The God of the Christian Bible

His Characteristics and Why I’m Not Fond of Him

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it: a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

-          Richard Dawkins, from The God Delusion

            One day while living at Purdue University, I picked up Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion. I was browsing through a campus bookstore while my wife searched for her semester textbooks, and the bright metallic cover caught my eye. I’d heard about Dr. Dawkins and that he was some sort of famous biologist. I’d also heard that he was an out and out Atheist, something that I’d been taught as a child was akin to devil worship. Intrigued, I bought it and took it back to our apartment. At once his wit and style were clearly evident, and he made shameless attacks on religion seem almost effortless. For the first time in my life, I began to think that maybe I wasn’t the reason why Christianity didn’t work for me. After all, I had been taught growing up that whenever bad things happened to me, it was either my fault, or God was just testing me, or it might have been that God was working “in mysterious ways”. But what if there’s another reason bad things happen to us? What if we’re not at fault for all the problems in the world?

            This line of thinking continued to bother me for some time until I found another intriguing book. The final nail in the coffin that held my thinly-veiled faith was when I picked up the book God is Not Great, by the late Christopher Hitchens. His work had come highly recommended by other famous Atheists, so I thought that I should give his book a try. I was totally unprepared for the vicious verbal whipping he gave to the Church, God, and Christianity as a whole. For the first time in my life, someone presented me with the idea that God is not really a God of Love – the common depiction of the deity among mainstream Christianity. In fact, quite the opposite might be true. God, at least the God of the Bible, could actually be a monster. Hitchens’ visceral depictions of the grotesque monolith that modern religion had turned into opened my eyes to a view from the outside looking in at the faith that I held as a child. Able to see Christianity from a different perspective, it allowed me to shine a light into every dark nook and cranny; it was as if I was suddenly seeing my former faith in the harsh light of day for the very first time. The following is an example of Christopher’s hard look at religion:

“Religion is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life, before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president; Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can f****g die and leave North Korea!”

-          Christopher Hitchens, from God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

            Reading Dawkins’ book gave me the ability to think critically about religion and faith in particular. Reading Hitchens’ book showed me how twisted religion now seems in the more-civilized modern world. The latter of the two was a great revelation to me, because I realized that the Christian conception of God is literally terrifying to me in my older age. In the New Testament, Jesus tells his followers to love one another, give aid to the poor and needy, abstain from vice and evil actions, and live life with purpose. But his Heavenly Father sends a much more foreboding message. According to the Bible, God is more than willing to kill off all life on the planet, order the slaughter of whole nation-states, sacrifice children (including his own) in horrific fashion, and torture billions of people for eternity. Now don’t get me wrong, I think there are many good messages in the Bible. The example of Jesus in the Bible was way ahead of his time, almost like that of Mahatma Gandhi: another compassionate, wise soul who led a peaceful revolution. But the picture of a Cupid-like God that I had when I was still in the faith was completely shattered for me upon a closer examination of the actual text.

            The best way I can think of to show you what I mean is through a good old-fashioned Bible Study. There are many examples of God displaying his wrath and lack of sound moral judgment in the Old Testament, but I believe that the most telling – and horrifying – example is the Story of Lot. If you choose to do so, you may follow along with the actual text; I will be commenting on the NIV version of Genesis 18:16 through Genesis 19:38. Our story begins with the Lord speaking to Abraham about his family line becoming a great and powerful nation. Then, in verse 16 three men (these men are commonly translated as being angels who appear as men) are sent by the Lord into the kingdoms of Sodom and Gomorrah, because “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great and their sin is so grievous.” (Gen 18:20). Nowadays, most people interpret Sodom and Gomorrah’s sins to be linked to homosexuality, as described in Jude (1:7): “In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion.” Although there are suggestions of many other crimes committed in the two cities listed in the Jewish Talmud, Sodom and Gomorrah became synonymous in antiquity with the crime of sodomy – then used to refer to homosexual intercourse and rape.

