Deism

Odin’s Eye – Why I am a Deist

/ Ed Raby Sr / 1 Comment

Happy Thor’s Day

Introduction:

I said for a long time that if I wasn’t a Christian I would be a Deist, because it is the most rational position because of the ignorance of mankind. We don’t know a lot of things, so to maintain that there might be a Divine power out there is simply a rational statement.  It’s possible and even atheists admit this. Most atheists aren’t screaming into the microphone that people who believe in the divine are stupid, they just maintain that they don’t believe in a divine power themselves.  They also like Laurence Krauss above admit that we are ignorant, so we can’t dismiss the possibility. Epistemologically, we are all in a sense agnostics except the religious who apparently think they have it all figured out.

I know a lot of my friends are worried because I am not a Christian anymore.  I even had my counselor ask if I had renounced Christ. I almost laughed because if my salvation or damnation depends on my saying or not saying words, then I am sure that’s more pivotal rather than living your life with virtue in mind?  Your actions can be totally evil, but as long as you don’t renounce Christ, you are good to go to heaven? I am sure someone will eventually say to me “I love you and I just don’t want to see you in hell.”  Did you ever ask yourself the question: Why should he or I go to hell in the first place and is that justice?  More on that later in Odin’s Eye in weeks to come.

See the source image

Faith:

As a deist I can have faith in a creator, in the divine. I can’t really say what that divine power is however.  What this means is I also don’t know what the divine’s actual expectations are.  What I am left with is to engage a lot of reason with my faith and that my friends is a far more powerful combination than religion and faith.

Religion:

As far as I can tell all religions are man-made and their holy books are written by men.  I cannot completely dismiss that those men might have been honest and genuine in their intentions.  I also cannot deny for sure that they may not have encountered the divine power that actually exists.  What I might say is that they all interpreted those things in the light of their preconceived religious world view. Casting those experiences in something they already understood and then adding their own opinions and spin to it.

As a deist, I really am no longer religious.  I am however still spiritual in some regards.  I take however as the deist axiom that ‘God gave us reason not religion’.

See the source image

Theology:

I can still reason about the divine.  I just don’t have to deal with the mucky muck of trying to figure out special revelation or revealed religion.  I am left with creation to tell me through engaging it with my reason, what the divine might be like.  I could make mistakes in judgment, but the one thing I am no longer doing in my theology is accepting as final arbiter someone else’s opinion about God like it is fact that cannot be questioned.  That includes Paul, Moses and Muhammad.

Spirituality:

I think religions tap into spirituality and that is why they exist, but also it is why they all will work in this regard.  You can also be spiritual without them.  Meditation for instance has been rationally explored and the reason it works is that it is basically a human being learning to calm down, think and be at peace. It’s why even as a deist I can be spiritual but it is far more me trying to find my way in this world, than understanding the divine.

Conclusion:

I have heard deism is the a logical progress which ends in atheism.  I am not sure that is true and the whole logical progression/evolution of religion thing has never appealed to me as genuine or always true.  I really don’t find atheism to be rational at this point given the colossal ignorance of mankind.  At the same time I get it. I don’t bear the atheist any ill will because I do understand why someone would follow that path.

For me the path is deism for while I think.  I can have a faith that is rational taking into account my own ignorance.  I don’t have to be religious to be spiritual in truth. Theology is a little more difficult but still possible.  I guess I just need to see where the path ultimately takes me.

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

The Pagan Pulpit – Havamal 47 – Enjoying Humanity

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Happy Sun’s Day

Announcements:

We don’t pray here – we figure God, the gods and goddesses, or whatever powers that be either know already, don’t give a fuck, or are busy with more important matters than our petty stuff. We also kind of assume that they expect us to do stuff that we can do for ourselves, and that we will do them ourselves and not be lazy. We also believe in being good friends, so we don’t presume on our friendship with the powers that be by asking them all the time for stuff while giving them nothing in return.

