{"id":4849,"date":"2016-03-29T17:00:20","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T23:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/?p=4849"},"modified":"2016-03-27T09:31:15","modified_gmt":"2016-03-27T15:31:15","slug":"losing-my-religion-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2016\/03\/losing-my-religion-twice.html","title":{"rendered":"Losing My Religion, Twice"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I\u2019ve long respected the work of Gordon White and his Rune Soup<\/a> blog, but these days it seems like I\u2019m turning into a full-fledged fanboy. So be it. I came for the chaos magic and I stayed for his brilliant analysis of how magic is interwoven through human society at all levels. I loved his book Star.Ships<\/a><\/em>, I\u2019ve got his next book The Chaos Protocols<\/a><\/em> on order, and I\u2019ve been listening to his Rune Soup podcast<\/a> every week.<\/p>\n

Episode 15<\/a> from two weeks ago is particularly good. It\u2019s a conversation with Dr. Jeffrey Kripal<\/a>, Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University in Houston. The podcast starts off rather slow \u2013 I was decidedly unimpressed for the first 7 or 8 minutes. But then it really took off. If you listen to it (and I highly recommend it) don\u2019t give up on it too soon.<\/p>\n

One of the key points continued Gordon\u2019s dissatisfaction with the academic world and their non-theistic assumptions. How can you effectively study something you don\u2019t believe is real? The answer is \u201cnot well.\u201d They discuss academics who toe the company line and present their work in strictly atheist terms, but then privately discuss the mystical experiences they had but are afraid to talk about for fear of killing their careers.<\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nThat\u2019s interesting, but what I want to talk about here is Dr. Kripal\u2019s proposal that \u201cyou have no business being a scholar of religion until you\u2019ve lost at least two worlds.\u201d His point is that if you lose one religion, you assume you can just find another one. But once you\u2019ve lost a second world, you realize that your quest is deeper than finding the \u201cright\u201d religion.<\/p>\nOr as I see it, someone who\u2019s still in the religion of their childhood will have too many unexamined assumptions to honestly deal with different religions, and someone who\u2019s on their second religion is likely to have the zeal of a convert and also won\u2019t be able to deal honestly with different religions. It\u2019s only after you\u2019ve lost your religion twice, after you\u2019ve lost two worlds, that you\u2019re humble enough to realize the limitations of any religion (i.e. \u2013 there is no certainty) but still inspired to find what truth and meaning you can.<\/p>\nKripal and White did not go into \u201closing two worlds\u201d in depth. It strikes me as overly general \u2013 I know several people who are on their first or second religion who are very good religious scholars or scholarly religious practitioners.<\/p>\nBut it\u2019s true in my case.<\/p>\nContrary to the impression you might get from reading my personal stories, my first religion was not fundamentalist Christianity. My first religion was \u201cJesus loves me this I know.\u201d It was Moses parting the Red Sea and receiving the Ten Commandments. It was Linus\u2019s monologue from the Gospel of Luke in A Charlie Brown Christmas<\/em>. It was Jesus dying an unjust death at the hands of Pilate and rising again on Easter Sunday. It was funerals where tearful relatives consoled themselves with \u201che\u2019s gone home to be with the Lord.\u201d<\/p>\nIf I had been able to hold on to that religion, I might still be a Christian. Now, every time I say that a Pagan friend puts her thumbs on the sides of her head and spreads her fingers upward, like antlers. Yes, I have a relationship with a certain Antlered God that goes back to this same point in my life. Was my Paganism and polytheism inevitable? We\u2019ll never know.<\/p>\nAlthough I was in a fundamentalist church, the children were largely shielded from the hellfire sermons. But I paid attention, and I was still very young when I realized that Jesus might love me, but His father didn\u2019t love the vast majority of the people in the world, who \u2013 according to what I was taught \u2013 were headed for hell for following the wrong religion.<\/p>\nI could not \u2013 and still cannot \u2013 reconcile an all-powerful loving God with any sentient creature being condemned to eternal torment. And so my first religion, my first world, was lost.<\/p>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/243\/2016\/03\/Hot-Springs-2015-51.jpg\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-4851\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter wp-image-4851\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/243\/2016\/03\/Hot-Springs-2015-51.jpg\" alt=\"Hot Springs 2015 51\" width=\"600\" height=\"400\"><\/a><\/p>\nWhile I never became an atheist, my second world was rationality.<\/p>\nIf the Baptists were wrong about eternal judgment, what else were they wrong about? As I grew and read and studied, I learned they were wrong about evolution and the age of the Earth. They were wrong about the origins and transmission of the Bible. And much of what they called \u201cGod\u2019s Law\u201d was simply the cultural norms of a long-dead society.<\/p>\nI professed belief in a deistic God, but I looked for meaning and truth with logic, not with scripture and doctrine. I tried to follow the teachings of Jesus, which are a pretty good way for anyone to live. When I became an adult I left the Baptist church and tried to find a home in mainline Protestantism.<\/p>\nBut my rational religion was a powerless religion, and it was unable to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2015\/09\/escaping-fundamentalism.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">remove the tentacles of fundamentalism<\/a> from my mind and soul. And so I lost my second world.<\/p>\nIt took me a long time to get from that loss to the point where I committed myself to dedicated Pagan study and practice. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2013\/04\/my-defining-moment.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">I\u2019ve told that story before<\/a> and there\u2019s no need to repeat it here.<\/p>\nSo what does all this mean?<\/p>\nLosing my first religion meant losing my innocence. I learned the world isn\u2019t a nice, safe, loving place. I learned that authority figures don\u2019t always know what they\u2019re talking about, and some authority figures abuse their authority. But in any context, losing your innocence is a necessary part of growing up. I see Pagans who innocently (or perhaps, na\u00efvely) worship Nature, forgetting that Nature is beautiful but Nature is also terrible. My love for Nature is <a href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/johnbeckett\/2013\/05\/loving-nature-in-tornado-season.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\">grounded in reality and awareness<\/a>.<\/p>\nLosing my second religion meant, as Dr. Kripal explained in the podcast, I realized I couldn\u2019t just find the \u201cright\u201d religion and everything would be OK. I had to work on myself \u2013 I spent a year reading, studying, and meditating with the strongest dedication of my life. I not only learned\u00a0there is no such thing as religious certainty, I accepted it. Here\u2019s an entry from my private journal from the very early days of my Pagan journey:<\/p>\n<blockquote>In the end, you have to have the courage to move forward as though your beliefs are absolutely true, even if you can\u2019t be absolutely sure they are.<\/p><\/blockquote>\nI\u2019ve long fantasized about growing up Pagan and getting started on this path much earlier in life. I\u2019ve handled the useless regret by saying \u201cI had to go through what I went through to become who and what I am.\u201d Now I see just how true that statement is.<\/p>\nIn order to become who I truly am, I had to lose my religion \u2013 twice.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr. Jeffrey Kripal says you cannot study religion until you\u2019ve lost two worlds. 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