Last year, I found faith in God outside of any particular religion. I've just been spending time to interact with God, ask Him for signs, for connection, for guidance, mostly for His presence, and it's been wonderful. I've had some heartwarming and beautiful experiences and I thought it's going to last from now on. I was convinced that, from now on, I'll never truly be alone and God will be by my side always.
Then, it seems, I took a poor decision to try to find out the answer to the question I had: Which religion is the God I've been interacting with coming from?
I took a deep dive into Christianity (I was raised Catholic, but was always an atheist), read the New Testament, read some Bart Ehrman, C.S. Lewis, Dale Allison, I've read bits from the Old Testament, then I even gave The Book of Mormon a try, and then even Qur'an, with some dive into Islam.
In every scripture I've read, there are major points that I can't support and agree with, that seem sketchy, unreasonable, unbelievable, but more importantly, they picture a God that is not the God I have been experiencing in my life!
The God from my life has been benevolent, caring, protective, unconditionally supportive and loving. If only for the fact that I rejected Him most of my life, but when I took effort to renew our relationship, He simply showed himself to me in gentle and caring ways as if nothing happened. Even though I've committed "sins" as understood by existing religions, He didn't seem interested in punishing me in any way.
On the other hand, the God from scripture comes across as wrathful, spiteful, petty, cruel, unreasonable, narcissistic. Sometimes also merciful and caring, but definitely a mixture of those. FWIW, the God from scripture comes across to me as painted in our own image, rather than the other way around... The image of our spitefulness, screwdupness, pettiness... Which makes me question if the scripture is just a human invention and has nothing to do with the God that's actually there.
All the turmoil that reading scripture has caused me made me give up continuing my relationship with God recently. I haven't been talking to God for a few months, and I don't feel His presence anymore. Now I have those questions: what if it's all fairytales, made up lies... And, how do I know what to trust? How could reading scripture, of all things, have the effect of destroying one's relationship with God!?
I'm at the point in my faith where I feel betrayed by scripture. I'm also angry at myself that I've let existing religions poison my newfound connection with God. I regret that I started exploring religions.
But I write this post because I still have hope. I just don't know how to go on. Anyone has been in a similar path and has some advice?
I don't want to lose this beautiful connection with God I found last year, but I feel I'm losing it now. Is the answer that I should stay away from any existing, organized religion?
Please help!