We also don’t take an offering here.  We figure the powers that be probably don’t need it.  Let’s be honest, offerings are not giving to the divine powers, they are given to an organization to support it.  Just being honest. God, the gods or whatever never see a dime, farthing or peso of that money; it all goes to the church, mosque or shrine.

Opening Song: Disturbed – Voices:

https://youtu.be/pKlg3jYMwRU

I have been listening to this one a lot this week.  It kind of goes along with the theme this week, so I will keep the commentary about it until the Sermon.

Poem:

“My Soul Has Eyes”

The Mirror to the Soul

So they are called.

I can’t see my own

unless I look in the mirror.

I wonder what part of my soul people see?

The part of my soul that is tired and depressed

The part of my soul that has regrets

The part of my soul that bleeds with wounds new and old

The part of my soul that is black and dark

or the part that shines in hope and love.

I wish I knew what people see in my eyes

What part of my soul is laid bare.

– Ed Raby, Sr.  – October 25, 2018

I must confess my writing of poetry is bitter sweet.  It enjoy it on the one hand because it allows me to express feelings in words that normal writing doesn’t do.  I need that from time to time.  On the other hand the memories of the person associated with me learning to write poems better and understand them better comes up every time I do it, and that just makes me sad.  I guess it’s something I just live with, because I can’t seem to stop writing them from time to time.  Sometimes its the only thing that works.

Meditation: 

Image may contain: text

I post a lot of memes and sayings on Facebook.  Just so everyone knows, the Meditation for the week usually comes from one of them I posted that past week.  It’s the one that meant the most to me.

Song of Preparation:Van Halen – Love Walks In:

The story associated with this song for me is that I was standing in a convenience store a little after my wife and I started reconciling.  This song came on and the guy behind the counter was singing it.  I joined in; which is not something I normally do.  The guy behind the counter stopped to listen to me and asked if the song meant something to me.  I told him until that moment, no.  But now it did.  Not only did it reflect at the time the new feelings of love I had for my wife but there was a very human moment there with that guy.  Humanity didn’t seem all that bad to me at that time.

Text: Havamal 47

Young was I once, I walked alone,
and bewildered seemed in the way;
then I found me another and rich I thought me,
for man is the joy of man.

Sermon:

It is really hard to be objective about the nature of humanity.  Most of us think humans as a rule are not the greatest thing to ever happen to us.  Some people I imagine love people, but there are a good chunk of us that have problems with humanity.  Some of us, like in the video of Disturbed’s song ‘Voices’, have our fantasies about getting back at the bullies, getting revenge on the girl who dumped us or tying up a difficult boss.  It truly is freaky shit that we think of sometimes isn’t it when it comes to how we would like to respond toward some people’s actions toward us.  The voices are pretty convincing that even we are not all that great.

If we were honest though, most of the people in our lives are a lot like us.  Just trying to make their way in the world and do the best they can.  Very few people in our lives actually deliberately try to make our lives miserable.  There are a few, I will acknowledge that, but for most part, people seem decent enough.

I think this is more evident if you have ever been lost alone away from people for a while or wonder if you can find your way back to them.  I have had this experience at least twice.  It is an intense relief when you actually find another person.  I get what Odin is saying in Havamal 47.  Like it or not we need our fellow humans and very few of us are misanthropes.

In fact, I would argue that many times at our lowest point it has been someone else who helped us out of it.  Some person who saw us in our suffering and actually stopped to help, or as we wandered we ran into someone who inspired us. I would say our positive encounters with humans actually probably outweigh our negative ones.

At the very least we become like the guy in the Disturbed video of ‘Voices’.  We drop our anger and desire for vengeance and simply walk off to the mosh pit and try to find a more human ‘loving’ way to get rid of our anger. Perhaps that is the greatest testimony to humanities goodness after all – that we choose to find another way that is constructive.  Very few of us actually act on the voices.

Closing Song:  Slash Street Boys – “I’ll Kill You That Way”:

A little Halloween Humor to send you off today.  Enjoy the Week and Happy Halloween!!!

