+JMJ+
Again, sorry I haven’t been able to reply right away due to family and personal reasons.
You are assuming that our conception of God must match the reality of God. (Or to put it another way, that the god of the philosophers must be the god of Abraham.) It is possible for God to exist contrary to our rational conception of Him, precisely because He existed before our thoughts, and especially since we are known to be fallible in our reasoning. (If this error isn’t possible, please tell me why.)
It’s not that I don’t want to give my freedom to an all-perfect being. It’s that I don’t have confidence that the Catholic Church is correct – that is, that I would be making the right decision to put all my confidence in someone who lived 2000 years ago who other people tell me is God. The Quran promises everlasting torment for Christians, and I do not see that the Christian god has eased my suffering, so there seems a reasonable possibility that the Quran is true and the Church is false, and that it would be a grave mistake to entrust myself fully to the Christian conception of God and declare that my suffering is “a good thing”, rather than a punishment as a sign to repent of erroneous attributions of divinity to other persons.
Ah, I see. A very noble reason: we are talking about giving your freedom to Someone who you do not know. I completely understand: it did take me more than a decade of convincing myself that the Catholic faith is the one true faith and giving myself to the Holy Trinity and His Church fully.
How I got to such a faith, however, is so convoluted that it may not be of much help to you to tell the whole story. I might, however, give you some shortcuts on how to at the very least find yourself to where you should go.
The major tip I think is that the shortest and most direct way to choose a faith is to look at the results. What do the best practitioners of each faith look like?
Of all the faiths, it is the best practitioners of Catholic and Orthodox saints that impressed me the most. As Dale Ahlquist said:
There may be outstanding individuals in history who did one thing well or lived notable and worthy lives: Buddha, Confucius, Spinoza, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and so on. But whoever you want to name, not one of them, not one of them, compares with the smallest saint, with St. Maria Goretti, with the Little Flower, with Don Bosco, with St. Francis de Sales, with Blessed Miriam Baouardy, with Mother Teresa. One saint is enough to prove the truth of the Church. But we have hundreds and hundreds, every one of them with an exemplary life worth contemplating and imitating
catholiceducation.org/en/culture/catholic-contributions/everything-proves-it.html
But not only that: I found you can also judge faiths by how they have affected society. And in that, nothing, and I mean nothing, beats the Catholic faith. Watch this series, it is a very interesting watch (at least for me):
youtube.com/watch?list=PL57857981F3CC5D78&v=m5siHd1P5zk
I have tried to please God, and I have tried to “taste and see that He is good,” but I keep sinning despite my best efforts, and the last time I received Holy Communion my throat began hurting after I swallowed, and now I am sick. So either what was only a wafer gave me a cold due to unwashed hands, or God is punishing me and I don’t know why or how to successfully beg Him to stop, or I am helplessly confused and would be better off dead than continue thinking in circles – and yet I cannot stop thinking and praying, as it is my only means of seeking after God. And yet God remains absent, and so I hate my life and hope this illness turns fatal.
I am really sorry to hear that. You do know that I have been praying for you.
I found that, when it comes to trials, especially in those that really make no sense or even seemingly shows God’s negligence to me, it is these trials that eventually show me God’s love for me the clearest.
For example, I have struggles with masturbation, and this had been going on for years. I have prayed for so long for the Lord to deliver me from this vice because I have tried my best to cultivate good habits to supplant them, but still I fall.
Then, inexplicably, I was able to not do it for more than a month. I was ecstatic! Finally I was able to kick off that habit. And yet I started to become careless with my eyes and movements, and eventually I fell again.
I was devastated when that happened, but after looking back, I saw that I was committing already the sin of pride. I was praying less, giving myself more rewards with respect to games and foods, and not doing my house chores and such things. I even recalled more than a few times telling the demons. “See how my Lord is protecting me? I have full confidence in Him! Give Us your best shot! I will not fall again!”
With that episode, the Lord showed me how prideful I actually was, and He would rather have me suffer in my shameful vice than let me commit the much worse vice of spiritual pride and conceit.
Of course that does not give me the excuse to slacken my fight against sin, but the Lord showed me I have to be more patient with myself and trust more in the Lord that He would someday save me from it.
If it was not so I would have left Catholicism and even Christianity long ago.