            In verses 23-33, God tells Abraham that he plans to destroy the cities, but Abraham pleads with him not to do it if he can find 50 righteous people in the cities; he eventually convinces God to stop even if he can find only 10. Once they received their orders, the angels went down to Sodom and met with Lot. In verses 2-3 (chapter 19 now), Lot convinces them to stay the night with him. That same night, the citizens of Sodom surround Lot’s house and demand to see the angels: “Where are the men who came to you tonight? Bring them out to us so that we can have sex with them.” (Gen 19:5). Instead of handing over the angels to the crowd, Lot offers his virgin daughters as a peace offering: “No, my friends. Don’t do this wicked thing. Look, I have two daughters who have never slept with a man. Let me bring them out to you, and you can do what you like with them. But don’t do anything to these men, for they have come under the protection of my roof.” (Gen 19:7-8). The crowd gets even more rowdy, and the angels pull Lot back into the house before striking the crowd with blindness. They then tell Lot to gather his family and escape the city before they destroy it. He managed only to convince his wife and 2 daughters to leave with him, and they fled the city as quickly as they could.

            Resting in a nearby village, Lot and his family are safe as God “rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Gen 19:24) and wiped out every living thing in the entire southern plain of Canaan. Unfortunately, the angels had said prior to Lot’s family prior to their departure: “Flee for your lives! Don’t look back, and don’t stop anywhere in the plain! Flee to the mountains or you will be swept away!” (Gen 19:17). Lot directly disobeyed the angels’ orders by staying in a nearby village, but he convinced God to spare the village. Lot’s wife, however, disobeyed the order to not look back at the destruction and “she became a pillar of salt” (Gen 19:26). In the end, God saved only Lot and his 2 daughters out of the cities on the plain. They fled to the nearest mountain and stayed in a cave where the daughters proceeded to get Lot drunk on wine and have sex with him: “The next day the older daughter said to the younger, ‘Last night I slept with my father. Let’s get him to drink wine again tonight, and you go in and sleep with him so we can preserve our family line through our father.’” (Gen 19:24). The 2 daughters then gave birth to children who would become the fathers of the Moabite and Ammonite tribes in the land of Canaan. This is how the Story of Lot ends.

           

            Now, let’s discuss the actions of the key characters in that story. Sodom and Gomorrah are supposedly full of people so bad, so full of sin that God could not find even 10 people worthy of being saved. The people who lived there must have been extremely despicable to have warranted destruction by “burning sulfur raining down from the sky”. Lot, much like Noah in the Biblical flood story, must have been saved from the coming catastrophe on the basis of his righteousness (and the fact that he was Abraham’s nephew). However, we find that Lot is actually a terrible person who commits deeds that we can only describe as morally reprehensible. First, he offers up his virgin daughters to be raped by an angry mob in order to save 2 angels who probably could have saved themselves. Next, he abandons his sons-in-law to die in the cities and takes off in the middle of the night with only his wife and daughters. He even disobeys a direct order from God by not leaving the plain entirely; Lot’s wife, however, is not so lucky. And finally, he manages to get drunk enough to have sex with his own daughters, and even manages to get them pregnant. It’s pretty safe to say that Lot comes out on the other end of this story looking like a person who was definitely deserving of some divine retribution.

            But what about God in this story? First, he displays a distinct sexism that can also be seen throughout the rest of the Bible. God has shown he will argue with a man (Abraham or Lot), and even wrestle with a man (Jacob), but he will not take any disobedience from a woman (Lot’s wife). Next, God practices nepotism with his favorite humans and their families. Lot and his family are saved largely because he is Abraham’s nephew – it’s hard to argue that he deserved saving based on his own merits – and there are countless more examples of God showing favor on someone’s family simply because they obeyed him (or like Adam, cursing an entire family line because of one case of disobedience). Finally, God displays a serious lack of justice when judging humans. Sodom and Gomorrah are just one of many cases in the Bible where God destroys an entire city – sometimes even nations or entire species – because they were full of “wicked” people. But I would think that those cities had to contain at least a small fraction of innocent people. You can’t seriously believe that a city the size of Sodom or Gomorrah was empty of pregnant women or children. How could God in his right mind ever massacre unborn children for being wicked?

