get yer stones ready. i'm only gonna say this once

hi, i'm ken, and i'm a recovering fundamentalist.

a while back, in another forum, i said i no longer have faith.

that's kinda true, and kinda not true. i'm so repulsed by what i believed that i'm having a hard time differentiating between genuine faith and that which is manipulative. my faith looks nothing like it did a few years, months, weeks or even days ago.

i see what i believed as an underpin to the status quo: for example, dependance on hierarchy, power structures and even leaders. follow me and you'll end up in the same hell i go through daily: a troubled mind trying to reconcile an ocean of blood, a mountain of bullshit and a desert of what i can actually live. the ocean is history; the mountain is words; the desert, where resources become scarce and which is that way because the first two are polluted, is responsibility. (all that from someone with absolutely no regard for symbolism--ha!)

i still hope love can somehow prevail, but i no longer believe a benevolent force or person (outside ourselves) will ultimately come set things right. i think redemption and retribution aren't reserved for some fictitious afterlife, but both processes begin and end now. maybe heaven and hell are merely extensions of the present.

i can't buy the vast majority of the bible any more. i just can't. that disturbed a long, long time friend so much that he felt compelled to preach at me the other night. sorry friend, but i won't be scared into submission anymore. love and fear are, by your own standards, mutually exclusive. it was like we're on the same team, but different pages. oh well. i see the sermon on the mount, the book of luke and maybe philippians 2 as livable (and therefore believable), but that's about it.

last summer, for the first time, i tried to articulate this dissonance with holy writ to another perceptive soul who deduced, "so, you don't think jesus is god?"

i had to shrug.

maybe, but in the sense that anyone else, for all i know, may be god; not in some mystical trinitarian sense. jesus has only called me brother and friend. i could be wrong here, but i think he only wants the same in return. i think the trinity is an invention of the powerful to keep god shrouded in mystery from those who ain't.

maybe i've said too much. i realize this is a bit of a departure for last call, but i hope it shows some roots of my aversion to power, so yeah, i guess it's political.

and there ya have it. go ahead, objectify me.