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

A Skald’s Life – Self Virtues – Budget Plan

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Happy Frigg and Freya’s Day

Budgeting is not something new to me.  I have handled things before like this, mostly though I find budgeting tedious and boring, so I find ways to do it that are quicker.  Thankfully computer software these days makes things go much better.  Mostly though the plan for budget is pretty simply from my perspective.

When I was a Christian, I followed Dave Ramsey a lot.  The fact is his basic plan makes a lot of sense simply because it follows tried and true things. I don’t see that I have to change my respect for its wisdom.  We are in debt again and we do need to make more money to combat that but we also need a plan to get back to financial health again. Our plan follows the Dave Ramsey pattern.

  1. Basic Emergency Fund – $1000
  2. Debt Snowball
  3. Fully funded Emergency fund
  4. Invest 15% of income into retirement
  5. Pay off Home Early
  6. Build Wealth and Give

There is a missing step as I have children but they are all grown up and I pretty much told them what my family told me – ‘you want college education, pay for it yourself.’  Step 5 for us wold be more of buy a small home and pay it off quickly because right now we rent an apartment and probably will continue to rent until we get to a point of being debt free.

After twenty years of being in the ministry I have little to show for it.  I don’t own a home.  I have a lot of debt and some things have had to be cut.  Probably the most devastating right now is health insurance.  We can’t afford it with the payments we have to make on other things and that means both my diabetes and my wife issues will have to be handled out of pocket and nope – we don’t have the money for that either.  Hopefully nothing major happens.

If we have any further need its to start making more money and that is why I accelerated school to be pretty much done except the internship, so I can start marketing my degree for a better job. I would stay where I am but they would need to make me more than a grunt worker at this point and they would also have to make me full-time instead of 32 hours a week. At this point in my life it is about retirement and that means I am about 20 years behind people my same age because of being a pastor all that time in my first career. Yep, it’s a tall order but I don’t just want to survive but thrive.

As an aside if you are thinking of ministry as a career, I recommend going to a secular school for your bachelor’s and get it in something you can make money doing.  Do that for twenty years and get your financial life in order and then go get you Masters in Divinity and be a pastor. Trust me on this, you will thank me for it.

Right now we could be classified as working poor.  Not poor enough to qualify for government handouts, but not rich enough to get ahead.  That needs to change soon and for me that means a better job with more money so we can breathe again.

Discipline:

“Discipline is the willingness to be hard on oneself first and then if needed help with the development with others, so that greater purposes may be achieved.”

Principle: Apply discipline to every aspect of life that it can be applied.

Achieving greater purposes is a line in the virtue I have been thinking about a lot lately.  When I look at things in my financial future I think others are going to play a role.  What I want is my own business to take into retirement.  I want it to be my retirement.  Not having something to do, I think is the death of a lot of people.  The one’s who live the longest understand discipline and sticking with something.

At this point I have all the plans in place, bucket list, goals and routines.  Now its time to take all these pieces and step back and reform the bigger picture.  I think though I will do a separate post on this under The Rabyd Skald platform probably this afternoon.

Perseverance:

“Perseverance is the ability to stand up and return from defeat and failure”

Principle: Keep getting up after every defeat or failure.

Not much to say here other than I keep going and I keep getting up. Right now school needs to have more attention and so I am making my plans to put more effort in and finish.  I may limp over the line but I will finish.

Fidelity: 

“Fidelity is the will to be loyal to one’s Gods and Goddesses, to one’s Folk, to one’s self, and loyalty to one’s friends was as valued as highly as loyalty to one’s family.”

Principle: Be loyal to those who have been loyal to me.

I am a deist, humanist and somewhat of a pagan and so I am loyal to those philosophies. I am truly working on being loyal to myself, my wife and my family.  The Self and marriage is a tougher one to keep in balance because to have a marriage often involves sacrificing what you want at times.  I just don’t want to give up too much loyalty to myself.  I still want what I want and for my sake, I can’t give it all up.  At the same time I want this marriage to work and be better than ever.  I am loyal to my friends, they need only ask and I will do what I can.