            The Story of Lot and its exposition of God’s decisions and judgment serve as a good place to start my case study on God. No one can agree on the exact characteristics of God, but some of the common ones associated with him include: loving, caring, patient, all-powerful, all-knowing, all-encompassing, and perfect. After re-reading some sections of the Bible – including the Story of Lot – and after hearing some different perspectives on the subject matter, I’ve concluded that the following characteristics of God are also found in the Bible: sexist, abusive, racist, murderous, and sadistic. These terms are all used to describe the dregs of humanity, but I believe that they also apply to the God of Christianity. I plan on beginning a series of five posts dedicated to each of these 5 characteristics of God, and for each one I will be using direct evidence from the Bible to support my claims. My hope is that I will be able to convince my readership that they can’t just take someone else’s word when it comes to God’s thoughts or actions. According to the Bible, no one is capable of knowing the mind of God; I believe that to be truer now than ever before due to God’s apparent mental instabilities. In all seriousness, I also hope this series will provide for my readership a new sense of perspective on religion; a view from the outside looking in.

Bottomless Pits Are a Myth

Why Emperor Palpatine Might Still Be Lurking in the Shadows

            Have you ever seen the ending of the movie Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi? You remember that moment where the menacingly hooded Emperor Palpatine seems like he finally has the upper hand over Luke Skywalker? He’s got Luke right where he wants him: Luke is too weak to overcome Palpatine’s deadly Force Lightning and is nearly finished off. But just when Luke needs his father most, Darth Vader realizes his grave mistake of aligning himself with Palpatine and sacrifices himself in order to defeat Palpatine. He proceeds to pick the Emperor up like a hunk of firewood and throws him into one of the many bottomless pits that inhabit the aptly-named Death Star (see Episodes IV & V for more evidence that bottomless pits are a staple of the Empire’s architecture). Darth Vader saves Luke from certain destruction, the Empire is overthrown, and the Rebels win the day.

            It’s a great moment in cinematic history, but I’ve always wondered what happened to Emperor Palpatine after he was thrown into the bottomless pit. He was one of the most influential characters in the “Holy Trilogy”, and even though he was a classically evil character I don’t believe he was irredeemable. What if – much like his Sith apprentice Darth Vader – he was simply misled about the Force and ended up on the wrong side due to unfortunate circumstances? Vader, himself a Sith Lord, did some decidedly evil things (murdering children in the Jedi Temple, killing his best friend Obi Wan Kenobi) and he was able to be redeemed in the end. After all, the only things Americans love more than a chorus is a redemption story; we all delight seeing people take full advantage of second chances. So whatever happened to Emperor Palpatine? Some people probably finished the movie and forgot about him; in their minds the Emperor is still falling right now and will continue to live in some kind of terminal velocity purgatory forever. But, as we find out in real life no pit is bottomless and no freefall is forever.

            When I was younger, I honestly never imagined that I would be in self-imposed exile from the Church. I spent the first 18 years of my life in a church; I’m sure it’s possible to count the number of Sundays my family was absent on one hand. For a very long time, I held Christianity as my faith, and this had a strong impact on how I viewed the world. My friends were Christian, my parents’ friends were Christian, everyone who I ever spent time with outside of school was Christian. I don’t know if I ever believed completely in what the Bible – the foundation of my parents’ Christianity – teaches, but everyone else around me did believe so it seemed as though it must have been the truth. To begin the analogy between myself and a certain Sith Lord, I thought I had it all figured out and that I was secure in my standing with God. Doubt, in this case the Rebel Alliance, was not big enough yet for me to take notice. My certainty in my faith (or lack of evidence to the contrary) lasted all the way into my teenage years, when reasons for doubt started to make themselves known to me.

