Brian C. Muraresku - The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name

Like Brian C. Muraresku, author of the excellent Immortality Key that it is my pleasure to introduce to you here, I was raised in a Christian household. My family was Presbyterian, whereas Brians upbringing was Roman Catholic. There are many doctrinal differences between these two denominations but both practice the rite of Holy Communion and until as late as the eighteenth century both advocated and pursued horrific deaths by burning at the stake for hereticsparticularly those accused of witchcraft.

My mother and father met in church in Edinburgh in the 1940s and my father went on to qualify as a surgeon, subsequently taking up a post as a medical missionary at the Christian Medical College in Vellore in the south of India, which he held from 1954 until 1958.

Born in 1950, I was my parents only child and our four years in the mission field, embedded in a devout Christian community, were undoubtedly formative in my lifealthough certainly not in the way that my father in particular had hoped. His efforts to fill my head with Christian ideas, buttressed by regular readings from the Old and New Testaments, only fueled my growing dislike of attending church and being forced to listen to long, boring sermons.

By the time I was fourteen that feeling of dislike had crystallized into detestation. The year was 1964; Id been back in Britain for six years and I was having a miserable time at a boarding school in the city of Durham. Affiliated to the Church of England (which has its own doctrinal differences from Catholicism and Presbyterianism, but with both of which it shares the rite of Holy Communion), that school, at that time, was horrible and sadistically violent in ways I wont even begin to describe here and was overlooked by a chilly stone chapel where regular services were heldservices that we, as pupils, were required to attend.

I remember actively dreading those services for being so remorselessly boring, and actively resenting them for their stupidity and irrationality. Why should I believe in this God and in his son Jesus, and why should I believe in Heaven and Hell, angels and Satan, just because the Bible, ministers of the church, and my parents told me that these things were real?

They werent real to me!

Expressing my rebellionin my teenage wayby refusing to kneel, pray, or sing hymns during chapel services, I determined that henceforth I would question everything and never again take anything on trust just because some authority figure, or some musty book, said it was so.

By my late teens I was already a committed atheistindeed atheism seemed to me to be the only reasonable and rational position to hold in response to Christian dogma. Then in the early 1970s I attended university where I studied sociology, at that time a radical and questioning discipline, and my views hardened further.

Ive stayed an atheist ever since, in the strict sense of the wordwhich derives from the Greek theos and means literally godless. Fifty years have gone by and I still see no reason to believe in a deity or deities of any kind. Nevertheless certain experiences that have come my way during this past half century have changed my outlook profoundly and, while god remains an unproven hypothesis, the experiences I speak of have persuaded me of the existence of realms and realities other than our own that coexist with ours, and exert influence upon every one of us, but that largely go unseen and unrecognized in modern technological societiesparticularly those that have suffered long exposure to Christian teachings.