To Mike, I read your blog. I find it very offensive, sad and disturbing. I had no idea you would make this comment but here are some quick thoughts and my first time 'blogging' "Last weekend I had a conversation with a fellow who is an ex evangelical. After high school he got very involved in the Open Bible Church movement. After a few years though he became disillusioned and left the church. Today he doubts that Jesus even existed. I must admit I was a little taken aback when he denied there ever was such a person as Jesus. His explanation for the existence of Christianity is that it is a self generated religion. In essence, what I heard from him was that Christians simply made it all up. It seemed to me that much faith is required to deny the Historicity of Jesus and even more faith to think Christianity is self generated. Some fringe people believe the Christian church is perpetrating the world's greatest hoax, but they are not able to mount a credible defense of their position." You missed many key points. 1. Very involved for me was = I consistently converted dozens and dozens inluding Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc. wondering how they could so emphatically cling to their incosistancies which led me to verify my position instead of being an excellent 'theological saleman'. Try looking up salvation in the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance most evangelzealots refer to and you find no meaning Greek or Hebrew that refers to the recent concept of a crisis religious conversion at all. 2. I had open debate and dialogue with every teacher and pastor in my Bible College and beyond. They had no basis for every single one of their clasess. Every one. They couldn't defend one class. At one point, I was one person asking questions and asking for a basis for everything and getting a basis for nothing. They all made up every class or copied what they had been taught from others. 3. They didn't do thorough research 4. They didn't do what they preached. Heal, convert, have character. have discipline, etc. 5. 'Leaving' as you put it was extremely difficult. I was alone. Lost all social ties. It cost me millions of dollars in the 80's and I experienced many years of confusion in de-programming myself. As I said there was no help for ex-evangelicals. 6. Why would you be so careless in what you wrote about me? 7. Why would you be take aback by what I said? I was friendly and very careful to be gentle with your hopefully temporary subjective hallucination with its absurdities and irrelevancies. What specific principle of conduct, or behavioural pattern or purpose I have could you not find inspiring and powerful? Find someone else alive who comes close to the adversity, research and practical results I've achieved. 8. Much faith is required? It's fine to use any meaning for faith you want but let's make it clear it's not spiritual or biblical. Faith = the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not yet seen. 9. If all religions, ideologies, philosophies and words aren't invented as imperfect but sometimes useful means of packaging communication by humans then who invented them? 10. You didn't indicate any understanding or exploration of my or any other alternative viewpoints. 11. All the different variations of Religions, or the sub-set of 'Christianity' or the very recent sub-sub-set of Evangelical Crisis Conversion type sects all are far from being spiritual, effective, desirable, clear, consistent, healthy or sustainable under mild scrutiny. 12. Why have a group hallucination with others when you can have a direct relationship with your spiritual nature as abundantly described throughout even the 'evangelical canon'. 13. The difference between old buddy evangelists Charles Templeton and Billy Graham was the first quit and the second continued but both knew they promoted a 'theological scam'. 14. What specifically do you about evil, wicked cursers who harass and condemn vulnerable females considering abortion. That political issue 'got hot' with Francis Schaeffer only in recent history. Remember when Greenpeace came by our school with their highly manipulative, emotionally leveraaged propaganda about the seal hunt. Well the anti-abortion wackos did the same and they swept through all the churches in the Lower Mainland like a demonic plague. 15. I've met many of the 'big players' behind the scenes. None of them really believe in the actual message. They laughed at me as a naive 'x'. There is a term I've forgot for those converted as adults who actually take it all seriously. 16. cast doubt on "official explanations". Official ezplanations? What makes them official? 17. You talk about 9/11 strangely. How can you assume what happened? Are you encouraging or condoning those who over-reacted to say the least and used it as an excuse to kill tens of thousands of innocent people? I've made 'contrary predictions' about world events before and have subsequently met the players and confirmed my 'predictions'. You'd be very surprised how things are not as they appear to be. And how gullible the western media is. 18. You need to focus your topics. You make very disjointed and unrelated connections, hopefully not on purpose 19. You ommitted the majority of what I shared which was the ideal that all groups including religious poople be able to constructively cooperate with non-religious people to show both practically and symbolically that there is hope for cooperation globally. 20. How could you omit my stress on mutual tolerance, the golden rule, forgiveness, etc. with you and then do the opposite? 21. If by 'fringe people' you mean myself I'll take that as a badge of honour. With an extremely high IQ, absolutely exceptional communication skills, etc. I could have easily compromised integrity at St.George's, University, Bible College, etc. I've been offered almost everything. 