My family was Baptist when I was growing up. I never really bought into it, and I studied religion and philosophy at college because I wanted to understand what life was all about. I took an intro to religious studies class my freshman year. Our textbook was an anthology containing essays from various authors such as Rudolf Bultmann and Joseph Campbell. Their ideas were revolutionary to this country boy from West Virginia who had never been exposed to anything other than fundamentalism. But it was the essay at the beginning from the book's editor that helped change the way I look at Christianity forever.
The essay was called Deathwatch. And it was about how the world had changed radically in the last 200 years but the Christian religion had not evolved. It was about how religion serves the needs of the culture in which it operates or fades away. It was about how it is common for religions to die, for people to lose their faith in them and simply walk away. It has happened over and over again in the course of human history. And it was about how a new belief system that is more suited to the modern world will present itself eventually.
The essay helped me see Christianity and religion in general in a new and more objective way. I came to believe religions are products of culture. They may or may not help us experience or understand something greater than ourselves, but the thing that's greater, if it is real, isn't necessarily bound to any particular religion. If one religion no longer serves our needs, we can go to another, create a new one or simply go without.
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