Becoming all the more aware of the church’s exodus from its roots and feeling less alone in the idea, my zeal grew even more as if that were possible. My belief became ever stronger that the church had become a corrupted entity that Jesus would not condone. I began seeing two main opposing concepts within the Bible: religion versus goodness. Religious doctrines continued to flourish, but I found so many verses that talked about doing good, acting out righteousness, helping the poor, and so on. Many verses uplifted these things above animal sacrifice and other religious ideas. Some verses even explicitly said that God never wanted sacrifice to begin with. One verse in Jeremiah 8 really got me thinking all the more: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, for we have the law of the Lord,’ when actually the lying pen of the scribes has handled it falsely?” Perhaps the scripture we have now had been handled falsely as well. How would we know?

I found another verse which actually supported this theory of corrupt scripture. In Psalm 40:6 it is written, “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—my ears you have opened. Burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.” In the Septuagint, a Greek translation from the original Hebrew written around 250 years after Jesus death, the verse reads quite strikingly different. It replaced “my ears you have opened” with “a body you have prepared for me.” In the original translation, it sounds as if David is proclaiming that God had just revealed to him that he never demanded sacrifice. In the Septuagint, this verse had been used as a prophecy of Jesus’ death on a cross. They claim that God did not like the requirement of sacrifice and so he prepared a perfect body to end it all. How many other verses were so corrupted that we no longer have the evidence to prove? If one can slip through, then how many others can slip through? And how long did we use the Septuagint version before we noticed the discrepancy?

             I finally began to consider that just maybe God did not ever require sacrifice. It made far more sense to me that an almighty and loving God would not be so blood thirsty. It then also made sense how the Israelites continued to sacrifice to Molek as the prophets preached against regularly. The Israelites probably thought they were serving God but the prophets were stating that they were serving Molek instead—in much the same manner that I had claimed that Christians were serving Satan today. They, of course, scoffed and killed such prophets, and Christians certainly do not believe they serve Satan despite my claiming they do. They similarly scoffed and hated me as well, and at different times, they likely would have stoned me to death as a heretic.

With the scripture being potentially corrupted as had clearly occurred in the past, I saw a large probability that many things were wrong today. With such people willing to lie about the very word of God for their own gain even unto sacrificing one’s own children, it made sense that they would claim that God wanted them to commit genocide when in reality they merely lusted for power and wealth. With these realizations, I could truly believe that God embodied righteousness by dismissing all the disdainful things the Bible claimed he did. This revelation elated me as I marveled in astonishment. Everything fit together so perfectly. All the good things in the Bible were God and all the bad things were Satan. I could merely separate good from bad in my mind to determine which things were of God and which were of Satan. It could not get much simpler than that. I no longer had to make excuses for the evil that God had purportedly committed.

             I then learned that thousands of other scriptures existed that were not included in the Bible. I figured if they were wrong about the canon of the Bible and they included many false things, then perhaps they also did not include many true things. I bought two extremely large volumes of pre-Jesus writings known as the Pseudepigrapha and I read many other early Christian writings as well. The Gospel of Thomas actually had yet another parable indicating that the Kingdom would become worthless. It likened it to a woman carrying a bottle with a crack in it that leaked all the grain on the ground. By the time she got to her destination, the bottle had become empty and worthless. This resonated so much with me. Modern-day Christianity had lost all of its value. All the good stuff had been leaked on the ground. The leaven had worked its way all through the dough. The dog had returned to its vomit and the pigs to the mud. Birds had perched on the branches and picked away all the mustard seeds they could find.

             During this time of revelation, I found myself very fearful. I worried that I might trick myself into believing lies. I feared that I might disown God by disowning the perfection of the Bible. I feared that I would no longer be saved if I did not accept the blood sacrifice of Jesus. Such prospects frightened me regularly and I prayed without end about it. Day and night I cried out for proof one way or the other of every little thought I would think. I tried asking for signs to provide direct guidance but I never received any. My thoughts scared me and I did not want to be wrong. I wanted to be securely grounded on the facts, whatever they may be, and whatever the cost of knowing them.

I could no longer see two ways about it; God, being good, had to care more about our behavior than about our beliefs. His goodness thus required that he would not demand meaningless sacrifices for the supposed capability of forgiving us. He certainly would not command genocide and he certainly would not include the requirements to kill mere infants if a war were indeed necessary. After seeing all the rebukes toward the Pharisees for focusing on ritual works rather than righteousness works, it all just made sense. They had it all wrong as we now do today.

