I ended at the same place, but took a different path.
My research on C19 led me to a conclusion that required the acknowledgment of an omnipresent evil. So much so as to be unmooring.
In my newly acquired view, the scales tipped from our leaders being “generally and mostly good” to a scary percentage of them being “evil.”
To regain my footing I needed a North Star, a sense of ballast, an unchanging, benevolent power. Without that, why continue with joy here on Earth? There had to be something more, an afterlife, a place of judgment.
I returned to my faith with a new vigor. That’s the silver lining for me in this debacle.
Me too. I was always so trusting. I knew evil existed but it always felt so distant. After my awakening Covid hit, & I couldn’t believe the lies & deception. I’m still saying I can’t believe it, even though I believe it.
I am committed to believing. And this is my path to faith, even as I will always struggle in my commitment. - Exactly. It’s taken me a long time but I’ve come to the same conclusion. You keep trying, you do not quit. You don’t just lay there and let the world pass you by because you got knocked down. You get back up and try again.
But the Jewish faith encourages asking questions and debating. And they don’t try to convert anyone. Nor to they believe in a hell, or tests to get into heaven at least not reform Jews.
Across the board, God has a rule: respect me or you don't get to come into my house.
I actually like the idea of hell, considering the degree of anti-human depravity to which our elites of all religions are willing to stoop. And as someone raised Reform, I have had first-hand experience with intolerance, group think, and 'purity tests.' I'm not saying that it's because they're Reform Jews, but the theoretical liberalism that comes with the teachings has been non-existent. This is my opinion based on what I live.
I actually never believed in any religion and I do not believe in good or evil. I can see religion helps some people. But at least as Jews we were always allowed to question and debate and we enjoyed it and gave credit to another if they were able to prove their point. I like that about science and medicine, too. or I did.
It is not easy to decide to love even those doing evil things and harming many people. But that is the Jesus Way. Love your enemies. Love your neighbors. Appreciate God's magnificent creation. Love. First, in-between and last. Always. All ways. The mystery thar God is Love.
Your first public apology concerning the Covid stuff was such a huge encouragement to me back when I felt like a freak for noticing and saying that things just didn’t add up. Thank you, so much, for making a gal feel less alone!
Also, it’s so neat to me to see how God uses so many different things to bring different people to Himself. Thank you for sharing. Here’s my own testimony:
We all need to remember to love our enemy, especially when that is difficult. And to forgive, while seeking accountability and speaking truth in kindness. God bless you on your faith journey. A deepening of my faith has been the silver lining of the past several years.
I think that a famous atheist recently admitted that only a Judeo-Christian culture is worth living in and that he couldn't say the same for a secular culture or for an Islamic culture.
Christianity is like cataract surgery to restore vision toward a messed up world. It restores the way we view the world, other people, and ourselves. Regarding ourselves, we can see ourselves for the fallen, sinful affront to God's holiness that we are, and come to a place of repentance based on how much God loves us by sending Jesus to reconcile us back to Himself. This can scarcely be explained to nonbelievers because it is, the Bible says, a supernatural transformation that takes place at the soul level.
Well this makes sense to me! When people tell me Jesus loved me so much he died for my sins, I just don’t get it. It makes zero sense to me. This is supposed to prove “his” love be? But I because it is a transformation taking place at the soul level, if that transformation isn’t happening for me, you might as well be speaking a foreign language to me. None of it makes any sense to me.
The same rational process used to discover COVID fraud should be used with all issues, including religion.