            I grew up in a Church of Christ being taught that our God is a God of Love (a phrase which makes me think of a cartoon portrayal of Cupid and a look of innocence on his face as he spreads joy to humanity one heart-tipped arrow at a time). As a teenager, I began to hear the question: if God’s main attribute is Love, then why does the Bible describe him doing so many nasty things? Even though I was not a very devout believer in my teens, I still read the Bible from time to time. I would cherry-pick my way through it, hitting upon the phrases deemed important by my youth minister and skipping over the more boring or controversial sections. Even when I would land on one of these verses, I managed to put a Godly spin on it to try to kill off any lingering seeds of doubt. Over my high school years I read less and less of the Bible; in part due to the ever-growing teenage desire to rebel, but also because some sections of it did not sit well with me anymore. I began to think about the fates of all the people who could not possibly hear the Gospel in their lifetime, and how unfair it was for them to not be born white and middle-class like me. I still did not dare to question further, for fear of provoking a loving yet somehow simultaneously wrathful God that I understood less and less. The Rebel Alliance that represented my doubt was growing stronger in the void.

            The Rebels finally made their move; I was pushed off the precarious ledge of my faith and began my years-long fall into the abyss of true doubt. Two things happened in my late teens that began my freefall: the first is that my older brother – who had a long and often tenuous relationship with the Church community – made his break from the Church upon graduation from high school. He was no longer forced to attend services every Sunday and only did so from then on when guilted into it by my parents. For the longest time Brian had served as my role model; he was by no means perfect, but I looked up to him like any little brother would. This event had a profound impact on me, and although Brian was treated like the black sheep that left the Church because something was wrong with him, I began to understand that maybe something was wrong with the Church itself. The second life-changing event was when I started dating my then-girlfriend, now-wife, and lifelong-best friend, Holli. She is one of the most open-minded people I’ve ever met, and constantly helps me to push my boundaries. Holli had not grown up in a Christian home like I had, and she had been spurned by the dark side of religion multiple times in her life. Even though she still had respect for Christianity, her experiences with the Church led me to see my faith in a completely different light.

            These two events pushed me off my ledge; however, it took me some time to realize that I had fallen at all. Once I began my first classes at Purdue, I realized Church wasn’t really that important to me anymore. I went to a campus church – filled with nearly a hundred of my college-age peers – for several weeks, but it was mainly out of habit and I quickly fell out of the routine. I still went with my parents on the occasional Sunday when I was home from school, but I didn’t attend any church services on my own for several years. I’d like to say that I had thought long and hard about my faith and had reached a conclusion, but instead the truth is that I locked my conflicted feeling about the subject deep down inside and hoped that they would never resurface. By my senior year of college, Holli and I were married and she wanted to try going to Church one more time to see if it was really something we wanted to be a part of. I realized quickly that it was definitely not for me, but I continued going with her until she realized the same thing. We wanted the sense of community and fellowship that is easy to come by in a church setting, but we didn’t want any of the religious nonsense that came with it. That was the last time I willingly set foot in a church building.

            By that time I’d realized I didn’t want anything to do with religion, but I was still unsure of what to believe about life. Even though I was very uneasy with Christianity, I didn’t stop fearing that there might be a God somewhere who was still watching me. This part of my freefall was terrifying; what if the Bible was actually true and my non-belief was going to send me straight to Hell for an eternity of torture? Even though I had completely stopped believing in the existence of God, I felt that if I even said aloud the words “God does not exist” then I would be immediately struck down (I’d prefer a flying ice-cream truck to lightning). I’d believed in God and Jesus, or at least tried to believe for the first 18 years of my life. Practically everyone I’d ever known was Christian, and most of them would still consider themselves believers. Now I was losing that whole part of my life because I couldn’t get with the program. What was it that made me different from my family and friends? Why couldn’t I just believe like them? I wanted to pretend to believe just so that I could feel – even if only for a short time – like everything was back to normal. That section of my freefall from faith lasted only about 6 months, but it seemed like it lasted a lifetime.

            I eventually (and with much helpful prodding) stopped pretending to be religious. I realized that I wasn’t like my family or my friends. I was different; I saw Christianity as a charade. In my eyes, religion was something to be despised, not rejoiced in. My freefall from faith finally stopped in August of last year. While browsing through a bookstore with my wife (who was buying textbooks for her last semester at Purdue) I found a book with a very interesting title: it was The God Delusion by Dr. Richard Dawkins. I’d been constantly searching for a different perspective on religion since I made my break with the Church, and I found exactly what I was looking for in the bookstore that day. Shortly thereafter I began watching Youtube videos of religious debates, and I bought several more Atheist/Agnostic books. I became ever more intrigued by the history of religion, and the effects it has had on our country and the world. My entire worldview has changed significantly in the last few years, and my newfound freedom of thought has coincided with a chance for me to start a new life (with a new job in a new state). I have survived my fall from faith into the depths and doubt, and have come out a better person on the other side. I’d like to think that Emperor Palpatine had the same opportunity.

