How I Became a Christian Atheist Jew

Merry Christmas!

From your favorite Christian Atheist Hindu Muslim Jew.

Got a good one for you today. Thematically.

Even made a table of contents:

Table of Contents

• Part 1: My Religious Arc

• Part 2: My Insane Year Studying Religion

• Part 3: Tel Aviv habibi Tel Aviv

Introduction

Israel or Palestine?

Christianity, Islam, or Judaism?

Atheism? Is God even real?

Today I’m here to talk about my journey into God & Religion.

I separate the two for reason that will be more clear later.

But earlier this year, I made it my mission to dive deep into religion, specifically Christianity, Judaism & Islam.

And as usual, what manifested happened to be 100x more educational than I could have ever dreamed. Today I’m going to share with you what transpired the last 365 days.

Before I dive into my journey from this year, I’d first like to give you a brief background of my religious arc & history studying and experiencing religion, God and philosophy. I recorded a podcast about the history here.

Listen here for my religious arc podcast on spotify or here for apple podcast. Or just continue reading…

Part 1: My Religious Arc

1996: I was born, mom is Jewish, Dad is catholic. So by birth, I’m considered a “Jew” aka I would have been taken down in the Holocaust. So I’m a racial jew.

HOWEVER, since Dad catholic, we grew up celebrating Christmas.

2004: I begin to attend Hebrew school on Tuesdays and Sundays at 8 years old. Learning Hebrew and preparing for my “Bar mitzvah” in case you didn’t know, Jewish kids from about 8 to 12 attend Hebrew school to study for their ‘becoming an adult’ ceremony which happens at 12 for girls and 13 for boys.

There are only 5 Jews in my entire grade my ages, out of about 200. Everyone else is mostly catholic or Christian. 

This, on a subconscious level, was a little bit confusing to me.

2005: At 10 years old,My best friend, Sam, and at I Hebrew school start to quickly realize that we hate this shit and we deem it stupid and useless. Better time to fuck around than learn an ancient backwards language. Plus the teacher was a prick.

2007: Conflicts rise in Hebrew school. Sam and I are more dedicated to ice hockey than learning about Moses. We have several games on Sundays which conflict with Torah study. “The head Jew” at our school asks us to speak to our hockey coach to see if we can move our entire team’s games to a different day as Sunday Hebrew study is essential if we are to have our Bar Mitzvah’s on time.

2009: I’m 13. I’m supposed to be getting my bar mitzvah this year. Instead, Sam and I are more misbehaved in our class of 5 than ever. Here’s some things that we actually did instead of study Hebrew.

1. I mooned the entire class by putting my 13 year old bare but on the glass window as I walk out of the class room. Stunning everyone.

2. On Friday night Shabbat, Sam and I leave and pee on the walls of the bathroom.

3. After 4 years of Hebrew school, a 13 year old boy is expected to know how to read Hebrew and recite up to 42 prayers for his bar mitzvah. Sam and I had learned but 1. Ultimately, we are politely requested to leave Hebrew school.

2012: My first run in with my annoyances toward Christianity.

Freshman in high school, starting to get angst-y, all self loathing and compensating with hating the world. 

Sam and I are still very good friends and one morning we go to our favorite breakfast place to get some chocolate chip pancakes. It’s a Sunday morning and the owner, an old guy around 61 years old looks at us like we are crazy as we try to walk in and says, “why, the cafe is closed today. It’s the LORD’s day.”

What a fucking ass hole we thought. “The lord’s day”? Who does he think he is. And why do those Christian’s worship that naked guy on the cross. Seems kinda gay.

Meanwhile, growing up I absolutely loved Christmas time. Always good vibes. Good shows on TV. And presents. Was a believer in Santa clause 100%.

2015: I don’t think much about religion until I start dating a Christian girl.

Looking back, she was really an angle, and I was just an insecure, anxiety stricken and possibly depressed, certainly “Godless” idiot. I was very insecure and took it out on the girl. Probably would have won “worst boyfriend award”

I was eighteen years old, captain of the hockey team, and I was a virgin. What a loser. And to make it worse, I had a girlfriend who I had been dating for 7 months that I hadn’t had sex with yet.

Why? Because she wanted to wait for marriage or at least for me to tell her I loved her.

I didn’t love her. I didn’t even love myself in the slightest. 

I was walking around high school trying to mask my panic attacks, negative thought patterns, and trying to do anything possible to look cool to raise my self esteem by getting validation by others.

Of course, the biggest form of validation is ‘being a guy who has sex’. But I couldn’t even do that with my own girlfriend, because she was some Jesus freak.

What a twisted, and some mights say, ‘demonic’ world i was trapped in.

2016: I finally freed the entrapped spirits in my mind after discovering the world of ‘self help’ meditation, and journaling to train my mind to think more positively. The meditation eliminated the anxiety attacks. And I was for the first time, fully aware of the world that we lived in.

And that was also scary. For the first time i was facing life’s biggest questions - why are we here? What does that mean? And what should we even do?