For example, simply reading the Bible, the source of Christianity, reveals this--
The Bible god/Jesus--
Killed all of humanity except 8 adults in a horrific flood as a lesson on morality. The estimated toll was as much as 4 billion people, including innocent infants, children, adults, and animals. (Genesis 6-9)
Kills the firstborn humans, including innocent infants, children, and animals of the entire Egyptian nation, and then commanded that the slaughter be celebrated yearly as Passover. (Exodus 12; 14; Romans 9:17)
Kills people for making an ointment, burning incense, taking a census (75,000 slaughtered), for not cutting the ends of young boys' penises off or eating fat. (Exodus 30:33; 2 Chronicles 26:19-;1Chronicles 21; Torah)
Forced innocent children to wander and die in a wilderness for forty years because of the sins of the parents. (Numbers 14:33)
Condemned to leprosy children, their children, and a king who burned incense. (2 Chronicles 26:19-)
Orders that young boys who disobey or curse their parents be stoned to death. (Exodus 21:17; Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
Starved people, opened the earth to swallow them when they desired to eat, and then sent a plague to kill 14,700 more who complained about it. (Numbers 16)
Killed people for working or gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and for profaning it. (Numbers 15:32-36: Exodus 31:14,15)
Induced snakes to bite people and sent bears out of the woods to tear apart forty-two children who called a man "baldhead." (2 Kings 2:23,24)
Sent a famine that forced people to eat their children, and beheaded seventy innocent sons and put their heads in a pile as a lesson. (2 Kings 6:28-)
Tells men to kill their wives (even if pregnant), children, and friends if they disagree with them on religion, commands no mercy be given, and is wrathful if lives are spared. (Deuteronomy 13:6-; Exodus 32:27)
Condoned Jael lying to a man and driving a tent peg into the man's temple while he slept. (Judges 4:17-21)
Condemned victims for ten generations if they have mutilated sex organs or are of illegitimate birth. (Deuteronomy 23:1-)
Is partial to one race and keeps them in good graces if they commit murder, bash babies to the ground, and rip open pregnant women. (Exodus 22:20; Hosea 13:16; Joshua 10:1-42; 1 Samuel 15:3)
Condones the practice of incest, adultery, genocide, sexism, keeping concubines (300 for Solomon), keeping and beating slaves (with the only limitation being to not injure their eyes or teeth). (Genesis 19; 20; 28; 29; Exodus 21; . . . throughout Torah)
Commands the killing of adulterers and non-virgins brought to marriage. (Deuteronomy 22:20-)
Commanded Jews to slaughter entire cities and to steal all their goods, kill and maim the animals, but keep alive the young virgin maidens to rape for their pleasure. (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 13; Judges 21; Numbers 31)
The Bible god equates love with having himself in the form of Jesus sacrificially tortured to death. Guilt for this is collectivized by demanding that all people be responsible for the torture that was necessary to make amends for an original sin for which all humans but Adam and Eve had no part, but for which all of humanity is condemned to eternal torture in hell if they don't agree. (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12,14;1John 1:8-10).
How extremely inappropriate of you to come to someone else's house as a visitor - which is what a Substack is & then preach at great length why that person's new found faith is wrong & stupid. Would you do this if you visited his house in real life?
Trying to reason with people who know it all is where we are with the transfections. "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority." —Francis Bacon
Sometimes it is discovered the hard way.
“Belief [in God] is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”
Blind belief and blind faith is dangerous. But Christians do not have blind faith and the Bible does not encourage blind faith. It encourages to test claims. There is ample evidence that shows the Bible is reliable and true, check out McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict.
Also, your list of what God has done as some sort of “look at how God is a moral monster!” Makes it clear that you don’t understand who God is. God makes the rules for morality for us, not the other way around. The Creator has the pejorative to do what He chooses with His creation— He can create life and He can take life and because He is all-knowing and all-powerful, He has every right to do so and is not wrong for doing as He chooses. God is not a human to be subject to human rules. God one’s every man’s heart and judges righteously.
You also misunderstand and misinterpret many of those verses— one quick example, the Bible does not condone raping virgin maidens when conquering a people, it permitted Jews to MARRY women. Second example, there are many stories in the OT that are examples of what NOT to do, not commandments. It’s DESCRIPTIVE of flawed, sinful people, not PRE-SCRIPTED of what to do (Solomon’s concubines are one example of this.)
