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The Long Way Back to Christianity
By Leo thee Lemon
I could write all day about ancient philosophies.
Honestly, I usually do.
Not because I think I've figured anything out.
Because I haven't.
The people who have everything figured out tend to worry me.
They usually end up selling something.
The Bible is filled with incredible ideas.
Not answers.
Ideas.
Questions disguised as stories.
Stories disguised as warnings.
Warnings disguised as history.
For me, the interesting part is not whether a story literally happened.
The interesting part is why somebody felt it needed to survive.
Why carry a message across thousands of years?
Why copy it by candlelight?
Why preserve it through wars, famines, plagues, collapsing kingdoms, political purges, and generations of people who probably had more immediate problems than theological interpretation?
Something in those stories mattered.
Enough that people refused to let them die.
I don't think it was simply church authority.
Although religion has certainly accumulated enough authority over the years to make any reasonable person slightly uncomfortable.
There is a lot of darkness in religious history.
Power.
Control.
Money.
Politics.
Fear.
The usual ingredients.
Human beings have been remarkably consistent.
Give us a sacred text and eventually somebody will try to monetize it.
That is the part I struggle with.
Not faith.
Control.
Control the information.
Control the narrative.
Control the questions.
Control who gets to interpret the answers.
Then eventually convince people that obedience and understanding are the same thing.
They are not.
I have always tried to filter out the stories that feel designed primarily to control behaviour.
Not because I think I am smarter than the people who wrote them.
Because I don't trust anyone who gets nervous when questions start appearing.
Questions are healthy.
Questions mean you're paying attention.
Questions mean your brain is still switched on.
Which is why I never understood being told I asked too many.
There is no such thing.
The funny thing is that questioning religion is what eventually brought me back to Christianity.
Not leaving it.
Questioning it.
I wandered off.
Read other philosophies.
Studied different religions.
Borrowed ideas.
Rejected others.
Kept what resonated.
Discarded what felt hollow.
Then one day I looked back at Christianity and it made more sense than it did the first time.
The first version I received was mostly rules.
The second version felt more like wisdom.
"The Kingdom of God is within you."
"Be not afraid."
Those two ideas alone have probably influenced me more than entire semesters of religious education.
The temple is within you.
Be not afraid.
That feels like enough work for one lifetime.
When teachers tried to teach religion in school, they often seemed frustrated by my questions.
I understand that now.
Questions slow things down.
Questions complicate certainty.
Questions make neat little boxes harder to maintain.
Institutions love certainty.
Human beings live in uncertainty.
The two are often negotiating.
One of the things I admire most about Buddhism is its relationship with questions.
Questions aren't viewed as threats.
They're viewed as tools.
A Buddhist monk can spend years investigating a single question.
Not because he expects a final answer.
Because the investigation itself has value.
I love that.
I also love how often Buddhists refuse to argue.
Not because they secretly agree.
Not because they surrendered.
Because they understand something most of us learn far too late.
Winning an argument and changing a mind are rarely the same event.
I've spent enough time online to learn that lesson repeatedly.
Sometimes hourly.
The Buddhist perspective often feels less interested in being right and more interested in understanding.
That distinction matters.
Questions lead to answers.
Answers create new questions.
Then the process starts again.
I suspect that's how wisdom actually works.
Not as a destination.
As a loop.
From a Buddhist perspective, many would describe Jesus as enlightened.
A person who arrived somewhere worth listening to.
A person whose life became an answer to a question most people are still asking.
Even if someone only carries part of the answer, there is value in listening.
Even a small glimpse matters.
Here is the thing most people don't say out loud.
The temple within you that Jesus talks about is not entirely different from what monks spend their lives searching for.
Different language.
Different traditions.
Different stories.
Very similar destination.
I like drawing parallels.
Maybe because history keeps drawing them for us.
The more history I read, the less impressed I become with modern people claiming everything is new.
The technology is new.
The apps are new.
The surveillance is new.
The delivery speed is new.
Human nature is ancient.
The desire for power.
The desire for status.
The desire for certainty.
The desire to control information.
The desire to tell people what to fear.
None of that changed.
The methods barely changed either.
Study enough history and you start recognizing the same tricks wearing different clothes.
Different rulers.
Different governments.
Different religions.
Different logos.
Same techniques.
Powerful people rarely want ordinary people becoming too informed.
Information has a nasty habit of making authority uncomfortable.
Religion has done this.
Governments have done this.
Corporations do it every day.
Fear remains one of the most reliable tools ever invented.
Fear of outsiders.
Fear of punishment.
Fear of questioning.
Fear of being wrong.
Fear of leaving.
Fear of staying.
The Church used fear.
The State used fear.
The internet uses fear.
We've simply upgraded the delivery systems.
People think this is an overreach.
Then I remember Galileo.
Galileo looked through a telescope.
The Church looked through a bureaucracy.
One of them aged better.
The Earth was not the center of the universe.
We know that now.
And somehow reality survived.
The funny thing is that learning we aren't the center of everything never made humanity less special.
If anything it made existence stranger.
More miraculous.
More improbable.
We still live on the only world we know that can sustain life.
That remains extraordinary.
Truth doesn't become less true because it makes institutions uncomfortable.
That lesson survived too.
I love Jesus.
I think his teachings are extraordinary.
I think they contain more wisdom than most people realize.
The rest?
I'm still asking questions.
And honestly, I hope I never stop.
Keep scrolling for the Afterthought.
The main articles stay free. That matters to me.
I don’t want the important stuff locked behind paywalls and “community access” that just means a credit card and a login.
But I do need a space to go deeper. Less polished. Less filtered. More honest.
So the main piece will always be free.
What’s below is optional.
An extra layer for people who want the behind-the-scenes thinking, the psychological undercurrents, and the parts that don’t fit cleanly in the public version without breaking it open completely.
Think of it as director’s commentary for the emotionally overcaffeinated.
Afterthought
There is one story in the Bible that has annoyed me for years.
Not confused me.
Not challenged me.
Annoyed me.
