I was raised to believe in an afterlife. There was a god, he had rules, god needed to be obeyed and pleased, and if you failed to please god he would toss you into a lake of fire, where there was weeping and gnashing of teeth, where the worm was not consumed, and you would live forever in eternal torment.
With the stakes so high, it takes a lot of time, and thinking, and, yes, a dash of that ole gambler/risk-taker syndrome it took a lot of time for me to even consider the possibility that maybe what I was frightened into believing might not be so.
Belief in god, at least for me, came not just from being scared that I would roast forever if I dared to doubt, it was also something I accepted because my parents told me it was so, and they were like gods themselves. They were my creators. They not only gave me life, but they sustained life. My parents provided me with food, clothing, shelter, toys, pleasant things including love, cuddling, as well as punishment when I violated their rules. God, and parents had a lot of similarities to me.
It is common for children to accept their parents' opinions and rules without question until they approach adolescence. The teen years are times when a child must question, disagree, experiment as a way of exploring their future life as an adult.
When I was a child I spoke as a child I understood as a child I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things. ~I Cor. 13:11
Of course, every child does not rebel. Some children become adults created out of the same dough as their parents are made of, they are replicas of their parents as far as their values, opinions, and beliefs go. This happens, but, I doubt if it is ever total. Children become adults who look at their parents and wonder how they managed to survive their quaint and pitiful views, and senseless choices.
The same maturation takes place in one's theological life. As one matures one questions the authority and the rationale of those tenets that have been inculcated into us.
There are reasons for doubt, as well as consequences that come from our beliefs and doubts. At this point in my life I consider myself a doubter. Here is my rationale regarding my doubts:
1. The god I was raised to accept (and now doubt) is a personification: God was described to me as being in the image of a human (better, perfect, but human –like) with a mind, a will, intelligence, purposes and desires. My god (pun intended) the Bible calls him a jealous god.
2 The god I was raised to accept (and now doubt) was suppose to possess supreme power or omnipotence. Omnipotence meant to me that god was all powerful, that there was nothing he could want to do that he could not do. I remember once, as a budding teenage jerk asking my Sunday School Teacher if god could make a rock that was bigger than he could lift. The Sunday School Teacher said, "You can go to hell for asking questions like that!" What an excellent answer. Scare the doubt out of that smart-ass kid is an effective way of instilling a profoundly devout blind faith.
Whenever you look at stuff that seems really bad you might be tempted to question god, but then you remember:
For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. ~Isaiah 55:9
3. The god I was raised to accept (and now doubt) was perfect. The perfection of God is one of the more generally accepted tenets of fundamentalist faith for Christians, Jews, and Muslims. I'm not sure if Ron Hubbard-ites fall in with this crowd or not. This is a very convenient trait. because it makes it useless and sinful to question his decisions. You can't blame God for anything because God is perfect.
4. The god I was raised to accept (and now doubt) is omniscient, the fancy word for All Knowing. God knows everything. If God exists, then he is supposed to know everything, and there is absolutely nothing, not one fact of which God is ignorant. Think back to the scripture about God knowing when a bird falls and the exact count of the hairs you have on your head.
5. The god I was raised to accept (and now doubt) is all loving. God is the essence of perfect love. God is supposed to care about and be interested in human affairs. God loves us, and wants what is best for us. This seems to contradict his inflexible position on sending sinners into the outer most regions of the nether stygian darkness. I love you so much that if you doubt me, or disobey me, in even very small ways, I will destroy you with pain, but make sure that pain never stops, ever.
I wanted to believe in god, because to reject god is to risk losing the love of my family, and friends, and potential friends. According to a Fox News poll 92 percent of Americans say they believe in God, 85 percent believe in heave, and 82 percent believe in miracles. If I reject these beliefs I fear I am cutting myself off from between 82 and 92 percent of the people around me. If faith is actually fear of loneliness then it is really like building your house upon the sand. When the rains of life test your faith that house will come tumbling down (or so goes the Sunday School Song).
But one of the main reasons I have tried to believe in God, and why most people do believe in God is because it explains why we exist, why the earth exists, and how everything that is came to be. Trace every theory back and you get to a point where stuff doesn't make sense. Even if we accept the Big Bang Theory we still end with, yeah, but if this tiny super condensed stuff exploded and the star stuff scatters and eventually, over billions of years becomes stars, planets, puppies, and people, you still have to ask, "Yeah, but where did that super condensed stuff come from? Who made that tiny stuff that, once exploded becomes the entire universe?"
My problem with all this is that just because there is something instead of nothing is not a reason to believe in God. If there is nothing, well, there is nothing. Obviously there is not NOTHING or else we couldn't be struggling with the question.
If there is something then how many potential explanations might exist to explain how there is something? In the words of Carl Sagan, "Buhillions and Buhllions" God is one explanation. Since matter can be neither created nor destroyed only changed, one answer is that what is exists because it has always existed, and its existence only became an issue after evolution developed a life form aware of itself.
One of my problems with God is that IF God exists, and IF it is important to know God's will (because not pleasing God has eternally negative consequences), then how am I going to know God's will? How does anyone know God?
There would only be two ways I can think of for someone to KNOW that God exists:
1. God comes directly to them and tells them He or She exists (convinces them), like YHWH did with Moses and that burning bush. There problem here is that most folk that would claim direct contact with god get locked up in a rubber room and their systems are flooded with anti-delusional drugs. OR
2. You believe in God, not because of direct contact, but because you accept the testimony of other people who claim they had direct contact with God. Those accepting the Bible are among this second group. They believe because the Bible tells them so.
But why do we assume that it is the Christian Bible that is true? Are there not other Bibles? There are Holy Books everywhere. If God exists, and you know God from scripture, shouldn't you consider all the scriptures before you pick one? Even the, on what bases would one pick one holy scripture over another? I was raised to believe in the Christian Bible, but I never even read the other religious texts that pass for holy scriptures. Have you? How many Christians have read the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, the Zoroastrian Avesta, the Qur'an, Dianetics, The Book of Mormon, Kojiki or Furukotofumi, Tao Te Ching or Dao De Jing, Yasna, Arzhang (the holy book of Manichaeism).
I am left with doubt. To me the existence of God is unknowable. But what is more important is that belief in God messes up my life. If you believe there is God, and an afterlife, you are tempted and urged to use this life in preparation for that other eternal life.
What I think happens when you die is that the forces within your body that resist death are overcome, you stop living, and the atoms go on doing what atoms do. There is no me left. There is no consciousness. There is no continued existence. So is life important since it is such a brief evolutionary curiosity, an odd and interesting spectacle? In the macro sense, I suppose life does not matter. But I don't live in the macro. We live. It is a rare, interesting phenomena and as an organism I feel pleasure and pain, and my mind has thoughts that entertain me. Why not consider this one of the rarest of rare events and enjoy it while I have it. Use life. Enjoy life.
To pin your hopes upon the future is to consign those hopes to a hypothesis, which is to say, a nothingness. Here and now is what we must contend with. ~Angela Carter
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