No, not really. I actually said, "Shit."
Why did I say that? you may ask. I'm not certain; I'll let you figure it out.
I believe that God exists. Moreover, I believe IN God. I don't just believe in a higher power, I believe in THE God...you know, the one in the Bible. And to top that off, I not only believe in the God of the Bible, I also believe in Jesus Christ, the son of God, which makes me a Christian, too.
I am quite confident in what I choose to believe about God and the Bible and Christ. And it is fine with me if I am called a Christian. This is, though, the point of departure between most of the "Christian" world and myself. I do not adhere to any particular religion or denomination, which means that I do not like assumptions to be made about me based on what the rest of the world knows about popular Christianity. But this blog entry will not be about Christianity, it will be about why I believe in God.
It's an interesting journey, being raised in a particular belief system, then leaving home to embark on real, "adult" freedom. Once outside of the confines of the environment that Mom and Dad provided, I was free to examine what I had been hearing all of my life. I was raised to believe in God and in Christ and in all of the truth of the Bible. I was raised that way, but that didn't mean to me that I HAD to believe it. It wasn't an imperative. In fact, the way they raised me, I had a complete understanding of free will, and I was ready to experience my own free will when I left for college. During those college years, then, I often thought about whether or not I believed that what Mom and Dad had been teaching me all of those years was right or not.
I am an analytical person by nature. I am methodical and logical to the core. I am also, therefore, a bit of a skeptic. It occurred to me, once I had the distance to be at least somewhat more objective, that believing in God and the Bible was really just as arbitrary as believing in the Big Bang Theory, Darwin's Origin of the Species, Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age Existentialism, Mother Earth, Wicca, or...nothing. In other words, there was no real evidence that I could see that would compel me or anyone else to know for absolute certain that God and the Bible were more true than Buddha or Allah or a big purple unicorn standing in the corner.
"Evidence" is in the eye of the beholder. Many in the Christian world will point to all kinds of mysterious occurrences in life and the cosmos and say, "See? That's the hand of God." I don't see it that way. As I looked around at the world that surrounded me, and saw a combination of beauty and pain, loveliness and ugliness, love and hate, I knew that there was no clear sign pointing to God. At the same time, though, the other theories and beliefs and possible explanations for all that I could see in the world seemed...incomplete. In my mind, there were as many holes in science and religion as the nonbelievers would say there are in the simple explanation of God. But there was one thought that remained with me that I just couldn't shake off: this - all of this world in its beauty and glory and misery - did not just...happen.
For me, then, the conclusion was swift and simple - something bigger than me is behind all of this. I could not reconcile believing in nothing in my mind. That just wasn't possible for me. As a consequence of knowing that about myself - that I was not capable of believing in nothing and being peaceful with that - I chose to believe in God.
And I do believe that belief is a choice; it isn't a feeling, and it isn't something that happens TO you. There may be influences on that choice, but it's a choice nonetheless. I am certain that there are many who would say that I was just not able to overcome my upbringing. Okay, fine. Believe that if you will. I don't like that because I feel like it does not give me the credit to have a brain and think on my own. Of course, we are all influenced by our upbringings, but at some point, in our adulthood, we have to take all of the experience and knowledge that we can gather and make up our own minds. My mind did not like the alternatives.
Believing in God makes me feel peaceful, and it gives me an enormous amount of freedom. I am now free to worry about all the little mundane things, as well as all the big decisions I need to make. If I had to worry about the mundane AND the big decisions AND wonder why/when/how this all happened, I would go insane.
So, I choose to believe in God. And I will not say that it is an act of faith because I am, in no way, a person of great faith. It just works for me. And I know that it is arbitrary, and I know that it seems simple-minded to some, but that won't change my mind. I do question the choice sometimes, because I am an analytical thinker, and I do feel, sometimes, that I might be just taking the easy way out. But that really isn't it at all. It is my attempt at reaching a logical conclusion about something that is totally illogical, and it works for me.
No comments:
Post a Comment