[I originally posted this on Facebook, but I also want it recorded here.]
First of all, this is a genuine inquiry on a fundamental human level. Not an intellectual exercise, not a platform for theological discourse, but a sincere examination of something that spins constantly in my mind. Secondly, I am not here to indite your beliefs or ask you to defend anything you believe. I do, however, want you to explain *why* you believe. Honestly, as a human being.
I find myself in an existential crisis. The nature of reality has become more uncertain than it has ever been for me. I don’t see how anyone can be certain of anything at all, how anyone can truly *know* any answers.
I’m not a Christian because one day I realized I just wasn’t. It wasn’t for me. I wasn’t doing Christian things and had no interest in them. I believe God exists and that Jesus loves me, but I do not feel that love nor do I feel any love for Him. Not out of ill will or evil. It is just a fact that I don’t have those feelings and I don’t want to have those feelings. I think it is unhealthy to suggest that you love someone because they love you or because they died for you without involving you in that decision.
I asked someone about their idea of heaven and they explained it would be an eternity involving nothing but singing praises to God. This filled me with dread and revulsion. I could imagine nothing more boring and awful. I don’t want to live forever. The idea seems unnatural to me.
So I stopped being a Christian because I wasn’t interested in the package, not because I didn’t believe it was true.
Recently, the tenets of Christianity, and, peripherally, any faith, have become more and more preposterous to me. Let me clarify: I’m not calling into question whether something is true. I am calling into question the line of reasoning that would allow someone any sort of certainty about the machinations of reality (both seen and unseen). I get the sense of some fundamental, root level absolute reality, unknowable in its very nature, run through the sieve of limited human intelligence, social mores and politics.
And I’m not talking about translations of the Bible, so-called contradictions, etc. I am wondering how the information presented in the Bible is compelling enough for people to form an entire outlook on reality. And how someone could feel that outlook is more valid than any other.
Personally, my outlook on reality can be summed up this way: What I feel is real. Ultimately, the decisions and actions I take are based on how they will make me feel. This means I may believe in “irrational” things. I am aware of physics, laws, etc., but, honestly, I am going to go with my heart. So a derivative of this philosophy is that something need not exist to be real. An event can be fictional and still be True. To bring this back to the point, it is not important to me whether or not something actually happened for it to have meaning. I don’t care if there was an Adam and Eve, but there is truth in that story.
However, I cannot let go of a desire for certainty. For whatever reason, I want to know what is Really Going On. Right now I feel like I have a collection of various stories that sometimes overlap. The stories are a way to explain an experience. But I feel it is preposterous to say any story is a definitive instrument to measure reality. I hear accounts from Christians, Buddhists, New Agers and Atheists and I experience a growing dread that these perspectives are flawed on a rudimentary level, like a slide rule is being used to measure love. Or the fact that we have built these perspectives is abhorrent in itself.
So, the question I pose to you is: Why are you doing this? “This” being existence. Discuss.
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What would we do now if we knew all that we wanted to know? Tweek God’s decisions? Offer Him advice? Analyze His plans?
I think that in Heaven we WILL “know as we are known” and have fully all the potential we could possibly have. Not just have but be able to excercise those abilities with others who have fulfilled their own potentials.
That would be reason to praise God.
Maybe it would be like going to the ALAMO and always finding everyone you want to talk/listen to be there. And they mutually glad that you came.
I don’t know what I actually believe. What I’d like to believe is this: God is bigger than any human understanding. But at the same time, we are God, each of us is a face of the Divine. God is Love and we are God when we love one another and behave in a compassionate, thoughtful way toward all other parts of creation. I would like to believe that when we die, we are shed of our body’s limitations of understanding and loving, and that we finally understand and love in a fully God-Like way. That’s what I’d like to believe. But most people are such complete bastards I just really can’t.
By the way, I’m going back to your original post, and I find a lot of beauty in it. I think I agree with what you say here more than I realized at first reading. I actually think that all religious perspectives CAN be likened to using a slide rule to measure love. But I would counter that you need not feel dread. I think we need to release ourselves from the need to own Truth and embrace the quest for it. Like so many parts of living, you can never get there; you can only hope to get close enough to see how far you have to go.
Getting in late on the discussion.
I was meditating the other day in my interior world, and I had posed a question to some of the people there, and they told me “nobody knows nothing.” It was in regard to what I should feel/do about something that was going on in my life. But they were all hanging out, like bedouins in the desert, and waiting for things to happen, to see what was going to come about.
This is probably confusing as to why I would share this in relation to this question. I don’t think certainty enters into any of this. In fact, I think that it’s not something that can’t be part of the discussion related to the divine. That’s an element of faith, which is in essence and by needs subjective.
What you can know and be certain of is the love you feel between and for people and things, of the company you keep while you wait for signs and for things to happen, or the things you create and make happen which bring you joy.
I’m trying to reconcile the complexity which is human emotion and mind with the strictures that religion places on us. Should I feel badly about coveting another man’s wife? Because if I do, it’s really hard to tell me not to do it. How do I handle that? I think the Bible is reflective of that complication, as the commandments say you shouldn’t do that, and yet King David kinda had a problem with that and it turned out ok…
So I guess what I’m saying is that while I may look to the major religious texts to see how other people have handled this mass of confusion that is being human, I’m probably not going to take any of them as THE RULES for this thing called life that I have been blessed with (and yes, I feel blessed:)