assorted thoughts

Someone asked me this evening at church how I was doing. I said, "Got an hour to go for a walk? I can tell you then."

We didn't, but as I explained to him, I'm at a point in my faith where I've stopped putting off questions I've had for years. Some people enjoy the certainty of knowing and they see doubt as an evil to be avoided or as a monster to be silenced; I see faith and doubt as walking hand in hand, and I've lived for years at the point where the two mix uneasily like masses of cold and warm air.

The storm has been brewing for a long time, and the wind is starting to blow something fierce.
During the service, we had a period where people were supposed to call out something descriptive of God as an act of worship. Back in college, we would do this and say things like, "Lord, you are wonderful" or "Lord, you are gracious." Tonight, I wrote:

Lord, you are inscrutable

    unknowable

    incomprehensible

    bewildering

    difficult

    an escapist fantasy?

    the personification of our hopes, our fears, and our metaphysical aspirations?

Are you the source of our meandering concepts of Truth, Beauty, Grace and Love, or our explanation of them?

It's curious, really. I've been a believer for 18 years, almost 19. I spent two years on the missions field, and though I've had moments where I've questioned God's goodness and moments where I've wondered if he even exists, I think this past week or so has been the first time in those almost 19 years that I've seriously considered the possibility for a rather extended period that it's likely -- not possible, but likely -- that God is an extrapolation by humanity from the nontangibles of our world, such as love and truth, to identify an external Prime Mover from which they come. I feel like all around me, and not just in church, that people are claiming to have all the answers, and no one's even bothering to ask any questions.

Am I making sense?

So tonight, I didn't take Communion when it was offered, and I didn't join in the prayer groups, and I didn't even really sing any of the worship songs. Instead, I wrote on the back and the inside of my bulletin and complimentary visitor's card, and when I filled those, I took one from the vacant seat beside me. Here's what I wrote, somewhat disjointed yet still an honest reflection of my thought processes at the time:

God is dead.

Was he ever alive?

Did God create us, or did we create him to inspire ourselves to be better?

Ordinary stuff happens, and we credit it to miracles or blame it on God, when it's completely ordinary in nature and easily traceable to natural causes. The credit is due to timing, good or ill, and yet we attach it to God.

What reason is there to believe? What gain? In committing to follow an inscrutable god whose very existence lies beyond the realm of proof, we bind ourselves into a lifetime of servitude to the expectations of others who claim to be following that same god. In exchange for this supreme act of self-abasement, we're promised something no one reasonably can assure us of, and yet when we break from this conformance to others' expectations, we're reprimanded, shunned or even worse. All we have to do is believe an impossibility, leap beyond any source of logic.

The canon is a fascinating collection of stories, but half are fiction and the rest differ, disagree and carry the pathologies of a score or more different authors. And that's our basis for faith?

Is this all a crock? In our hearts, do we know that we toss our prayers into an empty sky beneath an indifferent sun, yet tell ourselves otherwise to give ourselves hope and comfort?

Is the struggle between Christ and Satan nothing more than being caught between the inner burning of our personal beast and the celestial light of our aspirations to be better people and to build a better society for our children?

I do not believe in God
I do not believe in God
I do not believe in God
I do not believe in God

I see no evidence that Christ transforms us in ways that other religions or gods do not.

You know, some people feel tremendous relief when they walk away from the Christian faith, and I can understand that. The unholy pressure of the church to be match its standard of righteousness and to live a certain way, and the petty vindictiveness the church crowd can have for people who fail to match up, is so far outside the nature of Christ, that it would be a relief to leave it behind, to stop pretending to be something I'm not, and to plunge headlong into the fountain of honest self-expression.

I'm having a hard time right now seeing validity to the Christianity, not just as it's practiced in church but in what I understand its foundations to be as well. And I find no relief in that assessment.