My Mom divorced my Dad in 1954 when I was 4 years old. At that time only movie stars got divorced, so I had to explain to every kid I met after that, what “divorce” meant. We had to move several times so that my Mom could find work as a nurse, and I had to explain it to every kid in every school in every city we moved to. I went from a heavily male influenced area (West Texas) to only being around females and I missed having a father, uncle, grandfather and male ranch hands around to be with so when we settled in Pennsylvania at my Grandmother’s house (3 years later) I latched onto my mother’s father like he was a lifeline. Grandpa took me into the Pennsylvania woods and taught me how to survive, hunt, build shelter, make weapons, stalk, kill and preserve game… in fact, everything that would enthuse a 7-8 year old Davy Crockett fan, I was in Heaven. My grandad was taken to a hospital to have his larynx removed, he had cancer. He would send me out into the woods to get away from the sick smell, but I knew he loved me and felt bad about not being able to go with me.
To take up some of my time and to distract me Mom and Grandma got me into a class at church for “being Baptized”. In the Baptist church you cannot be baptized until you can demonstrate that you “know what God is and want to be closer” by having your “sins” washed away at the Baptism. An 8 year old doesn’t have many sins to proclaim and I had fewer than most so I invented some. Grandpa died (or was buried) December 8, 1958 and I was Baptized (full body immersion) during a special service in the sanctuary as part of the Christmas Class just a few weeks later. In less than a month, I saw all the worst parts of church people lying, backstabbing, misleading others and even cheating them and I did something I didn’t even know was possible until just a few years ago. I took an “Oath before God” that I would get to the bottom of everything that was happening on Earth. My first step was to reject religion and the Bible because I saw the Bible as “just a bunch of writings that help keep people in line for preachers”. I don’t know why, but I never blamed God for all the crap that happened to me or the misbehavior of my fellow “Christians”, even though my religious teaching said that God “caused” everything that happened to me.
Every course I took, every opportunity I had, I read and evaluated each and every Philosophy (Western, Eastern, Indigenous) Psychology and religion known to man (including the Bhagavad Gita and Tales of the Annunaki) and found a lot of opinions, guesses and rationales. The Bible looked to be the same from the outside, but once you read it for content, ignoring the religious “accommodations”, the themes and progressions were absolute and informative, NOT guesses. Oh, individual Biblical authors made guesses, but the empirical knowledge of the human spirit that was required to accurately predict behavior was mind blowing and NOT reflected in any other human Philosophy or religion. I tried my best to show the Bible up, to find all those “inconsistencies” I’d heard about. The only inconsistencies reside in human interpretation, not in what the Bible actually says.
Think of it like this… God has implanted human soul seeds in modified Australopithecus bodies letting the soul develop, the stalk die out then the soul re-develop on a new stalk with the next season (continuously) until that “perfected” soul is “harvested” for use elsewhere. Read all of Matthew 13 and 25 (the Good Servant) to catch my drift.