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.