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

Odin’s Eye – Halloween (Samhain)

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Happy Thor’s Day

Every once in a while I make the statement that I am a Pagan or have Pagan tendencies.  I have to confess the main reasons for this are spirituality and  holidays.  I suppose this post is more for educational purposes than it is expression of any beliefs I might have; but I do embrace the idea that a truer understanding in the realm of spirituality might be our hearts reaching out to the world around us, and paganism has that in abundance.

By the next Odin’s Eye we will be past Halloween and so I want to talk about the holiday before it happens.  I must freely confess now that my favorite holiday of the year is actually Halloween.  I never could say that because I was a Christian and minister, but now I can.  I love the whole thing.  The dressing up in costumes, the carving pumpkins, trick or treat, the whole darkness and death of it.  It reminds us all things die and when it comes to the seasons this is particularly true.  In a sense Halloween is the celebration of the end of the harvest season and the end of the year for pagans.

Now Christians tend to make anything Satanic if it doesn’t line up with their beliefs but Halloween and Samhain are hardly Satanic.  The real problem is that Christians also steal a lot from pagans and the fact that All Saints Day is November 1 is no accident because Halloween is the big day for pagans.  It’s about countering it with a Christian holiday. But Christians steal a lot more than that and holidays for Christianity tend to be near to pagan ones and even use pagan symbols but Christianize them.

That said, I like the basic concepts of paganism’s spirituality because it creates a very individualized belief system to the person while at the same time allows community spirit. At the same time, it has aspects of religion that I pretty much as a deist reject.

Faith:

No I don’t really have faith in what is commonly called Wicca or Paganism on that side of the aisle.  When I say I have pagan tendencies, I mean I draw my spirituality from looking at the world around me and my inward self.  This means paganism has many schools of thought and most of them have the same religious nature as the monotheistic faiths.  I have faith in my abilities to advance myself and be in tune with the world around me.  That’s about it, but it lines up with paganism’s basic foundational tenets.

Religion:

Halloween for the Pagan marks the end of the year and starts the new year with the season of Samhain.  The beginning of the long dark period before rebirth and renewal in the spring.  Different pagan groups view this differently but Halloween was a celebration originally and Christians are probably the most guilty of trying to add sinister qualities to it to discredit it.  Mostly though it is a time and day to honor the past and past people. To honor what has gone on before.

Theology:

Theologically speaking as a deist who believes in something; but as an agnostic I don’t know what it is, I think paganism is more honest about looking at what we know for sure and honoring it.  What can we know for sure?  The people who have gone before us that have blazed the path so we are where we are today.  Honoring the dead and their work and sacrifices is something we can truly honor and know we are honoring something that is indeed real.

Spirituality:

I suppose my most spiritual moment this last summer came while standing at the graveside of my father.  Given all that I was going through, I was wondering what he would have said or done at that moment.  I have to admit that it was there at his graveside I began to realize some sense of reality of what I was doing and perhaps honoring my commitments.  Mostly to my wife.  I still struggled after that but that moment left me pondering my life and in the end became the seed of the motivation that caused me to consider reconciliation with my wife.  Perhaps there is far more spiritual truth to the honoring those who have gone before. All religions seem to have elements of this and perhaps it is one of the more valuable contributions of religion in general.

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

Odin’s Eye – Crisis of Faith

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Happy Thor’s Day

Probably for the purpose of the future of Odin’s Eye I am going to cover three areas. Firstly, I want to cover my current state of belief in greater detail so I will have three posts one on each of the following: Deism, Humanism and Paganism.  Secondly, I want to offer my four objections to the God of the Bible in detail, so there will be  post on each of them. Thirdly, If I am reading my calendar correctly, this will take me into December as I will probably use Odin’s Eye as a sounding board around Halloween and when it falls on Thanksgiving to talk about those holidays and how I celebrate them now ending with Yule or Christmas.

