AwareofAware

Discussion thread for religion and faith

Religion/Faith/Belief Discussion

I am creating this separate thread to discuss personal beliefs about the structure of the spiritual dimension and how that should affect how we behave…also known as religious belief. For many this kind of discussion is not wanted, hence the creation of separate thread/page for those who do want to get into it. Don’t read this if you don’t like religion or are offended by religious beliefs or positions. If you do engage, please keep it respectful (one of the reasons I have chosen to avoid this subject is that it generates strong passions). I will shut it down if it gets nasty. Having said that, disagreement using reasoned argument is encouraged!

I will start.

I am a Christian. I called myself a Christian into my teens more through my cultural upbringing, than any deep conviction. My views were typical of anyone growing up in Western Europe during that time…the church was boring, and riddled with hypocrisy, but Jesus was generally a decent chap, along with lots of other religious figures like The Buddha, Mohammad, Moses, Brahma etc. 

When I was about 17 I had an experience which happened during my sleep but was much more than a dream. A brief summary is that I awoke, everything was very normal…not like a dream. I felt compelled to say the Christian prayer – “sorry I ignored you [Jesus], sorry I hurt you, myself and others, please forgive me and become my Lord”. My bedroom disintegrated before my eyes and I found myself in the presence of a being of pure love. I cannot say how long I was there as the moment felt outside of time. It was the most perfect experience of my life. When I awoke I did not repeat the prayer and continued as I had been, but more open to the faith of my culture than I ever had been.

About 18 months later, when I was 19, I visited a Pentecostal church with my girlfriend of the time. There I encountered the Holy Spirit (what Christians believe to be the temporal form of God on earth since the death of Jesus) in a way that I had only experienced in that dream until that point. I was overwhelmed with the sense of God’s loving presence. 

A short while later I made the decision to say that prayer in real life, but was unable to physically form the words with my voice. It required deliverance from a darkness that had been oppressing me, causing suicidal thoughts among other things, before I was free to say the words. That was the moment I was “born again” in spirit.

Since then my faith has only deepened. I had a period in which I did question things, largely due to the fact that my writing did not take off in the way I had hoped and believed that God had led me to understand it would. As a result I dug really deep into the questions around the origin of life. 

By this point I had gained a Ph.D. in organic medicinal chemistry and was an expert on the biochemistry of DNA and proteins, so was qualified to pursue this line of enquiry. My findings confirmed without any doubt that life could not possibly have emerged from inorganic matter by natural means, and to believe so was foolishness/delusion in the extreme. As a result I concluded that a creator or God existed, despite being disappointed with the outcome of my writing endeavours, and I just had to roll with my situation. Moreover, the evidence from the words attributed to Him in the Bible and from my personal experience of walking with Him convinced me that Jesus was exactly who the gospels claim he is…God the Son Of Man, God in the form of a human, and the only guaranteed path to eternal life.

39 years of being a Christian, attending various churches, talking to people of other faiths, visiting non Christian countries, researching NDEs, reading about origin of life research, and thinking deeply on these subjects has led me to conclude that I am on the right path. I do not believe that God/Jesus is exclusive in that I believe that anyone who truly seeks God will find him, but I am also of the view that those who reject Jesus as he is presented in the gospels (as opposed to represented by other Christians) are on a sticky wicket from an eternal perspective. I understand why many people reject Christianity because of the (mis)behaviour of some christians, but to reject Jesus himself is a whole different ball game.

As for the fact that reports from some NDEs seem to contradict the teachings of Jesus – specifically that some people come back having been told that all people go to heaven – it is also reported that some people end up going to Hell which instantly contradicts these heaven-only NDE reports and these internal contradictions from accounts have caused my view on NDEs to evolve into a position that they may not be exactly what people have come to believe them to be…including my former self. While I believe that these experiences are authentically experienced by NDErs, I am now of the view that there is a degree of deception or delusion going on in the dimension they find themselves in. I’m not sure which of those it is, not sure how it happens, and not sure why it is happening…but I have thoughts on that latter point related to maintaining the necessity of free choice (something I expand on in detail in my book Did Jesus Die For Nothing).

That is a summary of my faith. Feel free to post what you believe. Feel free to ask me questions about my beliefs, or even challenge them, but always maintain respect for each other and consider that we are all on a journey of discovery and often at different stages of understanding.