“A Bible study?” my friend asked. “But, you don’t believe in God.”

Well, yeah. I have rejected the God idea of my youth. It’s too small. It has nothing to say to most of what I see in the real world around me. It requires me to check my brain at the door.

And yet, there seems to be something to this God idea as a metaphor for Something Else. I’m an actor by trade. Lemme tell ya, actors who do improvisation know there’s a Something. When you do a scene with other artists who really know how to do the thing, something exhilarating happens. I have no way to describe it. I have no words for it. But it’s there.

It’s better than sex. I know what my scene partner’s gonna do as she does it. AS she does it. And she Knows what I’m doing. It’s not premonition and it’s not hyperfast reaction. It’s as if we’re creating the scene together with some kind of group mind. It’s real. It’s magical, but not magic. It’s mystical without being superstition. It’s some kind of connected, deeply rooted feeling that I believe the God idea speaks to.

This isn’t supernatural. It’s a completely natural outgrowth of our human capacity for self-awareness – or something. It’s, well… it’s… shit, I don’t know what it is. If I could explain it quickly I’d just update my twitter and forget about a blog.

It’s not magical. It’s not even really what anyone normally would call a God idea. But it makes sense to me that there is a natural human experience which prompts the quest which has been theology for thousands of years. God isn’t real. God is a metaphor.

And after all, this whole blog is about exploring the meaning of Life in meaningful ways. That’s going to require metaphor.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. But why a Bible study?”

Partly I want to counter all those atheist Bible study posts and groups that are all about “Heh heh… look how stupid the Bible is… heh heh… look at how awful the Bible is… heh.” Not constructive. And if you want that, there’s plenty of other places to look. We’re building bridges here, remember?

Also, I want to talk about spirituality along with art and need a language to do that with.

I grew up speaking English. When I write anything, I tend to do so in English as I’m not fluent in any other language. While I do have a passing interest in learning other languages, I’m probably not ever going to feel the motivation to reach the level of fluency in Spanish, for example, that I have in English.

So I write in English.

I grew up a member of the churches of Christ. This tradition is deeply rooted in the study of the Bible. Academic knowledge of scripture reaches competitive levels in this tradition. We were the Bible Bowl kids. Playing Jeopardy-style games with Bible trivia and so forth.

The language of spirituality that I learned and became fluent in is that of Christianity. While I also study other texts and other religious traditions, I’ve accepted that I will not likely reach a level of fluency in those that I’ve already got in Christian-speak. If that makes sense.

So I write in Christian.

When someone speaks of the Christ experience or of God in Christian terms, I know what that is. Or at least I can relate to the thing that person is trying to express.

And as a lot of religious controversy seems to boil down to vocabulary rather than ideas, I choose this vocabulary. Now, I can focus on the ideas.

This is also about trying to build bridges. My religious neighbors and I need to be able to live together in harmony. I don’t want to start fights, have debates and all that business. There’s too much negativity for my taste in the culture. Am I naive? Maybe. Still, finding new meaning in the Bible texts is an attempt at countering that negativity.

That said, there will be lots of references to other works, from Origin of Species to the Tao Te Ching, so let’s don’t get carried away with taking the phrase “Bible Study” too seriously.

Does that make sense? It does to me. And it’s my blog – so there.