The natural progression of knowledge acquisition for anyone to gain expertise in a field:

Knowledge is taught

Communicated in a series of

Steps which

Increase in complexity. Understand each step to progress to

A level of expertise. Learn

These steps. Let them

Be teachable. Learn reason

For mathematics, or natural science.

Learn language for art, and history. What cannot be

Teachable is faith. But innate.

In discussion of complex religious concepts

(With the exception of the most fundamental concepts,

As love

Is justified through experience by even children)

The innate faith is necessary to attaining knowledge.

Belief in the afterlife is not a product of reason or logic

Deductive or inductive.

A knower must not doubt.

A minister, nor a Sunday school child, nor a protestor for the Westboro Baptist church can exist without

Faith and expect to progress as a learner.

You must understand this basic step

Comprehend the incomprehensible

In order to attain expertise.

(And God will not explain it to you, nor

Teach it to you: the fine print of the Bible.)

(And there is no expert to lead your way, and this

Is what they do not tell you.)

Steph 1:

Must be learned from your mother.

She plants it, like a seed, this teaching

Of love. It is always explained in simple concepts

For which children do not yet have context.

No personal knowledge of hate – Yet fresh skin,

Squish the fat on the baby’s wrist, tell them that

Touch is connection, no matter how painful

And they will not be able to contrast. A bruise

Which we know as a sign of abuse will be seen as a sign

Of affection. Red blood vessels rise to the surface

Like a heart, after all the heart is a vessel itself.

God is credible in the mind of a child

He is a man with a beard which they can draw

In crayon. There are colours for God when you are Young.

Here are the words: Hope, love, trust

Ask a five year old to show you the evidence of God

And he will point out these words in his life

In the form of his parents, and his friends; Tell him to

Say thank you for the food, and he will say it. There is no

Question yet that it was put there for him by God.

Now the seed is a tree and he believes that it is

Real.

Step 2:

Natural science gains authority in the fifth grade classroom

A historical development challenges the credibility

Of a God. There are atoms now; read them for me

Hydrogen, and oxygen, and nitrogen and these are God.

The world evolves around the computer, a tree growing its roots

Around a RAM. Dominance shifts and fades and religion is no longer

On top. The system is heliocentric and God did not make Earth first

Find the fossils and tell me if evolution occurred in seven days-

Learn to speak in combination, in order to exist

Learn compromise. Sit at the table and talk about

Genesis as a metaphor, each day a few millennia.

The Garden of Eden was in Africa, and Adam and Eve walked across Pangea

When they were expelled. God clapped his hands and it made

A sound like the big bang. Children will struggle to make room for this

Amongst their roots. Twelve year olds do not think like Thiselton.1

In the midst of voice drops and acne no child raises their hand

In the classroom and accuses the teacher

Of disbelief.

Reject on the premise of it being easier.

Through the reading of popular scientific journals come to

The same conclusions as Einstein and agree that: “the stories of the Bible could not be true.”

Yet even Einstein appreciates Spinoza’s God.2

Step 3:

Stumble.

With hate, comes context, and we progress beyond a young child’s brain into one

That can compare.

Faith is not so clear now. God is no longer a man

1
An English Anglican priest and theologian
2
Defined God as a substance and extension synonymous with nature. Humans do not interact with God but are
merely a derivative of God.
In a picture Bible at Sunday school, but a man who is unwoven

In threads by the evangelical, revisionists, and politicians.

Search for the threads that will make God whole again and tell me what you find.

Let your identity become the basis of your willingness to reject.

Read Atwood and find that Rachel and Bilhah3 were built by the Bible;

Bodily autonomy for the women becomes ground that cannot be relinquished.

Drown Leviticus 18:224 in rainbows

And stuff the Corinthians back down the throat of those who first spoke them.

Not young enough to see forgiveness as merely a word with simple connotation

But still young enough

To read Hebrews 8:125 and question if the wickedness

Of McQuilliams, Shannon, Roeder, Rudolph, Tarrant6

Have as much right to be

Forgiven.

Become the tug of war rope between your mother who can preach

Love like it’s her native language and the atheist liberals in your online forums

Who are looking for another argument because

It is easier to debate with logic than it is to debate with faith.

After all, every teenage revolutionary wants to be right.

When your mother reads ‘love they neighbour’

She may tell you it trumps all possible hostilities in a good Christian’s heart

And you must decide if you believe her.

But the concepts are increasing in complexity,

You are tripping up the stairs to expertise and everything is more

3
Biblical characters referenced throughout Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Genesis 30:1 – 3: “And she said, Behold
my maid Bilhah, go unto her; and she shall bear upon my knees, that I may have children by her.”
4
“Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable.” – Leviticus 18:22
5
“For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.” – Hebrews 8:12
6
McQuilliams, Shannon, Roeder, Rudolph and Tarrant are Christians who committed hate crimes in the name of
religious belief.
Difficult up here.

The God you were taught, is not the God that you see

And instead of being something you can draw

God becomes, faceless.

Step 4:

Attempt to locate your faceless God.

You find you cannot master those complex

Steps of your younger years and hence you become stalled.

In order to redefine your God you reject most verses in the Bible;

You reject the definition of the God you were once taught and leave it

Scattered in the wind. Now you have a choice:

Option A

Believe in that which you have yet to find.

Create your own God from the leftovers of what you have decided is true

Return to the seed your mother once planted. Begin to rebuild something that

You can have faith in.

Trust blindly that you will find it.

Escape all logic

And learn to exist in the place where the parallels of natural science

Religious knowledge, and that which you have rejected cross.

Believe that those cross roads are there

All though by all accounts of parallels

They should not be.

Option B

Let it scatter. Find solace in the logic which allows you to understand

Natural science with your eyes and tongue. Religion becomes

A sect of the Social Sciences and History and you

May learn to measure its effects on the world around you

Through data which you collect audibly and physically.

You keep the seed your mother planted

As a souvenir to remind you how to treat others in your life

But you know that the tree it will grow into

Has limbs too complicated to understand

Without the faith you have no interest in learning.

You ask yourself why you should believe in something

That was taught through twisted translation, red elephant propaganda

And the escapes of those persecuted?

((And that question) (the fact that you see it as such) show that

You cannot comprehend the one critical step necessary for expertise).

For it is both the easiest and most complex

And it is not teachable

Or learnable

Or understandable:

The Final Step

Faith.