Most people who meet me now have a hard time believing I was once a fundamentalist Christian–well, a Roman Catholic, anyway. Evangelical Protestants say we count as heathens, but then, we used to say the same of them. I was a lector at my church, and knew the catechism backwards and forwards. I knew it so well, Father Joe exempted me from the two years of instruction required prior to my First Communion. I was a convert, you see, and like all converts, I turned to my new religion passionately. Like so many converts to Christianity in America, I converted not from some other religion so much as apathy. My parents were more interested in getting me and my brother out of the public school where we were tormented, and getting a reduction in tuition by being parishoners. For a 10-year-old boy as I was, though, it was a new religion I had to learn, incorporate, and become. That I did very quickly, and very thoroughly.

My paternal grandmother gave me a very old book titled My Catholic Faith. It was written for children, and filled with hate towards any but the most pure Catholics. I read it through and took every spite-filled verse to heart. I read the catechism, the writings of the Church Doctors, and the entirety of the Bible no less than four times through. I was very politically aware, even then, and I held quite conservative opinions.

Eventually, these factors ran afoul of one another–being very aware, and holding conservative opinions. First was the contradiction with scripture posed by Marianism. Then I learned how the Church instituted celibacy to control the clergy, in contradiction to the first mitzvot of the Torah to reproduce. The infallibility of the pope led to such logical contradictions as Pelagius and St. Thomas Aquinas, so that free will is both true and not true. The contradictions and crises just came faster, laying waste to my carefully-constructed, pure, fundamentalist, Roman Catholic world.

It was in this chaotic millieu that one of my best teachers, Patrick Schlemmer, assigned Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for my junior English class in high school. With my interests in history and religion, Quinn’s interpretation of the Garden of Eden grabbed me immediately. Quinn turned the story of the Fall into the story of the Agricultural Revolution. Everything is good for one thing, and bad for another; if a lion kills a gazelle, that is good for the lion, and bad for the gazelle. In claiming to know good from evil–eating of the gods’ Tree of Knowledge–our agricultural ancestors took upon themselves the authority to make such a decision, to decide who should live and who should die. This is intrinsic to agriculture; we clear away a natural habitat–we decide that all life there must die–in order to plant our crops–that which we say must live. Rabbits and crows must die; corn and wheat must live. In Genesis, the punishment for the Fall is quite explicitly agriculture.

Of course, then the perplexing relationship between Cain and Abel makes a great deal more sense, as a distant memory of the first farmers’ murderous rampages against their pastoralist neighbors–pastoralists like the Semitic peoples of the Middle East, for instance.

My feet were now firmly planted on the road to revolution, but I’ve never really given up on Christianity. It would be more accurate to say that Christianity gave up on me. If anything, it has deepened and transformed that faith. I can no longer understand how a civilized person can read the Bible and consider it “their” book. Civilization and agriculture is G-d’s curse. He calls Abraham to leave civilization behind and found twelve tribes to be his chosen people. He must constantly rescue them from civilization–the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, every successive, great civilization is G-d’s implacable enemy. The Torah creates a subversive system that undercuts civilization at every turn (I wrote a paper [PDF] that touches on this); the prophets advance an incredibly liberal agenda that assaults the most fundamental tenets of civilization–the concentration of wealth and power. The Hebrews demand a king, a state–a civilization–despite G-d’s warnings, and their suffering for that mistake has yet to end.

The Gospels only underline this unremitting, brutal assault on civilization. Jesus incites his disciples to leave it all behind, move beyond civilization into small, cooperative tribes, for lack of a better word. The Romans kill him for it, and Paul inverts it for his own power (see John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus). After all that, the Bible ends with a stark prophecy of a final battle between east and west, the emergence of a single, global empire, and how G-d will destroy civilization and return us to the idyllic, utopian existence of Eden, where we began, where G-d meant us to be–in tribes.

Of course, my interpretations are heretical, but when the text is so clear and straightforward, any other interpretation seems deceitful. My Jesus is a Gnostic Christ; my G-d is a pantheistic deity; my faith is shamanic. It isn’t a conventional creed by any stretch of the imagination, but don’t mistake me for irreligious simply because you have no name for my religion.

My Autobiography

1. My Catholic Faith
2. Testing the Gorilla
3. Tribal Dawn
4. The Dream that was Anthropik
5. A Student With No Master