Pulling The Thread Podcast: Tracing Jesus Before Christianity Emerged, Jesus the Jew within Judaism! · Jeramiah Giehl

Loosing His Religion: A Discussion With Former Pastor Mark Peralta's Journey of Deconstructing Faith: Episode 12

·1 hr 16 min·4 clips

Peralta says he was fired after he argued for a full-time worship pastor, then handed a written explanation that was not true.

Jeremiah interviews former pastor Mark Peralta about his journey into and out of Christianity. Mark begins with being born and raised Catholic in Colombia. He talks about baptism, communion, and the other sacraments as part of his childhood. As an adult, he drifted away from the church before the move to the United States. After the move, Catholicism stayed more in the background. Later he began attending an evangelical church. That shift deepened when he met his wife, who also came from an evangelical background. They were quickly convinced that God was necessary for their relationship to work. When that path started to feel off, they did not just stop believing and move on. Instead they tried a home church model. He describes trying to build something more primitive and self-directed. He kept teaching the Bible to his kids and living the church life around the house. Around the pandemic, his thinking changed direction. While getting into woodworking videos on YouTube, he also started watching the atheist experience. Matt Dillahunty and Christopher Hitchens began to make a lot of sense to him. He connects that shift to philosophy courses from DTS. He points to intro philosophy, logic, and epistemology as especially important. Logic exposed him to fallacies, inductive and deductive reasoning, and the way science and religion argue from different starting points. He also talks about how language can be bent to sound convincing without being true. Hearing the other side forced him to look again at the arguments for God, Christianity, and the claims he had once carried inside the seminary itself.

As heard by us

A former pastor traces a path from Catholic childhood to evangelical life, deconstruction, and hard questions about logic.

The episode follows Mark Peralta from a Catholic upbringing in Colombia into evangelical church life, home church experiments, and the questions that later started to pull his thinking apart.

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Why you'd press play

If you want a faith story that starts in Colombia, passes through seminary, and lands in philosophy.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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