God Has Made It Plain

God has made it plain...

I don't remember who told me to reread this passage, but Romans 1 goes into a very detailed discussion about faith and reality. Many claims are made there by Paul about the nature of faith and unbelief.

In short, he claims that those who do not believe in Christ actually know who he is. All of his attributes, and the attributes of the godhead, were made plain to everyone. You have no excuse to doubt or disbelieve. (On a side note, Paul argues that this lack of belief is what causes homosexuality, disobedient kids, lack of love and so on. All these also "deserve death", but that's another topic...) 

Everyone knows the truth. It is impossible to honestly disbelieve in Christ and the godhead.

I knew these verses, and the information wasn't new. I had used them in my discussions with people who weren't Christians many times before. 

"Creation screams of the Creator". If you want to find God, look around you. See the trees, the complexity of the human body, the depths of the cosmos, and there you will see the handiwork of the maker made known. For many of the Christians I knew, this was the argument that swayed them the most. God is just obvious. 

Paul goes further though. Not only is a creator obvious, but his very attributes are obvious. Everyone knows God, but they reject him. 

There is a problem here. I wasn't sure who God was. I wanted to know, but I didn't. And looking at nature sure didn't help. Trees are complex, but that is proof of trees being complex. Humans are complex, but that is proof of the complexity of humans. I didn't then, and still don't, see how God's attributes are just plainly known. 

Furthermore, if it is obvious, why didn't my Mormon friend just accept Christianity? She fully believed everything she claimed just like I had only a year before. She looked through the Bible, and even listened and tried to judge the merits of my own "obvious" beliefs, and still didn't accept what I said.

If it really is obvious, where is God?

If I am going to be honest with myself, I didn't, and still don't, see God in nature. Paul was wrong. The very fact that it wasn't obvious to me (someone who grew up immersed in and believing in the Bible) was proof of that. And no matter how hard I tried, my commitment to truth and honesty wouldn't allow me to accept this.

But the Bible can't be wrong. Can it?*

Now I had two options. One was to be honest with myself, and enter a world I knew next to nothing about, letting go of almost everything my life was founded on. The second was to cling to something I wasn't convinced of, and live a lie.

I took the first option, and a chasm opened beneath me.

For the first time, I came to the conclusion that the Bible was fallible, and contained at least one major error. If one portion was proven wrong, then I couldn't trust it completely, and everything in it could not be believed until proven true. And that was quite a massive change, since the Bible had always been my perfect guide until then.

Now I was scrambling to find the truth, and build a rational understanding of the world around me. Without the Bible as an infallible guide, I didn't know where to really start.

However, none of this mattered. With the fear of Hell having been metaphorically beat into me all my life, that fear had to be conquered before I could truly move forward.




*There were more reasons I came to this question. I just picked the one that was the most important reason that moved me this direction.

Without Faith...

"Without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him." -Hebrews 11:6

As I wrote in an earlier post, my life was flipped around pretty drastically when my beliefs came into conflict with my relationship with a good friend. I won't go into detail with that situation again, but the long and short of it was that she was not a christian, and my beliefs about hell meant I thought she'd go there. 

Questioning my beliefs about hell pushed me out into the unknown. My family is very religious, and has always made certain to train me up to become a believer in Christ myself. My mother was especially interested in theology, and had me read and work on memorizing the Catechisms, and read up on theology books. Looking back on my childhood, Christ was the center of everything from work to play to education. Mom and Dad didn't perfectly follow this ideal, but they did their best. 

All I truly knew was Christ and his Word, at least when it came to how to live your life and find your purpose. Early on, I was taught not to question the "basics" of faith, although I could question everything outside of that. Now I ran into a major problem: hell was one of those unquestionable basics, and yet I was questioning it.

What on earth was I going to do?

Imagine for a moment that you were born blind. Somehow, for your entire life, no-one ever told you about sight, and you didn't realize it existed. Sight has never crossed your mind.

Now imagine someone comes up to you and tells you about this weird thing called sight. There are colors, shapes, light and dark. The world is WAAAAAAAY different than you think. At first you think they are nuts, maybe it's some weird myth. But whatever it is, sight isn't a part of how you "view" the world.

You get knocked unconscious one day, and are given surgery to give you the ability to see. When you wake up, BAM! Suddenly there are colors, shapes, light and dark. Your brain is shocked into overdrive with all the new sensory input, and you have no idea what the hell to do with it.

Now ramp that up a bit, and make it all philosophical, and you sorta get what happened to me.

I didn't learn anything new by that first experience, rather I began questioning everything. I really mean everything. My life, my religion, my entire world. Nothing was beyond questioning. And nothing was making sense.

Desperation began to kick in as my need for a solid foundation and understanding of the world deepened.

Problem was, I had no idea where to start.

Understandably, my parents wanted me to be a believer, so they never taught me to be a proper skeptic. I was taught faith, not doubt. Belief, not questioning. So paradoxically, I started with what I was taught.

Prayer.

The greatest cure for doubt that I had been told was to pray. Beg God for forgiveness, plead for him to give you faith and to get rid of your doubt. 

In spite of my anger, hurt, and doubt, I still wanted to believe. My belief in Christ may have been on the chopping block, but I didn't want to part with it.

So I prayed night after night. I still remember several times breaking down and bawling, asking for him to help my unbelief.

