I was raised in a christian home. My mother was a christian, and my father sort of went along with it. I’m sure he believes in god, but I really wonder if he doesn’t secretly loathe the dogmatic tenets and doubt the claims of miracles.
I went to baptist churches, pentecostal churches, nazarene churches, lutheran churches, catholic churches, I attended a christian school for a few years, I went to christian kid’s camps, my mom had bible study meetings at our house…you get the idea.
When I was 12 years old, I stood up and walked out of the middle of a sermon. I walked home. All I really remember was that I didn’t want to be so involved in the christian religion. I went to the bookstore and bought a book about meditation. I started to meditate.
When I was a teenager, I met a guy who had a nice house, a good job, a beautiful wife, and because I was so impressed by his life, I decided to start attending youth groups at his church. I was formally converted once again to the christian religion.
I think I just had too many questions.
If god is love, then why do people burn for all eternity? That doesn’t sound like love to me. Who wrote the book of genesis? …In the beginning, god created the heaven and the earth…so, what happened before the beginning? god was just kind of hanging out? Who wrote that? How did they know that? So, the reason why the plagues were inflicted upon innocent people and their crops was because the lord hardened the pharaoh’s heart, and the pharaoh would not let the Israelites go out of his country? Why did the lord do that? What happened to free will? I thought that was why Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden. Why didn’t he just let the pharaoh exercise his free will? The pharaoh was kind of a jerk anyway, he probably would not have let the Israelites go, even if the lord hadn’t hardened his heart. Jonah was swallowed by a great fish, and Jonah was inside the fish for three days and three nights? Now… this doesn’t sound terribly plausible to me. Further, many of the points are metaphors which are open to interpretation, and could mean anything to anyone. Do you see what I mean?
I started to read Jean-Paul Sarte, Erich Fromm, and Ayn Rand. I appreciated Rand ’s work the most, but instead of referring to myself as an “objectivist,” when people asked me about my spiritual orientation I called myself an “existentialist and a humanist.” So, with regard to religious matters, I decided that the application of “existence precedes essence” ultimately led to a more agnostic philosophy which required little discussion, since the consideration of reality takes precedence over speculation about its origin.
I decided that the best way to handle the kind of religious zealots that we have all come to deal with would simply be to say “I am not a Christian.”
I also studied Einstein, da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin with an appreciation of scientific deduction, intuition and pragmatism.
Ultimately, I struggled with the inherent conflict between faith and knowledge. Between supernatural and metaphysical. Why should anyone study the laws of nature and physics, but have reservations because we’re not sure whether there is a omnipotent being which could violate the laws of nature and physics? How can anyone escape uncertainty and confusion under this circumstance?
Wow. Someone needs to grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. To me the only way to do this is to operate on the very realistic observation that there is no omnipotent being. Everything just falls into place for me after that.