Pseudo-Onkelos
Gonecrazy12345
That's good, I'm happy there's people like you roaming the LD and the Morality & Religion forum as well. I don't consider myself knowledgeable with philosophy and especially religion, but I do take it very seriously as well. I used to be into philosophy hardcore about 2-3 years ago and then I got bored of it for a while. But then I got into what's called an "existential crisis" in my life and I got interested in philosophy again. I also listened to some lectures on YouTube by biblical scholars and that's what sparked my interest in studying The Bible.
I don't know what else to say besides that. But if I may, you said you were a former Christian. If I'm understanding you correctly, you are saying you also felt like you were "experiencing" God. Could you explain more in detail what exactly those feelings were? And if you used to experience those things, but you no longer believe in Yahweh, why did you stop believing in him even though you felt like you had experienced him?
I am wondering if I have experienced this "existential crisis" you speak of as well. I cannot say I became bored of religion, but I suppose you could say I became desensitized as I began to cease attending church. I felt that I was attending for the wrong reasons.
After that, I gradually discontinued from praying and reading the Bible. I still believed in the god of Israel, and I still do to this day, but things changed. When I returned on Gaia, I thought perhaps I would become interested in religion again. It took a bit of time, but I eventually returned with a different perspective.
There were three things that caused me to leave Christianity. The first thing was my lack of exposure to it over time. I still hung onto what was left. What cut the cords, so to speak, was that someone on Gaia named Sandokiri pointed out that Jesus and his believers were expecting the Second Coming to occur in their lifetime.
The final thing was that I realized I became more liberal in my views. I once was a Creationist, I once opposed homosexuality, and I once opposed pro-choice. So when I tried to understand the Bible objectively, it was there that I began reading what conservatives had to say about things like the failed Documentary Hypothesis and how they said that liberal Christians "claimed" to believe what the Bible said and other things like that.
This finally led me to think that Christians treated each other as anything but brotherly. I made a thread in Morality & Religion about this and decided that perhaps I should try to understand the god of Israel as how He was understood by the Hebrews. So I still am a theist, but through what I have found from the Tanakh, the ancient Israelites acknowledged the existence of other gods.
Anyway, my darkest times came about when I became a Calvinist. I found the view to be agreeable with what the Bible taught. What I hated about Calvinism was that I could not choose to become a Christian. It was not my choice. The act was entirely monergistic, meaning that—unlike the mainstream view where God is waiting for you to believe in Him—God was actually the One Who made you believe in Him.
I was never certain of my salvation and I would worry. I would find myself falling into legalism, and when I did, I had to remind myself that it is God's grace that saved me, not my own acts. I had to be cautious of legalism and a living faith. Instead of experiencing God at these times, however, I would tend to feel as though God was not present. This affected my life. I could not enjoy this or that without worrying about devoting my life to God.
Ugh, there I go again. So, yeah.
Maybe you have experienced it, I'm not sure. Basically my existential crisis made me feel like I was literally going insane. I got to the point that I didn't even know if it was worth it expressing anything linguistically anymore, with people and with myself. My mind also got even more confused, because when I was having this thought that I couldn't express what I was thinking with language, I was reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's work. If you're not familiar with that philosopher, one of his important arguments is that language is a public bi-product and there's no such thing as a private language, and furthermore he proposed that all knowledge and thoughts could be expressed with language. Well this directly contradicted what I was thinking, which made me even more confused. There's much more to my existential crisis then that, but basically what happened in my experience was that I lost all confidence in any form of knowledge and any foundation of knowledge, which also had really negative impacts on me emotionally as well. I still think I'm getting over my existential crisis, but I'm definitely feeling and doing a lot better than I was just like 6 months ago.
The "failed" Documentary Hypothesis? To my knowledge the Documentary Hypothesis is the most legitimate theory on the authors of The Bible. To my knowledge, the majority of well accredited biblical scholars who actually post peer reviewed studies, accept the Documentary Hypothesis. For example people like Bart Ehrman and Richard Elliott Friedman.
So you still believe in Yahweh, but are you also a Pagan? For example, I know that in parts of Genesis (Forgot if it was J or E that called God "El" ) and of course El was actually one of the pagan god's of the early Isrealite religion along with Yahweh who was one of the god's as well. But then of course there's the passage in Exodus that says that El and Yahweh are the same God (but according to the Documentary Hypothesis, the person who wrote this passage in Exodus was an author much later than J and E).
I'm just confused with what you believe now. You don't call yourself a Christian, and I'm assuming you don't consider yourself a follower of Judaism either, but you believe Yahweh (or do you believe a different God and believe Yahweh is a false God of The Bible? Just like how according to the Documentary Hypothesis, much of the Torah acknowledges pagan God's when you recognize that many of the books in the Torah were written by multiple authors at different times in Israel's history). Do you believe Jesus died for your sins anymore?
