masonlandry
Member
I'm a philosopher at heart. To the degree that it's a bit embarrassing when someone asks me what I do for fun because I spend most of my time thinking about, reading about, and attempting to do philosophy. Which makes religion and religious belief of great interest to me.
Where I stand myself on religious issues has been a bit of a lifelong roller-coaster, but I've seemed to be stabilizing into a more-or-less consistent stance the more I explore it. I was raised (and still live in) Southern Kentucky, so no surprise I was raised to be a Protestant Christian. Until I was about 15 I didn't really take it seriously, and I still don't know whether I believed it or not, because I don't know that I even understood that not believing in god was an option, and I certainly hadn't considered it. But I began taking it very seriously at around 15 and left the church my parents went to in favor of a Church of Christ. For those of you not familiar with the denomination, it's very literal, very legalist. It wasn't that different from the southern baptist raising I'd had, except they thought Baptists would probably go to Hell. Having two very fundamentalist backgrounds really did stunt my ability to perceive any other point of view on Christianity, which took years to get my head around.
When I was 18 and moved out of my parent's house, I didn't have them to rely on to answer all my religious questions. I'm a very analytical and rational minded person, so when I started studying apologetics (I wanted to stop one of my questioning friends from leaving Christianity) it was only natural to read both sides of the arguments to make sure I didn't say something stupid that has been corrected a hundred times if I'd just bothered to look. That was pretty much the end of my Christian faith because the amount of evidence I was presented with for the unreliability of the Bible was overwhelming and utterly convincing. Once I didn't trust the Bible inherently, I had to start from the ground up to try and rationalize any god-belief at all. The result was that I didn't have any reason to believe in a god, so I've been an atheist since then, After a couple years of getting the "new atheist" out of my system (it really was like a culture shock, only it was like you had been right in the middle of something really obvious and not able to see it. Kind of shocking once the 'veil was lifted' and suddenly I saw all kinds of things I'd simply paid no attention to before going on all around me) I chilled out a bit and started looking into philosophy. I discovered that the philosophy behind Buddhism was very close to my own way of thinking, and ended up becoming a practicing Buddhist, following the Rinzai Zen tradition, which is a frustrating tradition to feel most closely connected to, as there are absolutely no sanghas within 200 miles of me. It makes the "tradition" part a bit difficult.
I'd been a Buddhist for about a while already when I started listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson. I first heard of him because a friend sent me a video related to his position on enforced pronoun usage in a Canadian bill (I'm transgender, and they wondered what my opinion was). But I found his channel on youtube and discovered he's a clinical psychologist and an incredible professor, and ended up watching probably 200 hours of his content over the last year and a half. At first, his stances on religion made no sense to me, but once I read his latest book, in which he is much more clear and coherent than when he talks about it in discussions, I was convinced that he had a pretty reasonable and pragmatic view of the Judeo-Christian text and tradition. So, the current position I find myself in is what I call Buddheo-Christian.
Where I stand myself on religious issues has been a bit of a lifelong roller-coaster, but I've seemed to be stabilizing into a more-or-less consistent stance the more I explore it. I was raised (and still live in) Southern Kentucky, so no surprise I was raised to be a Protestant Christian. Until I was about 15 I didn't really take it seriously, and I still don't know whether I believed it or not, because I don't know that I even understood that not believing in god was an option, and I certainly hadn't considered it. But I began taking it very seriously at around 15 and left the church my parents went to in favor of a Church of Christ. For those of you not familiar with the denomination, it's very literal, very legalist. It wasn't that different from the southern baptist raising I'd had, except they thought Baptists would probably go to Hell. Having two very fundamentalist backgrounds really did stunt my ability to perceive any other point of view on Christianity, which took years to get my head around.
When I was 18 and moved out of my parent's house, I didn't have them to rely on to answer all my religious questions. I'm a very analytical and rational minded person, so when I started studying apologetics (I wanted to stop one of my questioning friends from leaving Christianity) it was only natural to read both sides of the arguments to make sure I didn't say something stupid that has been corrected a hundred times if I'd just bothered to look. That was pretty much the end of my Christian faith because the amount of evidence I was presented with for the unreliability of the Bible was overwhelming and utterly convincing. Once I didn't trust the Bible inherently, I had to start from the ground up to try and rationalize any god-belief at all. The result was that I didn't have any reason to believe in a god, so I've been an atheist since then, After a couple years of getting the "new atheist" out of my system (it really was like a culture shock, only it was like you had been right in the middle of something really obvious and not able to see it. Kind of shocking once the 'veil was lifted' and suddenly I saw all kinds of things I'd simply paid no attention to before going on all around me) I chilled out a bit and started looking into philosophy. I discovered that the philosophy behind Buddhism was very close to my own way of thinking, and ended up becoming a practicing Buddhist, following the Rinzai Zen tradition, which is a frustrating tradition to feel most closely connected to, as there are absolutely no sanghas within 200 miles of me. It makes the "tradition" part a bit difficult.
I'd been a Buddhist for about a while already when I started listening to a lot of Jordan Peterson. I first heard of him because a friend sent me a video related to his position on enforced pronoun usage in a Canadian bill (I'm transgender, and they wondered what my opinion was). But I found his channel on youtube and discovered he's a clinical psychologist and an incredible professor, and ended up watching probably 200 hours of his content over the last year and a half. At first, his stances on religion made no sense to me, but once I read his latest book, in which he is much more clear and coherent than when he talks about it in discussions, I was convinced that he had a pretty reasonable and pragmatic view of the Judeo-Christian text and tradition. So, the current position I find myself in is what I call Buddheo-Christian.