Before I start all of that though, I want to talk about the nature of my Crisis of Faith and some of the foundational things that led to it. Before I begin going trough the four things I normally do in Odin’s Eye, I want to explain on an emotional level this crisis I had this past two years was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to face.  I would rate only my father’s death and the period time around my near divorce as more emotionally trying.  That said this crisis lasted over two years.  It was not an instantaneous thing and it probably led to a very vulnerable emotional state over a long period of time.  Since I have owned up to the fact I just don’t believe in Christianity anymore, it has been very welcome relief from the emotional strain.

Faith

My crisis of faith starts with the simple fact that as far as faith goes I was told to have a thinking Christianity.  That is a reasonable faith all my life.  It is interesting that my Sunday School teacher seems to at the end of her life had a similar experience as myself, but it was she who also told me that God can handle your questions and will be able to answer them or he is not God.  I was taught early on to search the Scriptures.  It was in this search I simply found eventually after forty years, questions I still do not have answers for and probably never will.  The issue though with faith is that the definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 suddenly became nonsense to me because at face reading it is nonsense. It’s simply nonsense to say that which we hope for is evidence.  Wishful thinking but not evidence.

Religion

It’s not that the religion known as Christianity hasn’t played a part as well in the crisis.  Throughout my ministry career of twenty years, I have watched people who claim Christianity, in the name of  their religion, do some pretty despicable things to each other. One of my personal objections to Christianity is the gospel doesn’t live up to the hype of personal transformation of those who claim to have been ‘saved’.  It was never the religion that appealed to me.  It was the theology.  In the end the rituals and doctrinal statements and the expectations of the religion left me empty and if anything drained me, so it offered no comfort or security to my faith.

Theology

It’s the theology really that certain questions (which I will go over in the coming weeks) that left me going – “What the hell?”  It actually started with the notion of ‘sin’ as a concept.  When I realized that there was nothing natural in the world that said certain things are inherently sinful, I began to sense a problem.  If some preacher in my childhood hadn’t come along and told me I was a sinner, I would have never had that notion in my head. Sin is simply not self-evident, nor has the God who exists (if one exists) ever come to me personally and told me I was a sinner. In a sense Christianity tells you that you have a disease (without first proving empirically that the disease exists) and then offers you a cure.  They cure a problem of their own creation.

With that understood I realized a few more things about the Bible and the god it presents. 1) The Bible has no empirical evidence that it is inspired.  It makes that claim but never proves it – you accept it on faith or you don’t. 2) The God of the Bible seems to not have a very good plan for solving the problem of sin for a supreme being.  Why doesn’t he just forgive the sin against him like he expects us to do with each other?  Nope, Instead he kills his own son!?!  3) The god of the Bible’s justice is a little suspect, especially when you consider Hell. I will go over these in the coming months so bear with me as I offer more explanations over time.

Spirituality

Through it all however, I have held on to some beliefs – Deism, Humanism and elements of what Christians would consider Pagan have survived.  I believe in Reason, Humanity and the Spiritual.  I meditate but for different reason.  Probably the weird thing still to me is I don’t pray.  To whom?  Prayer has always bothered me anyway because most of the time it is asking for things and when a prayer is ‘answered’ you never hear the end of it from those who prayed because they claim credit for the result even though they might have had very little to do with it.  I figure the supreme being of the universe either doesn’t give a fuck, gave us what we need in ourselves to handle the problem or doesn’t exist so we are on our own.  Pray is in some ways presumptuous that our problems and our value means something to the divine to the point they will act on our behalf.  If god truly is our friend its  pretty one side friendship because of the way we pray.

For me a lot of things are spiritual but how that matters is still something I exploring and learning about to see where I am and where I am going.  All of this has brought me back to a Seeker level and to be honest this spiritual wayfarer prefers to stay that way.  If the divine powers that might exist, choose to bless me or do something for me may it be because of my deeds as I walk. not because I begged them through prayer.

