If your worldview is truly up for grabs, I suggest that you investigate the full range of worldviews on offer, including the “dark side” or “left-hand path” philosophies of the Sith, the Satanists, the Nietzscheans and other irrationalist paths of power. You can get a good historical overview of “dark side” belief systems by reading “Lords of the Left-Hand Path”, which should be quite a revelation to you as a life-long Christian. Whatever you do, do not limit yourself to the light side or right-hand paths of wretched moralism, collectivism, rationalism and legacy Judeo-Christianity, because I think you will find that in our dark universe, the Dark Side is stronger than the Light Side, irrationality is more powerful than rationality, the individual is more important than the collective, and "evil" always wins!
UPDATE: More downvotes please! I feed on negative points like Darth Nihilus feeds on the Force!
More downvotes please! I feed on negative points like Darth Nihilus feeds on the Force!
We might need to send a p-zombie to defeat this one! ;) Hey, I bet Jedi Exile was one.
(But yeah, downvoted.)
Background
I was raised in the Churches of Christ and my family is all very serious about Christianity. About 3 years ago, I started to ask some hard questions, and the answers from other Christians were very unsatisfying. I used to believe that the Bible was, you know, inspired by a loving God, but its endorsement of genocide, the abuse of slaves, and the mistreatment of women and children really started to bother me.
I set out to study these issues as much as I could. I stayed up past midnight for weeks reading what Christians have to say, and this process triggered a real crisis of faith. What started out as a search for answers on Biblical genocide led me to places like commonsenseatheism.com. I learned that the Bible has serious credibility problems on lots of issues that no one ever told me about. Wow.
My Question
Now I'm pretty sure that the God of the Bible is man-made and Jesus of Nazareth was probably a failed prophet, but I don't have good reasons to reject the supernatural all together. I'm working through the sequences, but this process is slow. I will probably struggle with this question for months, maybe longer.
Excluding the Supernatural was interesting, but it left me wanting a more thorough explanation. Where do you think I should go from here? Should I just continue reading the sequences, and re-read them until the ideas gel? I'm coming from 30 years of Sunday School level thinking. It's not like I grew up with words like "epistemology" and "epiphenomenalism". If there is no supernatural, and I can be confident about that, I will need to re-evaluate a lot of things. My worldview is up for grabs.