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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 1 of 7)
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Description: Islam evolving in the heart. Part 1.
By Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter
Published on 06 Sep 2010 - Last modified on 26 Oct 2010
Viewed: 7152 (daily average: 7) - Rating: 5 out of 5 - Rated by: 5
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Category: Articles
> Stories of New Muslims
> Men
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My disbelief before Islam
When I married my Portuguese
wife, Anabela, I had a philosophy which, though I believed in God as the Creator
and Power that drove the universe, did not acknowledge that I was obliged to
worship Him (I conceived the Power as It – that is, sexless).
I had been born a Roman
Catholic, and brought up believing in Jesus as my God and Mary as my God’s
mother – but this did not sit well with me. Rather, I saw Jesus and Mary as a means
through which to reach God, who was the God of the Old Testament.
As I grew older, I began to
despair at understanding vast tracts of the Old Testament. The material was
dense, and so called ‘prophetic’ passages appeared to be in the present tense –
addressed to those people thousands of years ago, as happening to them or in
their lifetimes. More confusion arose because personal addresses or actions
sometimes seemed to be assigned or directed not to people, but to cities and
nations. God, for example, seemed to regard Jerusalem as his wife, and the
actions of her people congruent with her actions. God called her a whore, and
appealed frequently for her to repent and turn back, and become His queen
again. The same was true of people, such as Jacob, who assumed the name of a
nation, so passages addressed to Israel sometimes meant Jacob. Jacob often
symbolized his descendents, which were split into two camps: the camp of
Ephraim and the camp of Judah. Again, the names of these descendents of Jacob
reflected the split in the children of Israel, between the city state of Zion
and Samaria.
Other passages seemed to refer
to supernatural events, and supernatural encounters. The raising up of Elijah
and the appearance of God before Israel seemed to describe events that could be
explained as meetings between races of advanced technologies and simple, non
technological, men. Given that many other religions described the same kind of
encounters with their ‘gods’, I began to suspect these stories of the Bible
were but legends, gathered together, and made to seem coherent for the sake of
a constructed hierarchy, the Church.
On top of this suspicious view
I had begun to hold, I also learned of the historical persecutions that took
place during and since mediaeval times, particularly the events of the crusades
and the inquisition, which followed them. In fact, the ethos of the inquisition
was exported to the New World by Spanish and Portuguese ‘Conquistadores’,
and the Roman Popes manoeuvred to establish riches and power in Europe by a
reign of Machiavellian terror. The Family of Borgia
were particularly exemplary figures in this respect.
Finally, I learned of the
attempt of the Church to stifle and deny scientific advancement well into the
reformation, and that change only manage to establish itself through the
renaissance at a later date.
All these factors led me to
believe that the God of the Bible and the descriptions of Heaven and Hell
taught by the Church were forgeries, designed to subjugate and pacify the vast
majority of the population under the rule of a minority elite.
Tortuous Confusion
There is a primal urge in men
to worship that which created them, and turn to Him when in need and nothing
but Him can be appealed to sort out ones peril or confusion. I have heard
people exclaim in extremus, “For the Love of God,” “Oh, God!”, “For
God’s sake,” and the like, appealing for succour. Yet when aid comes, and they
feel secure again, they thank the living agents who helped them in this world,
or their favourite deities in the world of the unseen. In my own sense
trackless waste, my lack of orientation, I took refuge in the concept of the Force,
or Power I described earlier – the single and non-material
Creator, whom men (individually) interacted with at a personal
level, with neither mediation from unseen agencies, nor
help from other human beings.
The route took in coming to
this conclusion was long and tortuous, concepts building on one another from my
reading of science fiction and primitive conspiracy theories. I read, for
example, Erich Von Däniken’s “Chariots of the Gods?”
and “The Philadelphia Experiment”
by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, the first of which gave credence to
religion being ‘made up’, and the second of which opened my eyes to what can be
covered up by the elite society and their governments in the world. However,
not every nation and government can be in on the grand conspiracy, if such a
thing exists, so the natural place to look for confirmation or contradiction
was other religions. To me, the ‘other religions’ were Hinduism and its
offshoots, in particular Buddhism, so I sought to find out more about them from
the inside.
