john76

Hello. I would like to give a short account of my agnostic journey, which is now at both an end and at a beginning.

I have forever been an agnostic. I have always thought that questions about theism and atheism are alot like sitting in your house and guessing about how many people are at the local McDonald's.

However, when I was in my fourth year of university, something changed. I was majoring in philosophy, and had been reading alot of Nietzsche talking about 'Dionysus versus the crucified' and the lies of Christianity. This seemed to me like little more than pointless ranting until I took a course on the New Testament and was exposed to the similarities between the myth of Dionysus and the story of Christ. On all of the major points, the Jesus story seemed to be derived from the Dionysus myth.

This really got me charged up. I started reading everything I could about the Greek God Dionysus. I became so obsessed with this idea that I completely went overboard when I read the following quote from the Bacchae by Euripides: "Even though he be no god, as thou assertest, still say he is; be guilty of a splendid fraud, declaring him the son of Semele, that she may be thought the mother of a god, and we and all our race gain honor." This was reflected in Plato's "Republic" and at the time seemed like it may have became the entire impetus for rehashing the Dionysus myth in the figure of Christ. We also see in the Old Testament that lying is smiled upon if it is done in the service of God (see the index of the commentary version of the 'New Jerusalem Bible' under truth and lies).

This did it for me. I was convinced that the Jesus story was a complete lie made up by the early Christians for political reasons. I started E-Mailing newspapers with my 'evidence' every time they would publish a religious story, hoping in my mind that this would somehow be the impetus for overthrowing Christianity.

Over the next few years, things got worse. Works by profs. like Robert M. Price and Tom Harpur started being published on the idea that Jesus was a myth, and these were supplemented by popular writers like Timothy Freke and Earl Doherty. They all made compelling arguments that Jesus was derived from earlier myths about Dionysus, Horus, and Zoroaster.

In my passion, I started E-Mailing these writers and others with my 'special' passage from Euripides, with the hope that Christianity would soon be overthrown. Things were not helped by the fact that I got positive feedback from these writers, and even had letters published on certain atheist websites and humanist 'letters to the editor.'

In the midst of all this, I was getting increasingly frustrated because I felt all my 'brilliant insights' about the origins of Christianity were going unbroadcast and weren't being acted upon. I was getting really upset.

My point is, in all this nonsense, I was forgetting the true lessons of agnosticism. The question of whether Jesus really existed or not is certainly a fun question that can be debated back and forth between theists and atheists, but I do not believe that it belongs in the view of the agnostic thinker. How could we ever know such a thing?

At the end of my long journey, I have come to a place of peace. I believe that learning to bracket theological questions leads you to a place of calmness. Otherwise, you just become a fundamentalist theist or atheist, filled with energy and childishness. If there is anything the world has suffered enough from, it's fundamentalism; John MacDonald