Ratel

Thank you both for your helpful recommendations. It appears I have a lot of reading ahead of me. This is the second time Borg has been suggested to me, I suppose I'll start with him.

Hi, I was referred here from another board by a self described "Progressive Christian". I told him that I wasn't a Christian, but since I accepted the existence of a transcendant/immanent God I would be willing to take a second look at Christianity not from the perspective of mythic-literalist belief, but as a system of symbolic rites and archetypes that allows participants to commune both with each other and with the One. So I thought perhaps this would be a good approach to investigate. Or not. I've been lurking here and at other Christian boards over the past few days, been thinking, praying and meditating. I'm not against what you are trying to do here, but I realized that I have a lot of negative associations with Christianity. I was raised in a very strict fundamentalist household and my childhood was a very negative experience. I attended Christian schools and went through all the degradations religious institutions are capable of inflicting on their charges, and my parents weren't really the best. I lost my faith in my early twenties after reading piles of material both skeptical and apologetic, and have been fairly vehement against Christianity since then. So now I have been trying to re-establish Jesus as "Gate to God" in my mindand have been trying to re-read the Bible not as a literal book of facts but as a book contain gems of profound wisdom. But somehow all the old fundamentalist training of perceiving everything as either objectively true or false keeps reasserting itself, and the exercise does nothing except bring up bad memories from the past. I don't know if I can ever divorce Christianity from my early experiences of it. I don't know if I can transcend the myth to partake of the underlying reality. Anyone have any insights on this?