             My fears were assuaged one night by a dream. Dreams, of course, being the only way it seems God is capable of speaking in a more direct fashion to someone whose mind is constantly pondering the ways of God. At first, the dream seemed rather harsh and made me feel terrible, but a dream followed shortly thereafter of a door opening in the sky which made everything okay. I saw the door in the sky and I stared at it with anticipation hoping that it would open—and it did! I saw this as an obvious sign that God had allowed me entrance into the inner chamber of his heart and of knowledge and power. Thus, I concluded that the scary dream prior to the door did not speak anything regarding me in particular.

             In the previous dream, I helped a woman escape from an old man who had sores all over his body. He walked around coughing and hacking as he slowly died of sickness and disease. She and I both belonged to this man as if slaves of some kind. I watched full of hope as she ran away but my hope quickly turned to dismay when she merely crossed the street and embraced a different man. Having dream-like knowledge, I knew this man had only guile and deceit to offer and that he lied to her about his name. As I later interpreted, the dying old man represented modern-day Christianity and the woman represented the people who run to home churches or to new doctrines or branches of Christianity. They got out of the big, dying, old falsity of modern Christianity but they continued in their foolish ways and instead went to another liar.

             Suddenly, I felt my heart pounding. This worried me at first but I then realized that my jaw induced this feeling with a constant chattering rather than my heartbeat. To me, this symbolized all the Christians in the church who think their heart is beating strongly for God but it is merely their own chattering mouths making proclamations but never truly loving anything but their own navels.

Suddenly, from deep within me, three connected balls of putrid acid reached out of my throat straight up in front of my nose with more leading all the way down my throat. This, I determined with great care and hesitation, symbolized the three lies that the Bible is the Word of God, that Jesus died for our sins, and that Jesus is God. I tried to keep my nose clean by holding the balls away but it kept burning my hands with the acid. I rationalized that with these core doctrinal beliefs, it is nearly impossible to do what is right and we tend to find ourselves in trouble. Metaphorically, we cannot keep our hands clean nor our noses clean while trying to uphold these three lies.

             I went to wash the acid off my hands which symbolized the washing away of selfish ways and focusing on living out love toward others rather than focusing on the three lies. When I finished, I turned and accidentally bumped a coffee pot that sat on the counter. It fell to the ground and shattered to a million pieces. It belonged to the dying old man. It represented the dying churches’ method of hyping up the people to make them feel good and to think that the good news is all about them and how much God loves them. With that act, I shattered such a mindset of Starbucks church by ridding them of their drug. After washing my hands and destroying a self-centered focus of faith, the three balls and many more poured out from my mouth and sat on the counter in a long, connected line of balls. By doing good and not simply trying to feel good, combined with refusing to uphold the three lies, all the remaining balls of corruption came shooting up from the inner depths of my gut as if on a giant skewer and lied on the counter in a pile of acidic ooze.

             While I clearly no longer believe this to be a message from God, I think it is still a very fitting analogy for the state of Christianity. The three core doctrines (i.e. the putrid acidic balls) are not even taught by Jesus. These three ideas caused so much grief and hatred toward me even by those who were once close friends. And yet, Christendom is united only on these three pillars of faith. They are the source of all division and have no value as a worldview.

Those three doctrines were held by the multitude of churches which committed atrocities, tortures, and genocides. They are held by those who picket at the funerals of soldiers and laugh at the grieving. They were believed by those who kept slaves and would not allow women any rights. Yet they are also held by people who do good, who build wells, and who feed the poor. The beliefs themselves are useless. They are not a worldview directing anyone’s actions and they are not a predictor of behavior. Worldviews which direct a person’s actions are ideas like “God hates everyone who does not believe in my book.” Such ideas would have me decapitated even today in some countries. I began to understand these things and to realize that Jesus preached a message of peace and love as opposed to ritual sacrifice and belief. Believing in a book will not dictate a person’s behavior, but believing in benevolence or hate will.

             With this new concept in mind, I began to notice something unique about the book of John. It focused a lot on faith and belief in such a way that I did not recall in the other gospels. I did a word search to see just how much John varied. John mentions believing “in Jesus” 79 times while this only occurred twice in Matthew and Mark and only once in Luke. The kingdom of God was mentioned 52 times in Matthew, 40 times in Luke, and 17 times in Mark while John mentioned it a whopping 3 times. I took this to mean that Jesus focused mostly on the kingdom and that belief in Jesus as a sacrifice likely came from a lie later added on to appeal to the Jews. This lie later became the crux of Christianity and the truth all but disappeared.

             Relieving myself of the false confines of the Bible and the typical doctrines which caused so much division, I was ripe for hearing from God directly in anything and everything and so become what I believed was a prophet of God himself.