Also, Jesus chose to give up his own life, He makes that very clear, so a voluntary sacrifice is not the same thing as God killing his own son like some sort of child abuse as you make it seem.
God gets to define love, not you.
If you do not think you have a sinful nature, then you are lying to yourself and are a fool.
There is no proof that an incomprehensible Creator wrote the Bible.
We all thirst to know the Creator but that does not give us the right to anthropomorphize the Creator into a book writer that leaves us no original copies of the book.
We, in our mortal physical existence, do not get to "know" the Creator any more than we can know infinity.
We can only know what the creation itself reveals.
Part of that creation is our free will, reason, and conscience.
That, not following an absurd book written by people naming themselves as god's chosen and filled with things violating our gifts of reason and conscience, is all we need to know to love and become better people, as is our purpose in coming to this Earth life.
For more complete understanding, see the religion section in the free Big Questions book on the asifthinkingmatters site.
There are good reasons to believe the Bible is divinely inspired. The Bible provides evidence of its own divine origin through the fulfillment of prophecies like Jesus’ birth (Isa. 7:14), his crucifixion (Isa. 53:4–12), even Jesus’ last words from the cross (Ps. 22:1).
The historical reliability of the Bible continues to be proven.
Without the Creator revealing himself to us, I would agree with you that we cannot comprehend an all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the Universe in the same way that we can’t really understand infinity.
But, what if this Creator chose to reveal himself? Could he not do it in a way that we could understand what he chooses to reveal about himself? Could he not inspire men to write the truth about Him?
Proof is needed of Bible prophesies--when spoken and fulfillment--and disproof that ordinary people have been documented to foretell the future, before any conclusions about the Bible being authored by the the Creator.
Many old secular books have historical accuracy, so the Bible is not unique in that regard.
The god revealed in the Bible by its racist authors claiming to be that god's chosen, is psychopathic, like its authors, as the quotes above prove.
None of this is to mention there are no original copies of a book supposedly written by the Creator of the Universe.
Absurdity upon absurdity that can only be accepted if the gift of reason given to us by the Creator is ignored.
Interesting article. As an agnostic I do believe that people underestimate the degree to which the development of science is tied up with Christianity. However, it's a complex topic as the enlightenment was a later revolt against the Christian worldview that is intertwined with various forms of occultism.
"Judeo-Christian belief may be what makes science and free speech possible"
I should point out, though, that you are using a propaganda term that basically did not exist before the early 20th century. There is no such thing as "Judeo-Christian" belief. That term would cause a lot of strange looks were you to employ it in the 19th century or beforehand. The two religions are both branches of the Mosaic law of the Old Testament, and they have very different worldviews and ontological commitments.
("Jesus in the Talmud" by Schafer should be enough to demonstrate that the two religions are not compatible).
As for free speech, some argue that free speech was a means of actually attacking the dominant Christian social order. "A History of the Freedom of Thought" by Bury. Also worth looking into Mill, as he was involved with various organizations that were known hotspots for the occult.
I ended at the same place, but took a different path.
My research on C19 led me to a conclusion that required the acknowledgment of an omnipresent evil. So much so as to be unmooring.
In my newly acquired view, the scales tipped from our leaders being “generally and mostly good” to a scary percentage of them being “evil.”
To regain my footing I needed a North Star, a sense of ballast, an unchanging, benevolent power. Without that, why continue with joy here on Earth? There had to be something more, an afterlife, a place of judgment.
I returned to my faith with a new vigor. That’s the silver lining for me in this debacle.
Me too. I was always so trusting. I knew evil existed but it always felt so distant. After my awakening Covid hit, & I couldn’t believe the lies & deception. I’m still saying I can’t believe it, even though I believe it.
I am committed to believing. And this is my path to faith, even as I will always struggle in my commitment. - Exactly. It’s taken me a long time but I’ve come to the same conclusion. You keep trying, you do not quit. You don’t just lay there and let the world pass you by because you got knocked down. You get back up and try again.
