The Bible Matrix
The Bible Matrix is a Secular Bible Study. Connecting the Bible to reality, while unplugging from harmful ideology.
Fikile Guduza - Who am I?
PS: This is me at Heaven’s Gate in Bali. The picture has religious connotations, and that’s okay. Just because I am not religious does not mean I do not appreciate religious and spiritual symbolism.
Why Did I Start This Blog?
I went to University at the age of 18 - not because I wanted a degree, but because I wanted to leave home. I wanted to find myself. I wanted to know who I was outside of the confines of religious boundaries. I wanted to seek the truth about how life works. Was I being lied to or was the world of the Church reflective of reality? Well, I found many discrepancies. Initially, I wanted to go on and live my own life, following the money to climb the corporate ladder and get a house. However, I found myself compelled to take a different journey – to confront and resolve this problem once and for all.
The Problem: What I was told was not true.
I grew up in an African Pentecostal Evangelical Church in London. This Church was highly successful. At its peak, the head pastor owned a private jet and met the Queen of England. He was invited to preach at various conferences all over the world, and he had many branches all over England until eventually he was extradited out of the country.
I was told that God was a spiritual father who could do anything for me if I believed in him. He was a miracle-working God and would supply his children with what they wished for if they asked. He made the impossible possible. The laws of nature, science and rationale would not hold him back because he made those laws. He had the power to usurp any and all of those laws. You need money? He would provide. You needed healing? He would provide. You needed peace? He would provide. Prayer was the answer to everything. In this Church and many others we attended in the form of conferences or via God Channel, we saw miracles, signs and wonders. We saw things that did not make sense occur before our eyes. The universal laws of nature that I had learnt at school were being brought into question because I was being told that there is a secret spiritual realm that dictates reality which those of the world did not know of.
When my mother finally left that Church, I would have liked to discuss the good, the bad and the ugly about all that we had learnt over that decade, so that we could begin the process of unlearning before relearning the world anew. However, since we were taught not to criticise the Pastor and not to look at the past, no such conversation happened. This is bad advice which directly goes against one universal law:
“Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.”
You have to be able to say that this was good and this was bad. You have to be able to critically analyse and criticise experiments, projects and even yourself to know what not to do next time. Even God looked back at his creation to see if it was good.
What do I believe now?
I stopped calling myself a Christian at the age of 16 when we left that Church. Some of the members of my family went on to find other churches, whilst I wanted to seek the other side of the story. I still believed (or more so wanted to believe) that God was Jehovah until 2017 when I was 21 and had left University. An incident occurred which sparked me to take this project seriously. I will eventually write a book about my findings. This blog is a compilation of everything that cannot fit into the book, unpacking my investigations into God, the Bible and Christianity, human psychology and sociology. [I do not have a book publisher yet, so if you are a publisher please get in contact with me. However, I may simply self-publish. ]
My conclusions and beliefs now:
God is not a supernatural being called Jehovah or any other name that upends the laws of nature and rewards individual people he favours. The overarching noun of “God” is abstract as it pertains to the laws of nature that underpin the foundation of the world. However, not every mention of God in the Bible references this definition.
The Bible can be read as a religious book, but hidden behind the instruction is a workbook of wisdom in the form of parable.
Subscribe if you want to learn more about the life lessons I have learned in all these years, the things I would not take going forward from the Church and the things we should relearn as a society to make our home a little more like a kingdom of heaven on earth.
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