The Path Less Traveled

My Road to Unbelief

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both... Oh, I kept the first for another day! / Yet knowing how way leads on to way / I doubted if I should ever come back... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.” (Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken)

            I’ve done a lot of reading and thinking over the last year, and that’s led to me posting a lot of things on Facebook that probably offended some of my friends and family who are Christian. While I stand by everything I’ve posted, I realize that no one likes getting on Facebook to be preached at. That is why I am starting this blog. It’s a chance for me to take a stand on my soapbox and give voice to my opinions. I’ve found that it’s much easier to achieve clarity on an issue when you put your thoughts down on paper (metaphorical though it may be in this case).

            If you’ve read this far, I’d like to give you fair warning here and now that my posts may be rather lengthy. I didn’t write this whole thing in one sitting, so I wouldn’t expect anyone to read it that way. I will also warn you that a lot of the things I write in this blog might be offensive. The vast majority of people I know are religious, and most of those are Christian. Every religious person necessarily takes their faith very seriously. My hope is that nothing I write here is perceived as a personal attack, but rather as a fair and open criticism of religion. I think that everyone is free to believe what they want about the world, as long as they don’t force their beliefs on others. So while I don’t have the right to tell others their beliefs are wrong, I do stand by my right to think they are wrong. To be exact, I believe Christianity is morally, factually, and logically wrong. If you disagree with my reasoning or think that I’m just flat-out wrong about the whole thing, feel free to respond to me. I don’t take this subject lightly, but I believe that open discussion of all subjects is the mark of a truly free society. Without any further ado, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of this post.

            The word Atheist carries with it a lot of connotations, some good but mostly bad. There’s been a lot of talk about Atheism during its resurgence in America in the last decade: they’re bad people who have no moral compass, who strive in every instance to put down or discard religion, and they are acting in collusion with the gays and the immigrants to destroy America. I’m not kidding; I’ve heard people say these things before. I promise you that Atheists are no worse of people than any Christians you’ve met. Chances are that you know more Atheists than you think; they don’t always make their non-belief known because their worldview doesn’t hinge on convincing others to believe. Atheists tend to get a bad rap in America because they push back against religion, which only makes sense as they are a minority here in America. Sometimes that means that they take it too far (like petitioning a university to ban players from putting crosses on their helmets to honor a dead teammate), and the actions and beliefs of the fringes of Atheism make it seem as though the idea is rather absurd.

            That being said, I’ve realized over the last year that being a Christian is infinitely more absurd than being an Atheist. The Bible is a comedy of errors (almost like the Purdue Football team); it’s full of historical inaccuracies, self-contradictions, questionable morals, and logical pitfalls. Several examples include: 1) if Jesus was born of a virgin, how was he born into the bloodline of David? 2) If the Ark had no rudder, sail, or motor, why did Noah send a dove out to seek dry land? 3) Why was it okay for Lot to stop the crowd from raping God’s messengers by offering up his virgin daughters instead? 4) Without eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, how were Adam and Eve supposed to know that disobeying God was wrong? This is by no means a complete list, but it should give you a good idea of the problems I have with the aforementioned text. I’ve also found out a lot about Christians through personal experience and observations of people around me. One of the things I’ve noticed is that many believers (and this is true in all religions) are very complacent in their view of the world. Speaking mainly from examples that I’m familiar with, Christians tend to acquire their entire worldview from the Bible. That’s perfectly fine if someone wants to structure their core belief system around a religious text, but they don’t seem to realize that there is so much more to the world than what is covered in any single book (even one as massive as the Bible).

