Fewer Sex Partners Means a Happier Marriage

It was exposure to fundamentalist Christian notion that I should read the bible for getting answers to questions I had. This I got from my fundamentalist Christian pastor at my fundamentalist Christian church at that time. That in turn set me on mini-journeys through the bible for every question that arose. In the background I was doublechecking with answers I was already familiar with from parochial school, and since Catholicism differs from fundamentalist Christian in some regards, and I never felt totally at ease with accepting any dogma (letting others do my thinking for me or worse), ...

So I would come up with answers that were not popular such as that for divorce then bring them back to the fundamentalist Christian pastor who would occasionally lose his temper after I presented my results to him. Telling me to read the bible did not have the results that he had anticipated. After the fact, he got a bit stubborn that his interpretation of the bible was valid and mine was not. I became afraid to bring topics to him after that. There was a change of leadership at the church and a new younger pastor came in. He had different set of flippant pat answers for my questions, finally settling on letting me know that he had diverted a member of his previous congregation in the direction of someone outside the church leading discussions on topics of the type i was likely to bring up (that is, somewhat controversial topics that were not likely to be chosen as topics for sunday sermons). he perceived himself as clever in delegating problem congregation members to others. then a good portion of his sermon time was spent on warm up fluff. i soon left the church for this and other reasons, deciding that i could do as well or better on my own since i tended to be doing it on my own anyway. i do not have high expectations from organized religion anyway. I rarely got to share thoughts concerning comparative theologies and philosophies. This kind of stuff seemed to be stuff that pastors studied in theology school and then never returned to when they preached to congregations. i was getting into exegesis and so on, but in what i suppose could be termed an “unsupervised” manner. Some of the answers i got were more and more at variance with answers i got from pastors. It did not help that I had a Catholic background which almost none of the other congregation members had or could draw from during discussions. I could not really discuss with other members of the congregation because I was diving into much deeper detail than they were, asking questions that they had never bothered to ask themselves.
Bleah. Eventually I formed the opinion that most organized Christian congregation members were somewhat intellectually non-inquisitive. I really did not delve into what made pastors tick because I was somewhat apprehensive about asking them too much lest I get into an area in which their conscience diverged from the organized christian message that they needed to adhere to in public for sermons.

Early on I had some exposure to Jesuits but it was really too early for me intellectually.

I left out a lot. I did a lot of solo wandering in between factions mentioned above, starting in my later high school years. That is when I started to tune into buddhism. Later I began to look deeper into yoga which brought hinduism to my attention. I traveled a lot which brought me into contact with different cultures. Friends I made along the way would occasionally help me in my journey. I have been fortunate to have opportunities to explore and occasionally friends who would help me when the going got difficult.

The internet can be very helpful.

Since I have ended up on a solo path I am not afraid to challenge conventional thinking on a given question. During fundamentalist Christian sermons I could not help noticing a heavy reliance on the teachings of Paul in particular during sermons involving discussions of societal morals, which can always be a landmine, along with the relationship of church to society at large. When I was listening to a sermon I would hear other internal narratives— Catholic, Buddhist, and my own at times, sometimes coming up with different answers. For this question, then, I began to zone in on the topic of the canonization of Paul’s writings. This must have occurred very early in Christian church history. No one I knew personally seemed to know a lot about it. When I brought it up it would result in some blank stares. I compared Paul’s writings with the other gospels while dropping all questions of miracles and dogma and focusing on philosophy, and Paul came up short, in particular, in comparison with the words of Jesus himself. I backtracked and asked what if Paul were just a gifted but misguided guy, and why would someone want to canonize his writings if so from the perspective of the early christian organized religion. Bingo— an answer seemed to appear. It was that Paul was early organized Christianity’s bridge from Jewry (lower class) laity to Roman (middle class) laity. Now I know this is popular with PBS documentaries on Christianity but i am non-denominational in my search so that did not matter to me and still does not matter to me— truth (or as close to truth as i can get) is more important than the side allegiances of a source of commentary.

I have a small floating set of questions I toy with nowadays and I’m quite content to keep on with them until i get answers that i am personally satisfied with. I don’t worry much about what others think if they are not on my wavelength. Most others don’t have my background and don’t have time to research themselves in depth and are not willing to go solo when the circumstances require, so I can’t expect them to relate to methodologies i use or the directions that i end up going in. I would probably have ended up where I am anyway no matter what. Because all paths lead to enlightenment.

“Why?

I thought you typed you’d been EXPOSED to ‘christian’ doctrine?”

well i have had about the same amount of time in both Catholic and fundamentalist Christian guidance. It is disconcerting and distracting to get different but equally blithe and perhaps oversimplified answers, especially the second time around. however, my catholic exposure was early in my life and i had very few life experiences from which to draw from at the time i received that. so some of it was probably beyond me really to comprehend fully. so i can frequently come back from a fundamentalist christian sermon and say to myself what would a catholic pastor say and would it be different just as an intellectual exercise if for no other reason. sometimes (rarely) i would just stand up in the middle of a sermon and ask a question of the pastor if something really did not make sense. I never dared do that in Catholic church. But it made sense to me to do it at the time. No one else was doing it but the questions were glaringly obvious to me and left without answers if i did not challenge them immediately. why does everyone think sermons is one way? should they not be two way communication? what if a point being made is not clear? it seems to me inefficient unless one is looking at a sermon from a computer screen or listening to one on a radio or prerecorded program in which case it is not feasible. i got to thinking that people who just go to sermons to listen but not interact were not really listening well enough. one should always follow the speaker, think about what he or she is saying, and ask questions if something is not clear. but just sitting and listening seems overly passive and not conducive to elucidating truth.

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