other peaceful philosophies. I figure we'd be better off with them.

And, that, in a nutshell, is the story of my road from Eagle Scout to Infidel. I will attest to my belief that Christianity is just one more problematic religion in a sea of them -- Scout's Honor!

I wonder if the Bus Boy has figured this out yet.

Details