When you’re honest with yourself - I mean really, really, honest, - and you think about the capacity for folly in the human mind and the innumerable problems with Christianty (let’s not pretend they’re non-existent; they are blaring), it’s absurd to even imagine the God of the Holy Bible. This is what happened to me. I feel I’ve become an atheist (as recently ago as December 15th). This was my last prayer:
It isn’t a change of rationale or a compelling new proof, a review of historical discrepancies, or the consideration of the nature of tenacity that would completely bankrupt my faith – I know it isn’t – It’s circumstances. I’m well informed that the bible calls for a sorrowful life, a rejection of worldly pleasures and joys; I’m aware that there is great an unforgivable evil in the world, and yet if that evil should rest upon me, God would never again exist in my mind. Faith, however, shouldn’t be circumstantial but cognitive (there are good reasons for believing in a religion, and so on). But a faith which leads to salvation shouldn’t be cognitive either, because there are mental deficients and imbeciles and those simply born with a hard head. And if God has chosen his elect and gives grace to whomever he wills, and destruction to the remainder, who can know or please him? One must accept that their faith is based on unstable tenants, or that they don’t have the cognitive fortitude to know God, or otherwise, are just unworthy of Him. If I participate in one man’s religion, I am doomed to the hellfire of another’s – and if neither cognition nor patronage can save me, in what shall I believe for salvation?
I recognized at once that my faith was neither strong, nor built on strong tenants when I adopted it into my philosophy. My saving grace, so to speak, was in the fact that there are secrets and mysteries and glorious things looming just beneath the cover of medieval literature, and in the hearts and minds of God’s alleged messengers (and what a stronghold that is for people that are content to confirm what they believe in the trite and too-common events of life; what a stronghold it is for those who are unwilling to do the investigation). But what I’ve found is poor reasoning, hatred, condemnation, inconsistencies, variance, atrocities against humanity, and subterfuge. I’ve found hypocrisy and the most unspeakable prescriptions for the treatment and judgement of the world’s sinners. I will believe in all earnestness a God that I know by more than man’s decadent authority, and by reason, if reason is permitted. But reason, if it is from God, I pray, cannot condemn me if it doesn’t also have the capacity to save me.
I’ve tried to repent and forgive, but my remorse has always been for my lack of ability to feel contrite over things which, by their very nature, seem perfectly acceptable. When I first began to believe, I know very well that I needed to. I may never know whether the stronghold was divine or psychological. Now, I don’t want to believe that there is a God or that there isn’t, I just want to know what’s true, whatever the case may be.
If God is listening, He will appreciate that this is the most truthful prayer I’ve ever prayed. Amen.