I gotta dig into this. A lot of ‘signs’ are pointing me in the same direction. Jewish by birth…but why not the whole of The Bible?
I recommend reading "Who Moved the Stone?" by Frank Morison.
But the Jewish faith encourages asking questions and debating. And they don’t try to convert anyone. Nor to they believe in a hell, or tests to get into heaven at least not reform Jews.
Across the board, God has a rule: respect me or you don't get to come into my house.
I actually like the idea of hell, considering the degree of anti-human depravity to which our elites of all religions are willing to stoop. And as someone raised Reform, I have had first-hand experience with intolerance, group think, and 'purity tests.' I'm not saying that it's because they're Reform Jews, but the theoretical liberalism that comes with the teachings has been non-existent. This is my opinion based on what I live.
I actually never believed in any religion and I do not believe in good or evil. I can see religion helps some people. But at least as Jews we were always allowed to question and debate and we enjoyed it and gave credit to another if they were able to prove their point. I like that about science and medicine, too. or I did.
Biblical scholar Dr Michael Heiser's book The Unseen Realm. It will help you see the OT & NT in new way.
It is not easy to decide to love even those doing evil things and harming many people. But that is the Jesus Way. Love your enemies. Love your neighbors. Appreciate God's magnificent creation. Love. First, in-between and last. Always. All ways. The mystery thar God is Love.
Your first public apology concerning the Covid stuff was such a huge encouragement to me back when I felt like a freak for noticing and saying that things just didn’t add up. Thank you, so much, for making a gal feel less alone!
Also, it’s so neat to me to see how God uses so many different things to bring different people to Himself. Thank you for sharing. Here’s my own testimony:
https://amandabarber.substack.com/p/my-testimony
We all need to remember to love our enemy, especially when that is difficult. And to forgive, while seeking accountability and speaking truth in kindness. God bless you on your faith journey. A deepening of my faith has been the silver lining of the past several years.
I think that a famous atheist recently admitted that only a Judeo-Christian culture is worth living in and that he couldn't say the same for a secular culture or for an Islamic culture.
Thanks for sharing from your heart Kevin.
Christianity is like cataract surgery to restore vision toward a messed up world. It restores the way we view the world, other people, and ourselves. Regarding ourselves, we can see ourselves for the fallen, sinful affront to God's holiness that we are, and come to a place of repentance based on how much God loves us by sending Jesus to reconcile us back to Himself. This can scarcely be explained to nonbelievers because it is, the Bible says, a supernatural transformation that takes place at the soul level.
Well this makes sense to me! When people tell me Jesus loved me so much he died for my sins, I just don’t get it. It makes zero sense to me. This is supposed to prove “his” love be? But I because it is a transformation taking place at the soul level, if that transformation isn’t happening for me, you might as well be speaking a foreign language to me. None of it makes any sense to me.
Kevin, your column pairs well with Igor Chudov’s chilling one today:
https://open.substack.com/pub/igorchudov/p/religious-faith-can-be-turned-off?r=1yhvat&utm_medium=ios
The Creator is the author of reason not religion.
The same rational process used to discover COVID fraud should be used with all issues, including religion.
