Pt.3 Karma and god concepts

As I began to distance myself from Christianity, I continued to study ideas and concepts from the major world religions. I didn't desire to replace one religion with another, but I was interested in different concepts of the divine that other cultures possessed. I will be giving very basic concepts about different faiths, please forgive me in advance for any errors, as my specialty is protestant Christianity.

In general, I noticed that Hinduism and Buddhism search internally for god, the ultimate reality. The Abrahamic faiths, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam search externally for god, the ultimate reality. However certain sects of the Abrahamic faiths, Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and Sufi search for god  internally as well.

These faiths all agree that sin comes from inside of a person. They agree that sin can take you off of the path of god. They also agree that desire is the root of sin. On the other hand, they have wildly different remedies for sin, and what sin will ultimately cost. For Hinduism and Buddhism, sin ties into the ideas of karma and reincarnation. For Islam and Christianity, sin will send a person to a fiery hellish damnation for eternity. However for Judaism, sin will simply cause you to die.

The connected ideas of karma and reincarnation piqued my interest and made more sense to me than the idea of a devil, hell, and original sin.

Karma, the concept that positive and negative actions have consequences with regards to how close you are to reaching enlightenment, made me feel more accountable for my deeds. Accumulating good karma gets a person closer to enlightenment, eliminating the need for further reincarnation. A person will continue to reincarnate until they reach enlightenment. They can reach enlightenment by destroying all desire. I pondered the idea of an ultimate reality, but I like having desire.

As I read and thought more about karma, I realized that the idea of karma was a way for the ancients to make people behave properly because it spoke of existential consequences for temporal actions. In other words, what you do now will affect your internal spirit. Karma, which initially seemed quite different, upon further review sounded very familiar to ideas that I already knew. The consequences, although not the same, dealt with how your actions today can affect your eternity.

Karma, and other concepts like it speak to notions of justice and how "good" things happen to "bad" people, and how "bad" things happen to "good" people. Humanity has a hard time accepting inequity and inequality, ergo they created "spiritual" ways to deal with the harsh reality of living. Ultimately these thought lead to theodicy, or the problem of evil in the world.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus deals with the difficultly of evil with this saying:

"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?

Then he is not omnipotent.

Is he able, but not willing?

Then he is malevolent.

Is he both able and willing?

Then whence cometh evil?

Is he neither able nor willing?

Then why call him God?"

Note: When Epicurus spoke about God, he was referring to Zeus, the God of Greeks in the ancient Greek religion.

This quote, along with a better understanding of nature, took me further away from the beliefs of my youth into previously forbidden, new exciting intellectual territory.

Pt. 2 The Exodus of My Deconversion

As I began to question my faith in Christ, I started to learn more about the world's major religions without any Christian bias clouding what I discovered.

Here are some of the highlights of what I discovered:

1. I learned that the oldest religion in the world is Hinduism.
2. I learned that the religions in the Mesopotamia region and Persia gave us a blueprint for many of the stories that would end up in the Bible.(flood story, Adam and Eve story, Garden of Eden)
3. I learned that the God of the Old Testament was a composite of many of the ancient Canaanite gods(mainly El Shaddai, El Elyon, Adonai, and Yahweh)
4. The OT did not have a concept of hell as eternal damnation or heaven as eternal bliss
5. The Adam and Eve story had a talking snake, but not a Satan
6. Hinduism has many gods which are all a manifestation of Brahma, the ultimate reality
7. Buddhism had its roots in Hinduism, like Christianity did in Judaism
8. Buddhist ideas spread from India into the Hellenic world through interaction with the troops from Alexander the Great
9. Platonic as well as other Greek philosophical ideas influenced Jewish thinkers during this period
10.The oldest vegetation-rising and dying savior god is Asaru(Osiris). His story influenced other stories about vegetation gods and goddesses throughout the Near East, including Jesus
11. The oldest religious cults were based on the divine feminine principle
12. There are only seven Pauline letters that are accepted as genuine, The other letters are thought to be forgeries
13. Generally eastern religions seek god internally and western religions seek god externally
14. There have been people throughout history who have been skeptical of gods and religion
15. I learned that Jesus is a mythical figure based off of various Greek, Egyptian, and Near East gods and goddess

After taking all of this and even more information in, I knew that at best Christianity was a remix of other religions.  I also learned that various concepts about god would change to meet the latest scientific discoveries of the day.  This lasted until scientists and philosophers had the courage to suggest that god wasn't needed to explain natural phenomenon.

I knew that my freedom and deliverance from Christianity came as a result of me actually thinking, challenging my beliefs and not just blindly following what I had been taught. The deprogramming, dismantling and destruction of my old belief system was in full swing.