I became enamored and obsessed with the rationalistic, atheist philosophy of Ayn Rand. And shortly after I began studying Philosophers from Descartes to Pascal to Aristotle. On my own I began to read Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris the leaders of the  ‘new atheists’ movement.

Keep in mind Boston University, where you would find a worldwide spread of various religions, so in my philosophy & religion classes, I had plenty of people from all over the world to debate.

From Hindus, to Muslims, to Israeli Jews, my mission was to show all of them how STUPID and unoriginal their religions were.

However, I entered college with a personal vendetta against Christianity specifically. 

And I had this one friend on my hockey team - Ken Mackin - who was as pious and devout religion as they come.

Ken and I would go back and forth on the daily debating atheism vs Christianity.

He kept trying to tell me about Jesus, and I kept trying to tell him how stupid it all was if you really looked at it, and how it’s obvious that these religions are all metaphorical and pointing to a deeper underlying truth.

Hard core atheist against “the God of Abraham” and any other ancient doctrines of religion, yet highly spiritual. That’s where I found myself on the spectrum.

So from about 2016 until 2023, I placed myself in the “eckhart tolle” or “sadghuru” camp.

If you don’t know who Eckhart is, he’s basically a modern day Buddha type / spiritual teacher. The viewpoint is pretty simple, but wildly complex if you’ve never had a spiritual experience of God.

Basically what Eckhart, and spiritual teachers like Sadghuru, Ram Dass and the like suggest is that: The majority of religions are pointing to a universal Truth.

They use stories and parables and analogies to bring the reader to spiritual experience. Spiritual experience takes place outside the realm of human thought.

So for example, as you read this aloud in your head - you will notice there is, if you

Slow…

Down…

Your thinking… there are subtle pauses in…

Between…

The words…

As you notice the subtle pauses between the words, you may also be able to get in touch with the inner body…

The inner body is, along with getting outside the stream of thinking, the inner body is a portal into spiritual experience.

IF you just ‘feel’ the aliveness of the inner body, you can really know the Truth.

Now some of this may sound like spirit talk mumbo jumbo, but really only if you have never had a spiritual experience before.

And if you haven’t that’s fine, it’s only a matter of time.

SO anyways, that’s what Eckhart pushes forth. This idea that Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, the Buddha, were all teaching the SAME universal spiritual teaching, but using different stories and methods of pointing to a truth that cannot be confined to words.

As eckhart puts it, language is the sum total of a group of syllables coming out of human vocal cords, “a, e, i, o, u, ch, k, lu, m… etc.” and do you really expect the ultimate transcendent nature of the universe to be communicated into only a few syllables from a particular species mouth?

How could it?

On the contrary, look at a flower for 10 minutes straight. Or dive into a freezing cold lake. Or fall in love. Is there not more that awakens inside of you when you do such things and experience nature as opposed to the intellect.

I also spent a bit of time studying David Hawkins and Frederick Dodson and the scale of energy that details varying levels of energy from apathy anger and depression all the way up to joy, love, harmony, and God consciousness.

These books are great because they bring the spiritual world into a world you can instantaneously relate to in your every day life.

Throughout college, I also began to study Islam and Judaism in more depth. I studied Avicenna, Al Ghazzali, Maimonides, Rumi and many more mystics who also seemed to relate the same ideas.

And so I became further cemented in this more experiential and provable form of spirituality. I viewed religions as attempts to spread and convey the spiritual dimension to humans.

Part 2: My Insane Year Studying Religion

But in 2023, I became what I called “spiritually bored” I felt like I wanted to reinvigorate my spiritual senses, that perhaps I could go deeper.

So what better place to start than at the soul of the spiritual place i literally mooned and peed on – the Bible…

And so, I made it my mission in 2023 to start my exploration of religion beginning with the Bible & the Qu’ran — Arguably the 2 most influential texts known to man.

This desire blossomed as a result of meeting some interesting people in early 2023. One of them was Sovereign Brah who became widely popular from the podcast show “Whatever” which I went on to appear on earlier this year.

I met Chase through instagram and he was one of the first people who I regarded as highly intelligent who was fully convicted in the death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ AND in the afterlife, 1,000 year kingdom as detailed in Revelations, etc.

Like…

I had met Christians before, but I really don’t think they were the sort who really believe that there is a 1,000 year Kingdom, & that Christ will REALLY return, etc.

So I took it upon myself to reach out to Chase & ask him to be my guide. And so I started following his recommendations to learn more about the faith - I bought “More Than a Carpenter” by James McDowell, and I even ordered my very own King James Bible and began to read.

I also attended an “influencer bible study” in LA where I met young Bryce Crawford, a 20 year old preacher who met Jesus in a Waffle House.

While at the Bible study, I met a Muslim attendee who attends the bible study because Muslims like to “learn from the people of the book”.

So I spoke to him a bit, and I learned that the basic fundamental difference between Muslims and Christians is that Muslims do not believe Jesus was the son of God. They believe he was a prophet. But they do not believe in the narrative that says that he was even put on the cross or resurrected.