Basically what I am saying this involved belief in Christianity in relationship to reasonable assessment.  Nothing more and nothing less. If you think its more personal because of recent events in my life, you would be wrong.  Those have an effect on my spirituality because of the emotions involved.  But my Crisis of faith was intellectual and theological in particular.

What I want people to understand is that a crisis of faith is a serious matter.  It rips you up in ways only another person who has been through it can truly understand.  If you have never been through it, I am sorry you can’t relate but I can tell you don’t dismiss the emotions involved or the seriousness of them. It can cause deep depression that is no laughing matter.  It also shouldn’t be just dismissed for many other reasons.

I remain,

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

A Skald’s Life – Self Virtues – Morning Routine

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Happy Frigg and Freya’s Day –  I actually find this one the most interesting.  We have shrunk it down to Friday which is the spelling of Frigg but we say it Fry which reflects Freya.  

My to do list still has a few things on it.

  1. Morning Routine
  2. Daily Routine
  3. Weekly Routine
  4. Bucket List

I also have some planning to do regarding weightlifting and diet.  So we all know what I will be doing today and next week.

My morning routine is about doing the daily stuff that can be done right away every day and getting myself off to a positive start.  So it involves things that wake me up and get me thinking about the things I need to think about.

Morning Routine:

  1. Review Nine Noble Virtues (NNV) and Principles
  2. Review Goals
  3. Review Bucket List
  4. Meditate on One of the Virtues
  5. Full Body Stretch
  6. Breakfast
  7. Supplements and Medicines
  8. Shower and Personal Hygiene
  9. Get Dressed for the Day

I think most of these are self-explanatory.  A few notes:

My meditation is on one of the NNV.  The reason I do this is to ponder it a little more deeply and see if I am understanding the wisdom of it a little more fully.  If there is something noteworthy, I usually write it down.

My Full Body Stretch is an every morning thing and takes about 15 minutes.  I have discovered that as I get older this is helpful in having less joint stiffness and soreness the rest of the day.

My supplements are actually a short list.  I would probably do more supplements but they are expensive and I don’t have the extra money for them right now. Mostly it’s a multivitamin, fish oil for my eyes and a joint supplement.  My medications are diabetic stuff.  No insulin yet thankfully.

Oh, the last one is getting dressed for the day.  The nice thing about having my own place now is the privacy.  It allows me to dress or not dress as I feel.  Like my father, I am comfortable in my own skin as much as I am clothed.  I just don’t see much point in getting dressed until after I take my shower.

Discipline:

“Discipline is the willingness to be hard on oneself first and then if needed help with the development with others, so that greater purposes may be achieved.”

Principle: Apply discipline to every aspect of life that it can be applied.

I am starting to be harder on myself in the right way.  I can do more and do better.  This is particularly true when it comes to school and my job.  I am definitely learning to be more disciplined in school.  Mostly I am still behind on reading.  Getting these routines more formalized is also helping things a bit in this area so it has been overall a good thing.

I am looking at all things in my life and the Morning routine is not a problem.  It’s the daily stuff I need to be doing better at.  I will talk more on this on Monday.  That’s why if I can put a thing in the morning routine I do it.  It pretty much makes sure it gets done. The Daily routines are often conditional on my daily schedule and that causes problems from time to time.

Perseverance:

“Perseverance is the ability to stand up and return from defeat and failure”

Principle: Keep getting up after every defeat or failure.

I have had a recurring nightmare/dream that has caused me some trouble this week.  Mostly,  it involves people I used to know and care for gathering around me and mocking me and what I am trying to do.  I go to work and someone is standing nearby and yelling at me that I am worthless.  It finally culminates in me being surrounded by these people and they pick up rocks and stone me.  Right before I die, I wake up.

I put this under perseverance because dreams and nightmares like this one used to shake me but now I just kind of shrug them off.  They do trigger The Grey a little, and I have to fight through it, but thankfully my wife helps a lot with that.  Knowing she loves me when she could be a part of that crowd is a remarkable and special thing to me.

