Who writes such things?!

I was a Christian kid. Evangelical Lutheran from birth, going to church every Sunday in a moderate-sized Midwestern US city. Somehow my ethical learning was greatly at odds with the ethical teaching of the church. If God was sending all the Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims to hell because they weren’t in my club, then I was too morally righteous a person to want to belong to that club.

Also, I was going to hell anyway because of the promise of a rainbow, which means something in popular culture now that is not Biblically approved (allegedly). I was estranged but later reconciled with my family. Not with the church.

I considered becoming an atheist for about an hour. Agnostic is the rational choice.

If ‘faith’ was detachable, I would be rid of it. But my religious trauma seemed somehow to be at the root of later traumas that I experienced over subsequent decades — personally in my relationships, and of course, publicly within the culture.

Then I learned about the academic study of religion. I had learned at university that scholarship rejects supernatural claims a priori. I can do that. But as I started getting a feel for the discipline, I noticed the established scholars did not do that. They have special rules in their discipline.

No problem. I will use primary, mostly NT canonical, resources. I will use accepted standards of any applicable field other than the one that makes the special rules. I’m writing up my results and posting them here.