Some people when they deconstruct their faith and beliefs they can just leave the bible in one fell swoop and never think about it again.

Not me.

I had to form a new relationship with it over time. Here’s how I look at it now. The bible has three epochs:

1. The Yahweh Cult: This is the jealous God of the Old Testament. You shall have no other gods beside me. A small band carved their niche in a religiously diverse and competitive world.
2. The Jesus Cult: This is the story about a man Jesus who wrested an exclusivist religion out of the grip of the Old Testament and its people and distributed it evenly to all God’s people. Jesus claimed he came specifically to the Jews.
3. The Apostolic Cult: Paul is the primary star here, who took the ramifications of Jesus’ words and work and flung it across the globe. No longer was salvation for just the Jews, but the Gentiles were now added in.

I think the church has failed to provide the paradigm for the next epoch. A universal one. It is stuck in the Apostolic epoch.

So I’ve done it myself.

All these epochs were human attempts to explain what they suspected was a deep and fundamental intersection between spirit and matter. I carry it further to say that there is now no distinction. Spirit and matter are fused, completely united, one, without distinction.

This was the point of the story all along.