I was on the Few Good Men commentary, so some of that may have come from me.  I had no real bad experiences with the Church.  I have nothing but affection for religion, from an academic perspective (I majored in film and minored in Religion).  I always talked about being a reluctant atheist and I'll explain why.

I felt, and still feel, a great passion for the message of Christ.  I don't think there's one thing attributed to Jesus that would make anyone go, "That's evil!"  Most people's issue with biblical authority generally comes from the Old Testament, with the exception of the acid trip that is Revelations.  So Jesus' message as depicted in the canonical gospels felt very real to me.  As a child I accepted the supernatural elements as true, because I was so impassioned with the living example he set, that the stuff about virgin births MUST be true then.  Also, the faith makes it very clear that the mythology and the message are a package deal.  Jesus is significant to Christians because of the fully God/fully man, virgin birth, died for your sins and resurrected 3 days later thing.

As I hit adolescence, something wasn't sitting right.  Inconsistencies became too common to ignore, and at 13 I had nothing short of an epic existential crisis.   I would wake up in the middle of the night pondering my place in the universe.  It became clear to me that much of the Bible is written from the limited perspective of it's era.  And once I found out that the Bible was written piecemeal and essentially collated and edited, oh man...that threw me.  I also got heavy into Martial Arts and eastern thought.  Reading the Tao Te Ching at 14 was revelatory.  There's such a purity in it's humble approach.  It was the first religious text I read that assured me it was ok not to have an answer for everything, as long as we keep searching for truth.  In many ways it reminded me of the words attributed to Christ, just without the baggage of the rest of the Bible. 

I still identified as Christian.  But there came a day when I had to be honest with my self.  Christ's message rang true to me.  I accepted the teachings as self evident a fact as the sun rising and waves crashing.  Did I believe in the virgin birth?  No.  Not for a second.  Did I believe that Christ was the literal son of God?  Nope.  Not even the nephew.  Did I believe in the resurrection?  Not a chance.  When it became clear to me those things were necessary to call yourself a Christian, I stopped myself that.  Once I did, it was INCREDIBLY liberating.

By this time I was living in Hawaii and training in Muay Thai with Kru Kham.  He was Buddhist and pretty much made Meditation mandatory.  Sitting Zazen was another lightning bolt moment because it was the intellectual inverse of Christianity.  Whereas I had nothing but fond memories of my times in Church and youth Bible camp, I couldn't help but notice a pattern:  I sat somewhere, and listened to someone talk.  Then I would kneel, close my eyes, and have (let's face it) a one sided conversation with the divine.  Then I would hear someone else talk, and generally tell me how my church or Jesus or God wanted me to live my life.  The only time I talked?  To say good bye on my way out.

My Zen sessions usually go like this: There'd be a 5-10 minute talk, then 30 minutes of sitting Zazen.  Think it's easy to keep your eyes open and remain perfectly still and not think of anything?  Try it.  Roshi Brad Warner likens it to "taking a lid off a boiling pot.  Everything rushes to the surface."  You're essentially forced to deal with yourself without any pretense or bullshit.  And trust me, we ALL bullshit ourselves regularly.  Afterwards, you could ask questions, but largely the work was all on you.  You were forced to just sit there with all this inescapable self, and by the end you couldn't ignore it.  Praying in a Christian church....you're essentially asking for someone to either lighten your load or make you stronger.  You're dependent on God intervening in some way.  That's why, macman, I find the whole idea of miracles, divine intervention, or any way that people claim God acts in your or anyone else's life.....offensive.  Because the Christian idea of God is selective of who it helps.  In Buddhism (not a religion, btw) the work is up to us.  There's no hell, no heaven, we are largely ignorant of any of that stuff.  All that matters is this moment in front of you. 

All of those things rang as true to me as Christ's words of love and tolerance and acceptance.  The magical stuff in the rest of the bible, the plagues, the floods, the angels, was silly in comparison to all the other truth.  SO no, Pastormacman, the "church," never alienated me away from Jesus.  The Bible did.

I may not agree with your sentiment, but I admire your honesty, both Eddie's and Dorkman.

I have been going back and forth in this thread and certainly have been challenged in my thinking. So, in that vein, it has been very enlightening. While I didn't expect it, it is interesting, especially after having to read psychology papers and articles for so long. Having go back and do some research in theology has been a change.

I recall a quote from Penn (or Teller, sorry it's been a while) that discussed a similar notion to what Eddie is talking about. The idea that believing in the God of the Bible is essentially and absolution of personal responsibility. That, I am not responsible for my choices or actions, that is the evil inside of me and that I need outside help to get past it.

Speaking from a purely psychological point of view, this can be offensive. It flies in the face of the current humanistic thought, that humanity is able to, if freed from common restraints, will excel. For those of you unfamiliar with humanistic psych, a quick example is Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, with the end being self-actualization.

It is very human to have to work for anything and to get something for something makes us uncomfortable. Believe me, working in retail and sampling this can be a fight. People want free stuff, but look at you cross-eyed when you actually give it to them.

It comes down to your view of humanity. The view that man is fallen, or evil, is not a new one, nor is it new to Christianity. The idea that man will be bent towards evil is even in psychological thought, especially Freud, but it is not popular now. People would like to think of themselves as good people who do good things. But, it is hard to escape the evil of man at times.

In my view, and others, the idea that believing in Christ absolves a person of their personal responsibility in this life, in the current moment, or in our decisions is not a biblical line of thought. God is freeing us to have the capacity to do good, and become better. That doesn't change my ability to choose or be free moral agents. It is a relationship and partnership, as true as any human friendship and more empowering for me to do good and to love in a deeper capacity.

I have discuss the more historical and textual issues relating to the Bible, because I really wanted to avoid the personal road. But, Eddie inspired me, a little, to be honest and to relate how personal the Bible and Jesus Christ are to me.

I understand why people disagree, but there is so much more to it than the common conceptions of organized Christianity. There is so much depth there that I would not understand but want to understand. Beyond that, it gets even more personal. But, it is much deeper than going to church, tithing, and praying.

Thanks for listening

Seconded.

I always point people in the direction of Hardcore Zen.  It's the memoir of a former Punk Rock bass player who became a Zen monk, because he saw the parallels to Punk Music and Zen.

Recently started studying Theravada Buddhism. Eddie's a little mixed up on the mysticism with regard to Theravada vs Mahayana. Must be thinking of a lot of the other Mahayana schools, like Pure Land's worship of Amitabha, or the overarching Mahayana beliefs of bardo as spirit-purgatory, lots of rituals, and how the Lotus Sutra (a key Mahayana doctrine separating the two major schools) is all like "Buddhahood == Phoenix Force." I don't know tons about Zen, but at this point I just loosely consider its relentless dedication to abject nothingness to be less than practical. (I mean, shikantaza ignores, like, most of the Satipatthana, right?)

The Buddha's dhamma is the same between the schools, but Theravada is the more orthodox and sticks only to the teachings of Gotama Buddha, whereas in Mahayana there are a number more revered figures, an expanded canon that stresses and builds on parts of the Pali canon, and lots of regional differences.

But like Eddie said, the biggest thing to separate Buddhism from the whole western idea of religion is that there is no inherent faith. Simply the practice of developing personal confidence in sets of methods and psychological tools that have been proven capable of diminishing dukkha for like the last 2600 years. Fits in well with what was being said earlier about personal accountability.

The foundations are built like logic proofs, making the whole operation about as religious as eighth year math, and the big question posed by the thread irrelevant.