For example, simply reading the Bible, the source of Christianity, reveals this--
The Bible god/Jesus--
Killed all of humanity except 8 adults in a horrific flood as a lesson on morality. The estimated toll was as much as 4 billion people, including innocent infants, children, adults, and animals. (Genesis 6-9)
Kills the firstborn humans, including innocent infants, children, and animals of the entire Egyptian nation, and then commanded that the slaughter be celebrated yearly as Passover. (Exodus 12; 14; Romans 9:17)
Kills people for making an ointment, burning incense, taking a census (75,000 slaughtered), for not cutting the ends of young boys' penises off or eating fat. (Exodus 30:33; 2 Chronicles 26:19-;1Chronicles 21; Torah)
Forced innocent children to wander and die in a wilderness for forty years because of the sins of the parents. (Numbers 14:33)
Commands killing unbelievers. (Deuteronomy 13; 2 Kings 10)
Condemned to leprosy children, their children, and a king who burned incense. (2 Chronicles 26:19-)
Orders that young boys who disobey or curse their parents be stoned to death. (Exodus 21:17; Deuteronomy 21:18-21)
Starved people, opened the earth to swallow them when they desired to eat, and then sent a plague to kill 14,700 more who complained about it. (Numbers 16)
Killed people for working or gathering sticks on the Sabbath, and for profaning it. (Numbers 15:32-36: Exodus 31:14,15)
Induced snakes to bite people and sent bears out of the woods to tear apart forty-two children who called a man "baldhead." (2 Kings 2:23,24)
Sent a famine that forced people to eat their children, and beheaded seventy innocent sons and put their heads in a pile as a lesson. (2 Kings 6:28-)
Tells men to kill their wives (even if pregnant), children, and friends if they disagree with them on religion, commands no mercy be given, and is wrathful if lives are spared. (Deuteronomy 13:6-; Exodus 32:27)
Condoned Jael lying to a man and driving a tent peg into the man's temple while he slept. (Judges 4:17-21)
Condemned victims for ten generations if they have mutilated sex organs or are of illegitimate birth. (Deuteronomy 23:1-)
Is partial to one race and keeps them in good graces if they commit murder, bash babies to the ground, and rip open pregnant women. (Exodus 22:20; Hosea 13:16; Joshua 10:1-42; 1 Samuel 15:3)
Condones the practice of incest, adultery, genocide, sexism, keeping concubines (300 for Solomon), keeping and beating slaves (with the only limitation being to not injure their eyes or teeth). (Genesis 19; 20; 28; 29; Exodus 21; . . . throughout Torah)
Commands the killing of adulterers and non-virgins brought to marriage. (Deuteronomy 22:20-)
Commanded Jews to slaughter entire cities and to steal all their goods, kill and maim the animals, but keep alive the young virgin maidens to rape for their pleasure. (Deuteronomy 2:34; 3:6; 13; Judges 21; Numbers 31)
The Bible god equates love with having himself in the form of Jesus sacrificially tortured to death. Guilt for this is collectivized by demanding that all people be responsible for the torture that was necessary to make amends for an original sin for which all humans but Adam and Eve had no part, but for which all of humanity is condemned to eternal torture in hell if they don't agree. (Genesis 3; Romans 5:12,14;1John 1:8-10).
From https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/solving-the-big-questions-third-edition/category/religion
How extremely inappropriate of you to come to someone else's house as a visitor - which is what a Substack is & then preach at great length why that person's new found faith is wrong & stupid. Would you do this if you visited his house in real life?
Trying to reason with people who know it all is where we are with the transfections. "Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority." —Francis Bacon
Sometimes it is discovered the hard way.
“Belief [in God] is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”
—Blaise Pascal (Mathematician & Physicist
If given the opportunity, yes.
Belief and faith are the enemies of knowing and truth. Knowing and truth--not any cockamamie notion we want to adopt--is our duty.
Moreover, belief and faith are the most dangerous mindsets human can have. They lie at the root of all human ills.
https://www.asifthinkingmatters.com/blog/proof-of-the-cause-of-all-human-made-problems
Blind belief and blind faith is dangerous. But Christians do not have blind faith and the Bible does not encourage blind faith. It encourages to test claims. There is ample evidence that shows the Bible is reliable and true, check out McDowell’s Evidence that Demands a Verdict.
Also, your list of what God has done as some sort of “look at how God is a moral monster!” Makes it clear that you don’t understand who God is. God makes the rules for morality for us, not the other way around. The Creator has the pejorative to do what He chooses with His creation— He can create life and He can take life and because He is all-knowing and all-powerful, He has every right to do so and is not wrong for doing as He chooses. God is not a human to be subject to human rules. God one’s every man’s heart and judges righteously.
