To Hell with the Devil

Ever since I was a kid I have, until fairly recently, believed in or at least taken for granted the existence of evil spirits, demons, whatever you want to call it. I’ve been as influenced as anyone by many of the big horror films of my day - The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Entity to name a few. I’ve always been kind of fearful that way, being the type that lives too much out of his emotions, rationally or not. The scriptures which I took at face value at the time also tell stories involving the demonic, which was likely of chief influence on my beliefs.

At times I would be afraid of the dark, to be in a basement alone etc. I used to sleep with the light on. Things were so bad as a kid that my poor mom had to stay in my room until I fell asleep many nights. I got to thinking of these things today as my kids have been displaying the same, and I’m sure common anxiety about going to the basement alone.

I eventually came to realize, which I’m sure most would have far, far sooner that nothing ever happened. I was never possessed by the devil, nothing ever flew around the room, nothing came out of my closet and Sasquatch never showed. Being by definition more an agnostic theist of late than anything else, and no I neither need nor want a label, if such a thing as a demon was ever to make it’s presence known, it would be doing me a favor in as much as this…my faith in God and the scriptures would be instantly and irrevocably as solid as a urinal cake in a North Pole men’s room.

Charismatic tradition gives a lot of airtime to spiritual warfare and the devil. I once actually sat through what I’ll loosely term as a sermon where the “pastor” spoke of a tree in a certain location in India where a winged demon lived. If one was unfortunate enough to fall under the shadow of this alleged harpy when it took flight, woe betide. Only problem with this anecdote is that according to the laws of physics which govern this little fishbowl we live in, the same laws that make it possible for a man to get up on a stage and tell ridiculous stories, it takes physical matter to block light which if memory serves rules out spirits of any kind by definition.

To my mind, if there were a devil in an unseen background plotting my destruction, there would be some kind of evidence, a smoking gun to show for it; something that goes beyond what is common to everyday life.What purpose the authors of the bible could have had in recording stories about the devil is beyond me to know; could it have been to control by fear, an instrument for conformity? Hell…I don’t know.

The Desert of the Real

I find myself standing under Tolkien's party tree with Bilbo saying, "I regret to inform you that this is the end. I am going away...goodbye!" And in a flash we disappear. At least this is how I'm feeling right now in terms of faith, belief. Most people who know me know that I haven't attended a church for years and the reasons why, which is what the previous incarnation of this blog spoke of at length.

In the past year, having begun to homeschool my kids and rethinking like never before what has come to be called Christianity, I feel like I'm finally seeing the boxes we choose to live in. I keep coming back to the idea of Neo taking the red pill; having left the "Matrix", I no longer see things the way I used to. I'm unable to. This has cascaded into everything. I didn't one day decide I was going to view the world differently...I just do.

I have razed everything I've believed to the ground, my pre-concieved notions, my assumptions, my confidence in the well trod path. My hope is to find a foundation. I want the real.

George Carlin once said of Christianity in one of his sets that he really tried, but the older he got, the more he realized something wasn't right. I can't help but wonder if our perceptions, our expectations of God are way off...if we assume too much of God.

I miss my matrix, my certainty that God loves me warts and all, that there is a great plan for my life, that God is somehow behind the scenes guiding it and concerned with it's details. Maybe some of these things are true but I need a better foundation to build those beliefs on than someone else's convictions and following the herd... and what do I do with two thousand year old texts penned by authors I've never met who had as much ability to screw things up as anyone?

New Vomit

Yep, I'm back in blogtown. So much is changing that I'm in need of another proverbial bag... perhaps in hope that getting this out can help me make some sense of it all.

Here's hoping.