The Journey Part 3

It’s been so long since I wrote about this. Here are the direct links to part one and two:
The Journey Part 1
The Journey Part 2

When we last left our bold adventurer, he had just discovered the clergy is full of crap.

Did I go out and start researching things on my own right away? Hell no. I had high school to finish, and college to look forward to. That day in the church was always in the back of my mind, however.

I went to college and didn’t think about religion or church all that much. I fell into what had to be the most secular group of friends you could ever find. It just didn’t come up all that often. I just called myself agnostic and left it at that. (See this post for my discussion of that term.) The closest to religion I ever got was the people I knew who were Neopagans. They weren't much for evangelicalism.

One day I read a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail. Now let me just stop one minute and say right up front: this book is mostly bullshit. It's very fun to read bullshit, however, as evidenced by The Da Vinci Code that was ripped off inspired by it. It does have one virtue. It makes a pretty good case that what is presented by orthodox sources as the history of Christianity and the formation of canon was peppered with quite a bit of bullshit too. While the author's conclusions are certainly a bit off kilter, they were able to show me that there was quite a bit more to the story of Jesus and the Catholic Church than I'd previously been told. I thought back to that priest complaining about a movie he never went to see and it all started to click.

I started to look for better sources. I wanted to know how the sausage was made. I wasn't interested in learning about the philosophical implications of atheism or anything like that. I just wanted to know what those priests had been keeping from me all these years.

To be continued...