You also misunderstand and misinterpret many of those verses— one quick example, the Bible does not condone raping virgin maidens when conquering a people, it permitted Jews to MARRY women. Second example, there are many stories in the OT that are examples of what NOT to do, not commandments. It’s DESCRIPTIVE of flawed, sinful people, not PRE-SCRIPTED of what to do (Solomon’s concubines are one example of this.)
Also, Jesus chose to give up his own life, He makes that very clear, so a voluntary sacrifice is not the same thing as God killing his own son like some sort of child abuse as you make it seem.
God gets to define love, not you.
If you do not think you have a sinful nature, then you are lying to yourself and are a fool.
That all assumes that which needs to be proven.
There is no proof that an incomprehensible Creator wrote the Bible.
We all thirst to know the Creator but that does not give us the right to anthropomorphize the Creator into a book writer that leaves us no original copies of the book.
We, in our mortal physical existence, do not get to "know" the Creator any more than we can know infinity.
We can only know what the creation itself reveals.
Part of that creation is our free will, reason, and conscience.
That, not following an absurd book written by people naming themselves as god's chosen and filled with things violating our gifts of reason and conscience, is all we need to know to love and become better people, as is our purpose in coming to this Earth life.
For more complete understanding, see the religion section in the free Big Questions book on the asifthinkingmatters site.
There are good reasons to believe the Bible is divinely inspired. The Bible provides evidence of its own divine origin through the fulfillment of prophecies like Jesus’ birth (Isa. 7:14), his crucifixion (Isa. 53:4–12), even Jesus’ last words from the cross (Ps. 22:1).
The historical reliability of the Bible continues to be proven.
Without the Creator revealing himself to us, I would agree with you that we cannot comprehend an all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of the Universe in the same way that we can’t really understand infinity.
But, what if this Creator chose to reveal himself? Could he not do it in a way that we could understand what he chooses to reveal about himself? Could he not inspire men to write the truth about Him?
Proof is needed of Bible prophesies--when spoken and fulfillment--and disproof that ordinary people have been documented to foretell the future, before any conclusions about the Bible being authored by the the Creator.
Many old secular books have historical accuracy, so the Bible is not unique in that regard.
The god revealed in the Bible by its racist authors claiming to be that god's chosen, is psychopathic, like its authors, as the quotes above prove.
None of this is to mention there are no original copies of a book supposedly written by the Creator of the Universe.
Absurdity upon absurdity that can only be accepted if the gift of reason given to us by the Creator is ignored.
Interesting article. As an agnostic I do believe that people underestimate the degree to which the development of science is tied up with Christianity. However, it's a complex topic as the enlightenment was a later revolt against the Christian worldview that is intertwined with various forms of occultism.
"Judeo-Christian belief may be what makes science and free speech possible"
I should point out, though, that you are using a propaganda term that basically did not exist before the early 20th century. There is no such thing as "Judeo-Christian" belief. That term would cause a lot of strange looks were you to employ it in the 19th century or beforehand. The two religions are both branches of the Mosaic law of the Old Testament, and they have very different worldviews and ontological commitments.
("Jesus in the Talmud" by Schafer should be enough to demonstrate that the two religions are not compatible).
As for free speech, some argue that free speech was a means of actually attacking the dominant Christian social order. "A History of the Freedom of Thought" by Bury. Also worth looking into Mill, as he was involved with various organizations that were known hotspots for the occult.
https://drclarecraig.substack.com/p/reflection-on-the-last-four-years?r=jhq3f&triedRedirect=true
Pepe writes: https://pepelivesmatter.substack.com/p/hide-in-the-shadow-of-your-wings?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=990855&post_id=143334344&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=73wbx&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Kevin, a verse for you: Titus 3:3-5. Perhaps it is along the lines of what you are talking about.