(Or, the scariest thing I've ever written.)

Can one be an intellectually fulfilled Christ-follower?

Can one look at all the contradictions, scientifically-dubious claims, and obviously false assertions (i.e., praying heals people) found in the Bible and accept them as true while living a life understanding and accepting and believing in science?

The last few years of my life I feel like my beliefs have been challenged as never before. Suddenly, the things that I have fervently believed my entire life have started nagging at my subconscious, begging for some sort of intellectual validation that years of church have been unable to provide.

We all adopt the beliefs of our parents. We all believe our mom and dad when they tell us that Santa brings presents to all the children of the world in a single night. We don't question when they tell us that Republicans are for the Big Bad Corporations, and the democrats are for the blue-collar, hard-working American families. The world is reduced to black and white terms of good and evil, and your political, religious, and moral attitudes are more or less dictated by what your folks believe and how they live. The earth is only ten-thousand years old? Okay. There's even fantastic, wonderfully-illustrated and wholly convincing books that discuss the apology of creationism. There are lists of why evolution cannot possibly be true. Somebody starts jabbering incomprehensibly in church? Well, we're Pentecostals. Glossolalia is no big deal! You're never really told how it works, but hey, the pastor does it all the time. He couldn't possibly be faking, or deluding himself.

Could he?

Are fundamentalists not the truest practitioners of their beliefs? Moderate Christians are guilty of essentially watering down their faith. You cannot deny that by the time you get to "Sometimes God's answer to a prayer for healing is 'no'." that you believe James 5:14 is lying. After you read Genesis and decide that scientifically, it doesn't have a leg to stand on, you've just decided that the book you profess to be infallible has, in fact, been shown to be in error.

Would most you say that slavery is a sin? Of course you would. But God specifically sanctions it in the Old Testament, and allows it in the New. You can even beat your slaves, just not so badly that you injure their eyes or teeth. If they die, it's okay, just as long as they survive for a day or two after the beating. (Exodus 21:20) Is that moral? And don't say "It was the law of the land at the time." Judging God by human standards is exactly what we're not supposed to do. No, God is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Why doesn't prayer for healing work? One of my former pastors, a man who I was certain had God's ear1 more than anyone I had met, developed bone cancer in the middle of his life, and what I'm sure were the most fervent and passionate of all his prayers over the years went unanswered as the cancer ate his body from the inside out. He died less than a year later.

And so I ask, sincerely and without any heat: what's up with that?

This is what I was raised to believe. I spent, with perhaps only two or three exceptions, all my childhood Sundays learning the teachings of the Bible. I drew pictures, looked at flannelgraphs (anybody remember those?) and sang Childish songs about Biblical characters climbing sycamore trees2. And I knew what was being taught was true. Me and my sister would both scoff every time a book or TV show would mention "millions of years" or evolution. We had books explaining the geological proof for Noah's flood. I spent several years as a puppeteer and teacher, teaching children the same stories from the Bible that I had been taught. Through Benny and Sally and Chuck the Duck, I reiterated for the kids God's love for them, how tithing was important for every Christian, and how lying would get you into trouble. I felt God. He was there at church camp. He was standing beside me when I decided for the first time to lift my hands in church. (I felt especially holy that day.) He was lying beside me on the blanket in my backyard watching a meteor shower and staring with awe into the heavens.

And then the shiny veneer of Christianity began to crumble.

Rumblings began at the church my family had attended for more than thirteen years. The old beloved pastor left, and a new, young pastor was immediately elected. Sweeping changes were made. The quirky, upbeat choir director was asked to resign, as were several other individuals. The church library vanished. My family, as well as many others, become discontent, and we went elsewhere for our spiritual sustenance. The church we settled on had its own problems. I eventually went to work for Point of Grace, and we all know how that story goes. And suddenly there were new voices. Voices that had been shouting all along, but I had tuned them out. The voices that said "Christians are just regular humans who pretend to have the answers!". The voice of science that had been with me since I was twelve, suddenly asking "If you're so certain of your beliefs, what do you have to fear by looking at scientific data?"

And so I have. I've looked at the evidence that demands a verdict. I've read the Bible. And what I've found are inconsistencies, repeated myths3 and many more questions than answers. I consider myself a skeptic; that is, I tend not to believe things unless I have a good reason to. A magnetic bracelet improves circulation and relieves pain, you say? Great - show me the evidence. Kevin Trudeau says that I can detoxify my liver with vitamin C? Okay - where are your studies? I used to laugh at people who thought that proximity to power lines and microwaves caused cancer and other problems until I realized that my steadfast belief in the Bible because my parents taught me that was absurd. As absurd as believing that witches made potatoes grow rotten in the ground, or that a UFO was trailing the Hale-Bopp comet to whisk the believers away one night.

And now I'm at a place where I don't know what I believe. On the one hand I have two decades of belief in Christ. I know all the church-y mannerisms and things to say and even a fair amount of Ecclesiastical knowledge. And on the other hand I have the doubter in me, the voice asking "Where is the proof? How do you reconcile science and the Bible? If God gave you a brain, certainly he wants you to use it!"

From everything I've seen, The Straight and Narrow Highway is just a row of billboard signs. When it comes down to the wire, to the real meat of the issue, can faith be anything more than that...faith? A blind belief in a book written by people thousands of years ago recording the voice of one guy who claimed that He was Christ in human form? I don't know why I should believe that, yet I am deeply troubled by Christ's claim to be the Messiah. His claims cannot be ignored. As C.S. Lewis says, there are only three possibilities. He was a hugely successful liar, a devil with a silver tongue bent on deceiving the populous for reasons known only to himself. Or, He was a lunatic - a raving madman with enough of his mental faculties to behave rationally - the product of an society where mental illness was common, rarely diagnosed and never treated. Or, He was exactly who He claimed to be: the Son of God, Creator of the Universe, come to die for sins of humans.

But which is it?

I don't know.

1: This is a misnomer, I know. It's a figure of speech. 2: I'm stumped as to why the Bible finds it necessary to record this rather mundane fact. 3: Every major civilization (that had floods) has a flood story.