I was raised Catholic, converted to fundamentalist evangelicalism, then have been an atheist for about the last decade.

My recent bout with cancer and the birth of my daughter has had me reconsidering my atheism and looking again at community and some of my spiritual inklings. I'm a big fan of Alan Watts for a point of reference. And i still study a lot of secular academic biblical scholarship for fun.

I Finally listened to a CLF service. The recent one on holy wholeness. The whole thing was very good, but I think I realized I'm just too much of an anti-nature atheist to be UU or any kind of humanist or progressive Christian.

Specifically the portion about 3 dimensional living which was very well delivered and a great message, but it helped me realize I don't actually believe in identifying the web of being with love or interconnectedness or wholeness. I see nature as inherently hostile and something we thrive in spite of not because of.

Like don't get me wrong i fully support the social political point of UU. If I had a stronger desire for community, I'd probably join anyways.

But it was helpful for me to recognize that my flirtations with things like progressive Christianity require me to suppress how i actually think about the history of the church and what i believe to be the shortcomings of the historical Jesus himself. I don't think I can authentically embrace Jesus as a moral teacher.

And my attraction to something like deep ecology or pantheism or Buddhist dependents arising and identifying God with love or the whole of humanity or all the universe requires me to suppress how I actually feel about natural evil, human evil, and what I see as pointless but unavoidable suffering.

I guess I'm something like an optimistic nihilist who narrowly (perhaps selfishly) wants to focus on my family and my minimal sphere of influence in doing the best I can, but have little desire for connection or impact beyond that.

Love everything y'all are doing but not for me personally no offense at all and thank you for the hospitality.

Does anyone know of any discussions of biblical scholars discussing how they reconcile the mainstream findings of biblical scholarship with their likely liberal Christianity?

I'm thinking podcast or YouTube interviews or talks would be helpful.

Questions that come to mind are

Jesus and the apostles appear to have been mistaken about the timing and possibly the nature of the coming kingdom. How does that affect your faith in Jesus and your understanding of the kingdom as a person of faith?

Jesus peter and James appear to have only imagined God saving the people of Israel. What do you think of the disagreement between Paul and the judaizers and the eventual marking of ebionites as heretics?

Related to that, Jesus appears to have taught salvation through the law's distillation of love, and forgiveness via repentance. The early church appears to have taught salvation via belief in Christs atoning sacrifice. Which do you think god requires forgiveness or atonement? How do you handle the disconnect?

Basically areas where biblical scholarship highlight real doctrinal differences between the jesus movement or early voices in the church. And where it highlights challenges to nicene Christianity such as Jesus potentially not claiming to be divine during his lifetime.

Of course I'll always welcome anyone who wants to chime in here with their own responses.

Please don't use this post to try to argue against the findings of critical scholarship. The topic at hand is grappling with those findings assuming they're historically true.