The most visible of the branches of Hinduism in
London, where I lived, was the orange coloured monks from the temple of
Krishna, so I duly
found myself recruited into their sect. Although the ritual meditation felt
good, its wide use definitely provided a calming effect on the devotees –
confirming that it preached a kind of placation of the people. Its creation
story was also rather repulsive; who wants to acknowledge the origin of the
world being a vast, but dead, cosmic cow, or that we evolved from her
excretions? I soon left the sect as abruptly as I entered it, and read up on
Buddhism. I knew the latter was an offshoot of the mother of the other, so I
wasn’t tempted to try and practice Buddhism. Instead I tried to discover its key
concept of life and life after death. I soon discovered that, like Hinduism,
the hereafter was conceived to be a series of reincarnations, and that we were
bound to our lives on the wheel of fate. However, instead of seeking unity with
the cosmic mind of God, the perfection of Nirvana, the Buddhist seeks to attain
enlightenment and freedom from the cycle of birth and death. This enlightenment
negates the ego because it must surrender its jurisdiction over time to achieve
it and let the infinite and unknowable take over. Strictly speaking, Buddhism
is a religious philosophy, taking the human ego as the only god that dominates
life, whose way is to a Godlessness goal in the afterlife.
Again, in seeking to eliminate ego orientation,
Buddhism can be seen as the Marxist concept of “opium for the people”.
It makes them tractable and controllable by the elite in society; but what
about ways of ‘bucking the system’? What about, pre-historical religions, or
religions that had died out? One of the earliest forms of religion I learnt
about is totemism. Totemism
postulates the existence of a spirit equivalent to a sign in the real world,
usually an animal. A whole tribe can have a collective spirit totem, such as
the cave bear, whilst individuals may possess an individual totem, such as the
grey wolf. Furthermore, if one is seeking help in a particular endeavor, such
as hunting, the totem of the hunted animal can be consulted for signs of where
the quarry might be.
There is a clear connection to
magical oracles in the use of totemistic rituals, pointing to the existence of
unseen forces existing in the world. There are also other avenues to these
forces, such as astrology and nature worship. One of the latter means of
worship envisages the earth as Gaia, the mother of everything in nature,
and the patterns of interaction between creatures of the ecological system. I
rather liked this idea that earth was a viable individual who must be
respected, and was capable of guiding us and protecting the guided, while
punishing those who work against her and will not take guidance. Not long ago,
a man named James Lovelock was able to express how I felt then in a book
called “The Revenge of Gaia”, which he
published in 2006.
However, the earth is too narrow a canvass for a
universal creator, so the second avenue was even more attractive to me. It
pertains to the heavens, and the heavens are much wider. Astrology
assigns meanings and influences to celestial bodies and their position in
the skies at the time of birth to determine the fate of an individual being.
They also rely upon the position of the celestial sphere at any given point of
time and space on the earth’s surface to venture predictions of what might
occur on the path of fate, and therefore give advice on decisions of the people
within the sphere of influence from those predicted events. For a while, I
became an amateur astrologer, because I felt I was in touch with a universal,
rather than local, force.
Then I met a man who turned me
back towards my religion of birth in order to seek universal answers. I can’t
remember his name, unfortunately, but his origin was Ireland, and his religion
Roman Catholic, as I had been. His outlook, however, was not as hidebound as
some staunch Roman Catholics I would meet later. He happened to meet me while I
was reading a book called Omega by Stewart Farrar, which gave me an insight into witchcraft and the religion of
Wicca. We had a huge discussion that lasted nearly a day, while sitting on a
beach in the Algarve, Portugal. He was trying to describe the concept of God,
and readily agreed with me that Jesus was not God. God was something immaterial
and invisible power and Lordship over everything. With the input I had from
Stewart Farrar, I described what I felt was the essence of Divinity and my
relation, or the worlds relation, to it. I felt that “God” was the Devine
initiator, whose “way” was the Laws of the natural world. I said I believed
that every world was different and behaved after its own proper laws, but that
there was a general guiding Law of the Universe, which was God and His
Guidance: working ‘with the flow” signified “good” while working across the
flow signified evil. Examples of working “with the flow” is using nature’s
medicines for healing, whilst “across the flow” is manufacturing chemical
agents that mimic the effect of nature’s medicine; working with the flow would
be environmentally friendly whilst across the flow would cause pollution; etc.
This was my state when I
married my Portuguese wife. She was Roman Catholic, but largely
non-practicing. Before long, she was pregnant, and my first child came
into the world.
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| Parts of This Article |
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 1 of 7) |
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 2 of 7)
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 3 of 7)
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 4 of 7)
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 5 of 7)
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 6 of 7)
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Jeremy Ben Royston Boulter, Ex-Christian, UK (part 7 of 7)
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View all parts together
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