Fidelity: 

“Fidelity is the will to be loyal to one’s Gods and Goddesses, to one’s Folk, to one’s self, and loyalty to one’s friends was as valued as highly as loyalty to one’s family.”

Principle: Be loyal to those who have been loyal to me.

My issue these days is not loyalty as far as if I am loyal.  My issue is what to be loyal to these days. I am loyal to my wife and family.  I know I have to prove that a lot after what has taken place, but I stand by them.  I work on being loyal to myself.  I am loyal to the friends I still have left.  Those that have turned their back on me – fine.  I let a lot of that go.  Less friends, less hassle.  Apparently their friendship didn’t include loyalty to me when I needed them the most. There are a few who have engaged in outright treachery against me.  Those?  Well, justice demands that if I ever get the chance to get justice, I will take it.  It’s not a vengeance thing, just balancing the scales if the opportunity presents itself.  Fidelity demands it.  I will remain patient and watchful.

It’s the faith thing in the gods/goddesses that is troublesome. I can loyal to the concepts of the NNV and the ideals of deism, humanism and even paganism as I define them.  I am still a seeker in that regard, so its hard to know what to be loyal to other than the principles.

I remain,

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!

Odin’s Eye – My Faith as It Stands Today

/ Ed Raby Sr / Leave a comment

Odins Eye 001

This will normally appear on Thursday; that is Thor’s Day but this opening week of The Grey Wayfarer it will be Friday; that is Freya’s Day. Odin’s Eye, as a post, is about faith, religion, theology and spirituality. Mostly is all of those things as they stand in my life and how I relate to these things. My struggles with religion and faith are pretty much a constant. For most of my life I have struggled with them. My faith as a Christian literally has teetered on the brink several times in my life and only recently have I decided to be truly honest about it and walk away from the religion known as Christianity. For the last few months I have been what I truly am, which is a Deist, a Humanist and a Pagan. More on all three of these as Odin’s Eye continues in the weeks ahead, but for now know that I am no longer a Christian and it has very little to do with recent events.

My Walking Away From Christianity

I want to change people’s perception here about what happened about my faith, because I have been accused of walking away from Christianity because of what Christians have done toward me recently and my observations of Christians. Well, I would be the first to say that has something to do with it, but it was not where the struggle began and one should not look at the followers of a religion to assess whether or not a religion is true. The truth of a religion should be tested in its claims and whether or not such claims can be rationally verified. Experience is no good here because I can tell you every religion has people experience something that ‘verifies’ the religion to the one who had the experience. History is no test either. History will show you that religions all make historical claims but are they verified by outside sources and multiple witnesses? Also, just because something is historical, does not mean that it automatically reveals who God, the gods or the divine reality truly is. Nope we are left with one tool to assess truth and that is reason. There are few things that sets humanity above the rest of the animal kingdom and one of those is the use of reason to assess truth.

I have spent a long time as a Christian trying to mesh its claims with rational investigation and I now can say that some of the claims of Christianity have no rational proof for their claims of truth. Because of this, you take a lot in Christianity hoping it is true, but not really knowing if it is true. Over time through various studies I developed four major objections to the theology of Christianity, for which I could not rationally come to good conclusions. It was these that caused me to walk away from faith, nothing more and nothing less.

Now recent events where Christians have acted toward me in very non-Christian manners may have caused me to walk away faster, but in truth I was already showing my backside to the Christian faith long before then. Not trying to be insulting there, just facing facts. My leaving the faith is my own decision and I am blaming no one for it. There really isn’t ‘blame’ here; just a decision to be honest where I stood. I don’t perceive of my walking away from Christianity as a tragedy from my point of view, although I am sure many Christians would see it as such. To me, I simply became more honest and truly myself. I stopped hiding my failures behind notions of sinfulness and started facing them honestly as a man should face them in this world. I didn’t change, so much as I found my true self. I am a rational human being and there are four things that I cannot reconcile with being rational human being and being a Christian.