Nothing happened.

So, I went and read Christian books that were written to prove that God was real, and that the Bible was absolutely true (and no, I didn't stop reading the Bible or praying either). I kept on trying to have faith, but the answers that were being given to my questions just seemed...off. Something wasn't right, but I couldn't quite tell what. Not to mention, many of the questions I had just weren't being addressed. 

Again, what was I supposed to do now? I hadn't been given any process for questioning the Bible or God. In fact,  the act of believing and searching the Bible and praying to God for answers was the very process I had used to question anything before this.

My first thought was to then expand out to different religions. Maybe one of them had the answers to my questions. 

Since I knew my Mormon friend would be happy to talk with me, I asked her about it. She arranged for me to meet with her family (her mother was a teacher at their church, and loved working with young people), and be able to ask them. I will say, they were very accepting and kind, and listened to all of my questions and thoughts. The discussions were very deep and thought-provoking, but...something just wasn't right. Honestly, at the end, I was left with more questions than answers.

You have to understand, I was getting insanely depressed now. My life was built around my religion. Hope, purpose, fulfillment, happiness, peace, everything came from it. But now, I didn't know what to believe or who to trust. What I had been taught wasn't working, and the pieces of the puzzle just weren't matching up.

Why the Hell?!

Why the Hell?!

Here comes some Sunday Cynicism

The last church I went to faithfully (and played any part in) really messed with me. The first time I became truly confused and frustrated with what I was doing and who I was, I ran into conflict with my church over having a friend who was a Mormon.

I would love to say long story short, but since when have I been short and to the point? Oh well, here we go...

I have suffered with depression for quite some time, and this friend of mine was one of the few people who would let me pour out all the feelings and hurt that were building up in me. Most importantly, she would not pass judgement on me, but would instead show that she truly empathized with me. Her friendship meant so much. However, I was still a good Christian. God was everything, and what I thought I knew of him formed the basis of my life. And this fact soon came into conflict with who I was and am.

One night at work, my boss and I began talking theology like we often did, and the topic of hell came up. We both spelled out the exact beliefs we held dear, part of which was that those who didn’t believe in our specific god and basic beliefs would burn in hell forever. My friend stopped us, looked at me and asked, “Christopher, do you believe I am going to hell?”

Hell is where unbelievers go when they die. It is a fiery lake of burning sulphur (Rev. 21:8), filled with weeping and gnashing of teeth (Mat. 13:50), and all who are sent there will be tormented forever and ever (Rev. 14:11) where the worm doesn’t die and the fire isn’t quenched (Mark 9:48). Yup, pretty damn horrifying. But I never internalized this. I mean, I believed it, and I knew what I was believing. Yet I didn’t fully “know” what I was saying by this.

My amazing, loving friend was a Mormon, as I said earlier. As such, she disagreed with the core of my religion. Thus, I was honest and without a second thought told her, “Yes. If you died right now, you would go to hell.”

I have rarely seen someone so hurt, nor cry the way she did. To be honest, I doubt I saw the worst of it, since she ran into another room to cry alone. Her friend, the one she cared so deeply for and would have done just about anything for, condemned her to an eternity of torment without even a hint of struggle. It was as if her life meant nothing to me.

Of course I cared about her. I am a caring person, oftentimes caring too much. But my natural ability to empathize had...well, a shell surrounding it. My religion gave me the strange ability to separate myself from what I was telling her, and thus be able to tell her something so harsh without so much as blinking. However, seeing the tears cascading down her face, the pain and sadness pouring out from her as if I had just taken a club and beaten her with it, I just...I can’t describe just how badly I felt and still feel. My shell cracked.

That moment has changed me forever. It is something that defines me, and shoved me onto the path of self-understanding that I am still on.

For months, I struggled with the reality of what I believed. And at the core of it was one question, why would a loving and just god send my friend to hell? Why did she, one of the most loving humans I knew, deserve to be tortured forever? Honestly, she was a far better, more caring, more honest, more beautiful person than I was. And yet I was going to heaven and she was headed straight for hell.

Why the hell?!

One sunday a couple months afterward, I was dragged into a side room of the museum the church was meeting at. The pastor’s oldest son was quite incensed. He claimed I was talking constantly about my friend, spending time with her and showing very obvious care for her (which apparently was a no-no). On top of that, I was not spending enough time with and caring for the other people in the church. It was my duty as a believer to care far more about my brothers and sisters in the faith than about some evil girl who was hell-bound. I was told I was being judgmental and critical of people in the church, and lenient with outsiders. If I didn’t love believers and questioned the authorities in the church, how on earth was I truly saved?

I’ll spare you the rest of the details, but let’s just say that I blew up, and everyone in the other room could hear me chewing him out.

If I wasn’t questioning absolutely everything before, this experience put all my beliefs on the chopping block. Thankfully I was hurt and enraged enough to gladly hack away at anything and everything I believed if I was given a good enough reason to.

Maybe a year (and many books, blog posts and YouTube videos) later, I built a pretty firm foundation for how I would venture out into the world and figure out what was real and what was fiction. These were my tenants, and still are.

Believe nothing unless it has sufficient evidence to back it up.

No matter what direction you go, be honest with yourself, and be willing to change everything in your worldview.

Nothing must go unquestioned.

These are the few principles I hold steadfast to, and they have led me to where I am now.