Praise then darkness, and Creation unfinished.
tfurrows recently posted[0] some statements for consideration
regarding God, as well as a personal statement of a belief
regarding the choice to believe in God.
Those items prompted some thoughts for me. Warning: rambling lies
ahead.
The idea of choosing to believe in God has always seemed odd to me,
as in being difficult to fathom - difficult to accept. It does
not fit with my own experience with religious belief, either
possessing(?) it or its absence. It really has not been my
experience that you can choose to believe something. You either
believe something, or you do not believe it, or you do not yet know
whether you believe it (your degree of belief may even fluctuate
from day to day).
When I was young my parents took my sister and I every Sunday to an
Episcopal church, and I can't say that I had any serious religious
belief at that time, I probably didn't have the capacity for it. As
a teenager I found a belief in God as some comfort in a time when I
really didn't have any close friends or anyone in my family to
confide in. My belief helped me to hold myself together during that
time. In college my belief began to come into question as I learned
more about the world and began to realize what a mess a lot of
things really are. For a time I continued to tell myself that I
believed but eventually I came to a point where I realized I simply
did not. I wasn't having doubts, I wasn't undecided, my belief in
the Christian God was simply gone. I didn't choose to give up my
belief, if anything I tried to hold on to it long after it wasn't
really there because it was a part of my image of myself. I took a
comparative religion course on early Christianity and while it was
truly very interesting and illuminating it did little to settle the
questions that I had - if anything it probably helped force me to
confront the fact that I was no longer a believer.
At no point did I really feel like I had any say as to whether I
believed in God. At some points in my life I have believed, at no
point did I choose to believe.
My beliefs now are more complicated. I am firmly an agnostic, I
don't have a firm belief in God and I suspect that it isn't
possible for people to really know whether God exists or not. If
God exists, some of the things that my wife and others I know have
been through in their lives would force me to question whether he
deserves worship, in any case. I do still pray sometimes, but to
who or what I pray is up for question. Mostly I just give a 'thank
you' prayer when something goes well, not knowing whether there is
anyone there to hear it. I also think that perhaps letting go of
the question of whether God exists may actually be better, for me
at least - I don't think you can reason your way to belief and it
can drive you crazy trying. I have for the most part let go of that
question - trying to figure out whether I believe in God. It either
comes, or it does not.
If there is a God then he could certainly come into someone's life
and show them directly what he wants them to know or believe, the
early Christians would have used the word 'gnosis' for that. The
less-early Christians decided that all of the Gnostics' ideas were
blasphemous and left them out of the canon and mostly tried to
erase those ideas from existence. To a great extent they succeeded
and now many Christians believe you need to have a church
organization telling you what to believe, which book to read, what
God is like. I don't think that unexamined approach to Christianity
or religion is very healthy.
On tfurrows' first two points, about accepting what God teaches and
asks or believing in God if what he teaches is something you are
willing to give, I think the real question is actually something
different. If what a religion teaches aligns with your experience
of life and the world then you are likely to accept the teachings
of that religion. If it does not then you are likely to dismiss
that religion and the rules or precepts that it presents. Many
people fail to follow the tenets of their religion very strictly
anyway, strict adherents are in the minority, at least in my
experience. There are also a great many people who choose religion
on a social basis for the things it allows them to do, or for other
reasons not related to their actual beliefs. Perhaps some people
have actually received gnosis and really /know/ what is true. That
is not me and so I instead have to do my best with being betwixt
and between.
[0] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/%7etfurrows/phlog/umbra/2019-04-30_choosingGod.txt
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