My Four Theological Objections:

  1. The Bible cannot be rationally verified to be God inspired. The Bible makes a claim to be inspired but it never proves it and there is no empirical proof that the Bible is any different from any other book in the world. If you believe the Bible is divinely inspired, you have no evidence for it, you just believe it to be true.
  2. Sin is a completely man-made made up concept. There is nothing in the world that tells you are a sinner. Some preacher came along and told you that you were a sinner and then offered you a cure. But let’s be honest there is no person alive who hasn’t done something they regret or was ‘bad’, so any snake oil salesman can play into that and say you are a sinner and then sell you the cure. They really don’t prove sin as a concept really exists or that it is the problem you actually have. They just reinforce your assumptions. They don’t prove those assumptions are true, they just play on them.
  3. God’s answer to sin is to torture his only son and kill him, this is an answer that doesn’t make a bit of rational sense as God could easily just forgive us without all this. Either the God of the Bible is a sadistic fuck or not too smart if this is the best he could come up with to solve the ‘sin problem’. There is the additional problem of how much of a sacrifice and torture is it, if you know with certainty that you are going to be healed from all injuries and rise from the dead in the end?
  4. The Bible presents God’s justice as a little suspect, especially when you consider the doctrine of Hell. I mean you get all eternity roasting in a fire because you did a few bad things. I mean we might understand with people like Stalin and Hitler, but grandma who never hurt a fly but never accepted the gospel of Christ because she didn’t buy it, gets the same punishment as them? Even the Bible’s own standard of justice makes this suspect – ‘eye for eye, tooth for tooth.’ I mean making God mad is such a high crime that I must spend eternity in hell for it? How is that the punishment fitting the crime? Yeah, I could go all day. If you don’t consider this a problem, you never have really considered the doctrine of Hell or it’s implications for those you love that have not accepted the gospel.

I spent many years trying to reconcile these things and couldn’t. Now either this speaks to my lack of ability to do so, or they are just not reconcilable because the whole thing is made up by humans for whatever reasons. I am not saying I am infallible but I have asked my questions of some of the smartest people in Christianity I know and you know what their answer is? The same as I can get from any preacher – ‘you just have to take some things on faith.’ Yeah, so you’re saying faith is a cop-out to any question too hard for you to answer? Sorry, that is no longer acceptable to me. If Christianity is genuine and true, it should be able to answer my questions. That is something I have maintained since I was twelve.

Personal Stuff

Yeah, there is personal stuff too. But that isn’t my main reasons – they are listed above. So where I stand each week will be reflected on in Odin’s Eye. It was not however all the personal stuff that cause this ‘crisis’ of faith. Rather the personal stuff was probably caused by my struggles in finding and accepting the truth about myself and where I really was because of these four things. Uncertainty breeds uncertainty and in that uncertainty shit happens.

Faith:

I believe in something out there. I am a deist, not an atheist. I think atheism and deism actually can get along because we’re both saying ‘ we can’t really know’. The difference is, I think it’s just as bold a claim to say ‘there is no God’ as there is to say ‘there is one and we have him (or her) all figured out and here is our religion for you’. Sorry mankind is a little too ignorant to make such universal claims either way.

Religion:

Yeah, it’s all man’s attempt to understand God. But like all things man does, it is prone to mistakes and error. Can you find truth in religion? Yep, but I don’t think any of them are The Truth or give us THE Truth. For that we need to turn to reason as our way of finding the truth.

Theology:

If we are going to understand God, I think revealed religion is more of a problem than a cure. We have to conclude that if we are going to understand the Creator, we are going to have to look at his creation including mankind to figure him out. Not the specifics of what certain men have written that says He, She or They are a certain way. The Creator gave us reason, not religion. Perhaps we should use it.

Spirituality:

I still meditate on these things and think about them. I just haven’t made a lot of ‘progress’ by not writing about them. Time to change that by doing so each week in Odin’s Eye.

The Rabyd Skald – Wandering Soul, Bard and Philosopher. The Grey Wayfarer.

Skaal!!!