I should really stop by the off topic section more often. I just haven’t hardly done so since it was split into three.
I was raised Baptist and sort of built up a fortress of self-imposed fundamentalism as a youngster. Young earth creation, literalism, etc. But for me I was academic about it, like down into the nuts and bolts. I thought about it, a lot. And diligently worked to work out the kinks, fill in the holes, fortifying it. For me the texts of scripture and my supposed system derived from them was the base and other areas of academia, like science, were slave to it. Bend the presuppositions, and you have a warped but functional perspective, unassailable against any more facts.
After a while it reached a tipping point of no return, though it was still a long process of defeat that had to play out. For me it started when I re-investigated my young earth views with a decidedly critical eye. I set out to re-evaluate it under the lens of scripture, but got more than I bargained for. It became clear that the only way to be consistent is to be a flat-earther, which is a bridge way too far. Another monkey wrench was how to regard Neanderthals. In a young earth view, they’re just people, sons of Adam, and we’re a strong point compared to an old earth (but literal Adam and Eve) view.
This began a pursuit for answers that slowly, painfully unraveled everything. My fortress was based in scripture, and my assumptions about it. And those were shown not to be what I’d supposed. There’s no magic, no obviously supernatural predictions that were unambiguously fulfilled, and most prophecy was handled very creatively. The Bible stopped behaving itself and left me with no special truths to cling to about the deepest parts of existence.
For me the final piece holding back a collapse was one tell-all question, which had always been my hill to die on no matter what: if one had a time machine and a video camera, what would be committed to videotape if it were pointed at Jesus’ grave the night before Easter. Though the means of verifying an objective answer are obviously impossible, there must be a correct answer in principle. Even if allllll the other instances of correspondence between my understanding of the Bible’s description of history and reality as learned by other means breaks down, even if the Exodus was a myth, even if Jesus were a fully human being who was imperfect, this question of the literal resurrection was the absolute final thing to go.
And I just let it go. And I’ve been so much better off for it. I’ve gotten a taste for liberal thought, mostly eastern. But I still return to my Christian ‘mask of God’ and am seeing how it has truth far deeper than the literal. But you have to destroy the literal to get there.
I love the scene between Luke and Yoda in TLJ. I’ve been there.