The Muslim idea of the Crucifixion is that Allah came down and basically put a decoy of Jesus to carry the cross and get crucified. This right away didn’t make much sense to me. If any Muslims are reading this, I’m open to hearing more of your perspective on this.

But anyway, I explored a lot. I finished More Than a Carpenter, and began reading the Bible daily and watching supplementary lectures from Biblical Scholars recommended by my Christian friends. By chance, I was, at the time, also living near Pepperdine University, a Christian University overlooking the ocean in Malibu.

I consumed a disgusting amount of content on the daily and spent all my free time away from work learning about the Bible, it’s history and origins, and about Jesus.

I think at the height of my Christian study era I had just watched “The Passion of Christ” movie. And I had come to a very interesting spiritual revelation of my own…

Based on the evidence available and my current understanding of Epistemology, that is, the science of how we know things to be true about reality… it appears that the evidence points to Jesus having been a real prophet that walked the earth. And moreover, that he actually did die on the cross and that he actually was resurrected.

Jesus’s documentation of his life is based on:

• Testimony — from both christian and non-christian historical records and texts.

• Empirical Evidence — while there is no direct evidence of Jesus, archeological evidence supports the historical records found in the testimonies.

• Consensus and Expertise — Experts across the board tend to agree on the existence of Jesus. The debate around the death and resurrection gets tricky.

• Interdisciplinary Approach — Historical epistemology often incorporates insights from other fields like archaeology, sociology, anthropology, and religious studies to build a more comprehensive understanding of historical figures and events.

• Analytical Epistemology — If you just do the math in your had, it all sort of adds up and points to Jesus being a real person.

So then, and what I believe to be an interesting and unique take that I have with my understanding of spirituality, is that when Jesus was on the cross he did something very interesting: he dedicated his soul to save the soul’s of all humanity for all time.

“Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” - Luke 23:46

Those are Jesus’s last words.

I believe in a soul / spirit. I believe in soul’s having a mission, perhaps a God given mission. And so, I believe that Jesus did dedicate his soul’s mission to “save all humanity.”

And I would say for about 24 hours I became a full on Christian.

The entire story added up and made sense, logically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Then, just to test my conviction, I decided to watch some Sam Harris. And to be honest, Sam sort of brought be back to more moderate perspective. But around this time it was time for our Europe Trip and my four months of biblical studies came to a hault.

Part 3: Tel Aviv habibi Tel Aviv

Well, my textbook studies may have come to a hault, but not my experiential studies.

My girlfriend, Chloe, is a Russian Israeli Jew. Her father and extended family was born and raised in Israel. And this past summer, we took a trip to the holy land to visit all of them.

Now, before i continue, I’d like to acknowledge that many of my readers and followers believe there is no Israel, and rather that it’s just “Palestine”. And that Israel is a colonizing settlement by a genocidal regime. I’ll get to that later.

But while I was there, (and by the way this was July, so before October 7 Hamas attacks), I went to Tel Aviv, Akko (an Palestinian muslim town), Jerusalem (all faiths), and even up to the north near the Sea of Galilee, and Nazareth where Jesus was born.

While in Jerusalem I went to a real jewish shabbat dinner with Chloe’s Dad’s cousin and his family. I went to a shabbat service in a Jersualem temple which was all men. In Jerusalem, women are not allowed to read the Torah in part because in the Torah it says women have “binah” which is essentially a 6th sense wisdom. And that only men are intended to study the word of God.

In Akko, I drank some coffee with some friendly Palestinian coffee brewers, and watched as the local kids did some bridge jumping into the Mediterranean.

It was only a couple months later that the Israeli Palestinian conflict erupted once again and the whole world’s eyes went straight to the Gaza strip. We are of course, still in the midst of this.

I don’t feel like commenting on this right now, perhaps another post. But I will say that the entire conflict ultimately just awoke me once again to the issue with religious extremism (on both sides, Jewish and Muslim).

And that’s around the time when I decided to start revisiting Sam Harris.

Sam Harris, as a refresher, is the author of “Letter to a Christian Nation”. He is a fierce religion adversary and has some of the most convincing and hilarious arguments against religion that i personally, as Catholic Jew by birth have no way of debating. He’s also spiritual, just without the ancient texts.

Here is an excerpt from the first few pages of, “Letter to a Christian Nation”:

And I might add to this last part… can you prove that Hinduism is not the one true Religion? Can you prove that Judaism is not true? Can you prove that Mormonism is not true? What about Buddism?

So ya, that’s how the book starts. Even by just putting the general population in those camps seems to make it clear that pretty much everyone just ends up believing what they are socially conditioned to believe, whether there is convincing evidence or not.

Then, after I reread that book, I started watching some of Sam’s lectures.

Take 10 minutes to watch this from a 2 hour debate between Sam Harris and Christian Theologian William Lane Craig:

So, yeah.

I basically rewatched this video, re-read Letter to a Christian Nation once, and thought about everything, and I was brought right back down to my neutral, ‘spiritual… appreciative toward the beauty in religious texts… but not dogmatically religious’ perspective.

Or in other words, “Christian Atheist Jew”.