22. Why use intellectual manipulations of words to dishonour the entirely different realm of a subjective, personal and internal relationship with God? 23. One of the true test is can you have a sense of humour about it. Some interesting tidbits for perspective and levity: 1, In July of 1999, the Pope made headlines and I would like to read you an excerpt from that news story: "The Pope drastically lowered the temperature of hell Wednesday, when he declared that the physical side of eternal damnation for sinners was less painful than being cut off from God. According to an official Vatican transcript of the pope's speech, Pope John Paul II noted that the Scriptural references to hell and the images portrayed by Scripture are only symbolic and figurative of "the complete frustration and emptiness of life without God." It was part of a concerted effort by the Vatican to purge clouds, harps, pearly gates, devils with pitch forks, and seas of flame from the popular image of heaven and hell, replacing the idea of infinite physical torture for the damned with something more akin to eternal loneliness. The Pope dismissed the notion of heaven as a physical place among the clouds and he said, "More than a physical place, hell is a state of those who freely and definitely separate themselves from God". 2,Somewhat modern thinking ministers: He writes: "Undoubtedly all of us have at some time been exposed to a theology that presented the blood and thunder of God and the hereafter. God was a stern and unrelenting judge who sat on a throne somewhere and recorded in a big book all the deeds of our lives. The story includes a final "judgment" when the books are balanced, and if the balance is found to be in our favour, we go up, and if against, we go down. We have envisioned heaven with angels and harps and white billowy clouds, and the domain of hell with its hot furnaces, its mass of people writhing in everlasting torment. Sensible people (he continues), have always rejected this ridiculous picture. It seems inconceivable that intelligent people could admit to such a capricious and sadistic deity that would allow or direct such things...." He goes on in a later paragraph to say "The "hellfire" theory holds that all pagans, heathens and non-Christians of every description are excluded from heaven and thus consigned to hell if they die in their benighted state. Just imagine, if your imagination can encompass or tolerate so awful an idea: sixteen hundred million souls in this generation alone and no less than one hundred billion sentient beings wallowing in eternal fire since the awakening of man in the last four thousand years. A universe that could permit or cause so monstrous a thing would be worse than worthless from every standpoint." Interesting words to consider. Let's look at scripture and see what we can find about this topic. Hell, in the Bible, is literally translated as Gehenna. It was an actual place, near the city of Jerusalem where they would burn all the waste. The city dump. The consuming fires of Gehenna burned continually. It was a smoky, smelly, gruesome place. So it became synonymous with suffering. A metaphor for what happens in our souls when we go through inner torment. Have you ever been in hell? I've been there. In my work in the prisons, I hear at length, how people can live in hell. Drug addictions, trapped in the past, memories of abuse. We can imprison ourselves in the fires of hell. The good news is that fire can be a purifier. Through those experiences, we can transform. We can open the gates of hell and let ourselves out. And instead, go through the pearly gates. That reminds me of a joke I heard. St. Peter is at the pearly gates checking out everyone as they enter and suddenly he notices Ali Baba and his forty thieves. And he stops them, "Whoa, wait a minute, I'm not sure about you guys." So he tells them to wait and he runs over to the phone and calls God and says, "you'll never guess who's here, Ali Baba and the 40 thieves." And before God can answer, he looks back and goes "Oh my, their gone!" And God says, "The thieves left?" And St. Peter says, "No, the Pearly Gates!" They ripped them off. The truth is that you don't need to bust your way in! Every single one of us already has the key. The Master Key. To the kingdom. Jesus talked about the kingdom of heaven at some length and his descriptions do not sound like a place. Jesus spent much time spinning parables and weaving metaphors about heaven. And yet there is not one word in the more than one hundred references that He made to heaven where Jesus describes it as being "out there". Instead, in Matthew 13, he likened it to a grain of mustard seed, (something that grows and is filled with potential to become more), leaven or yeast, (a living power that promotes growth) a treasure hidden in a field, (something precious and valuable), so precious and so valuable that we are to seek it first. Today's Bible verse says an interesting thing about heaven: "Neither shall they say, Lo here! Or Lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you". Luke 17:21 And similarly, in the Gospel of Thomas 113, it reads: "His disciples said to him ‘When will the kingdom come?' Jesus said, ‘It will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying here it is or there it is. Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it." It is here, now. Lo in the midst of you. The traditional descriptions of heaven and hell with the pearly gates and eternal fire come from the book of Revelation. And Revelation, as the name implies, is a vision. With deep spiritual significance. Like a dream, with symbolic imagery, not to be taken literally, but metaphorically, about our own internal states of being. Heaven is a state of mind. When you live in the awareness of God as a Presence and a Power in your life, when no matter what happens in the outer world, you remain in peace, heaven is indeed in the midst of you. It's not a physical place to go to, that peaceful state, although we usually take short vacations there, don't we? The aim is for all of us to establish permanent residence. Get our green card, so to speak. It is a state of being that we can reach in this moment. And only in this moment. That is a very important point. We won't enter the kingdom if we are stuck in the past. It is a moment by moment experience. Jesus said in Luke 9:62, "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God". We need to stay present.