New Church Life Mar/Apr 2014 | Page 78

new church life: march / april 2014 Few will take the step that what they know or believe might be wrong – a willingness to admit that what we know or do is wrong is distressful. But it is a necessary step in order to reach the truth. taught in the New Church – how Jesus conquered sin until the Holy Spirit became available to humanity. It was not as detailed as what Swedenborg describes, but enough of it is there in the New Testament. Later, I looked at the closed Bible on the shelf, and thought: I better start reading it more to determine if what the church is teaching is correct. I had at one time decided to read the entire Bible, but when I hit the book of Leviticus, I thought: “This has got to be the most incredibly boring book I have ever read.” This book was weird – why such detail in how to sacrifice an animal? I then skipped to the Book of Revelation, and fell in love with its symbolic imagery. But as I started to look at the Bible, the first problem I addressed was how do we prove this is Divinely inspired? I wanted a strong logical and rational foundation. If you ask the Catholic Church, they will say, “Because we told you so.” That is what we know as a logical error – an “ar gument from authority” (argumentum ab auctoritate). I knew the Bible was not completely correct, as the apostle Jude made a scriptural quote from the apocryphal Book of Enoch. This was not a problem I could completely solve. At this point, I thought: let’s move on and try to prove the existence of God. That was a bigger problem. Where to start? The problem was with any logical proof; you must begin with a set of assumptions that can never be proven. Those assumptions must be taken based on “faith.” So, I decided, let’s start with a proof that has some physical or witness evidence. There are two things that modern science denies: there is no such thing as prophesy, where one knows the future, and there is no such thing as the afterlife. I would periodically scan bookstores, diving into the New Age section. I had also gathered books on ancient symbolism. Here my research had a bit of success. There is documented proof that periodically some people have had visions of the future. Ordinary people have precognitive dreams every day. For the afterlife, I discovered the Near Death Experience (NDE), and research in this is ongoing. One of the books was Life After Life, by Raymond Moody, M.D. And in a brief chapter, he mentioned this person I had never heard of, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had described the NDE in the 18th century. At that time there was no internet. So I made a mental note to check 174