            The Bible may be able to tell you what is morally right and wrong (I’d argue we don’t get our morals from the Bible at all), but it doesn’t tell you anything about the nature of the universe. If you went to a university – not a Bible college, but an actual university – and claimed that the only information you needed to get your degree was in the Bible, they would laugh you out the door. In the days when the Bible was written, the prevailing notion was that the Earth was the center of our universe and Heaven and Hell were physically adjacent. We now realize that the universe is bigger than we ever imagined, estimated to be approximately 93 billion light-years in diameter and almost 14 billion years old! Likewise, we’ve also discovered concepts like the germ theory of disease and how to replicate nuclear fusion in the core of our Sun. I can safely say that our knowledge of the universe and its inner workings has increased exponentially since Biblical times. And yet Christians will attempt to use their Bible, which is itself one of many copies of innumerable translations of ancient manuscripts detailing conflicting eyewitness testimonies, to refute all that we’ve learned.  I find it a constant source of amazement that so many people I know - people that I consider extremely intelligent and open-minded - actually accept the truth claims of that book. But I digress from my point.

            The point that I’m trying to make here is that life is an uphill battle, much like the ancient Greek myth of Sisyphus; he was forced to an eternity of rolling a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down each time he approached the summit. We are transient creatures, and thus have only two options: go backwards or press forwards. I’m convinced that to remain static in life is to be dead. We must constantly try to improve ourselves, whether it is physically, mentally, or spiritually. Therein lays the biggest problem with Christianity. Instead of embracing progress, Christians prefer the status quo. They teach that the world is how it is because God made it this way, and there’s no need to change it because it will all come to an end soon enough. That’s why many of them reject global warming, deny basic human rights (after they leave the womb, of course), and despise evolution. This desire to stubbornly resist societal and scientific advances is creating a lot of friction in America, considered by some the most progressive civilization in history. There is no driving force for change in Christianity, and many people are leaving the church because of it.

            The process of change for me has been a long, often confusing, and occasionally upsetting road to some form of personal enlightenment. I met special people along the way that have shown me time and again how to break from the mold and think for myself. I have read, and continue to read, many books about subjects ranging from science to history, and as far as philosophy and psychology. I watch debates on Youtube about the existence of God, the beginning of our universe, and the origins of morality. I encounter new arguments on an almost daily basis and try to determine which are true and which are false. I even continue to learn amazing new things about my own particular area of interest (nuclear power plants) in classes they hold at work. I won’t claim that I know everything there is to know or that I hold some great personal truth, but I’d like think that I become a better person with each new thing that I learn. The Nobel Prize-winning French author André Gide put it very succinctly: “Believe those who are seeking truth. Doubt those who find it.” One of my favorite lecturers that I’ve heard (though unfortunately not in person), Dr. Lawrence Krauss is fond of saying that all of his students should have one of their core beliefs – something which they feel they could not live without – proven wrong at least once in their lives. I tend to agree with that sentiment.

            The things that I held true for the majority of my young life seem to me in retrospect like those of a toddler. As we grow up and become adults, we put away childish things. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying that Christians are like toddlers. I’m simply asserting that adults, like children, tend to accept what they are told, because they don’t know any better. We believe in Santa Claus until one day we realize that our parents sneak the presents under the tree while we are asleep. Likewise we believe in whatever deity our parents believe in until we’re old enough to understand that it was just a legend, a tradition passed on by the generations before us. Religion is a tool that humans created to explain our origins and our purpose, defining what we knew about the world and our place in it. Science has since shown how narrow our knowledge was back then, and even now we can only imagine what the future holds for our species. The truth about our genetic origins is being uncovered and the reason for existence of our universe is out there somewhere in the vast unknown. I find the fact that there is so much more to know about this reality extremely tantalizing. How could a book that claims to possess ultimate knowledge ever capture the magnificence of the unknown?  

            I haven’t nearly covered everything I have to say about religion, but I think that’s going to be the end of this post. I want to thank you for reading this narrative of mine; I’m not immune to the vain hope that others read and take to heart what I write. In regards to the contents of this post, if you agree, disagree, or simply want to share your own thoughts on the subject, feel free to contact me anytime.

Sincerely,

A Follower of Paths Less Traveled