I was raised to go to church when my parents woke me up on one of the two days I got to sleep in. My parents were not religious, we did not practice christianity in our daily lives, we did not pray together and my parents never behaved like christians, but we went to church.
At age 10 my parents stopped going to church and so did I unless it was with a friend or my grandparents. I remember going to see Rick Stanley speak at a revival when I was 11 with my preacher's daughter friend Mary Elizabeth when she asked me, "Have you ever accepted Christ?" I said, "I have doubts in Christ." The very fact that I had doubts made me feel guilty, and figured there must have been a reason to feel guilty about it. Afterall, the "unpardonable sin" is knowing God exists and refusing to acknowledge Him. So, I "accepted Christ" that night.
I went to church on and off my entire life up until age 16. I never lived like a christian, read the bible in devotions/sunday school and even on my own a few times, but never lived the life. By that I mean, I've never felt anything in my heart or soul that moved me. I"ve never been brought to tears in a sermon. I do know that the only times I prayed when I was little was to make my bad thoughts go away. It was the only thing that seemed to calm me. In my adult life, the only times I've prayed were to give thanks at dinner, and to ask God to help me out of the shit I'd gotten myself into.
As an adult today, I do not have bitter feelings toward christianity. I do not think that somehow my mind was "corrupted" into some big lie that all the adults told us just to give us hope for life after death. In fact, I have a huge respect for truly devoted christians-those people being the ones that live their lives for God. Their actions, words, everything-they do it not for themselves and not by themselves, they do it as an act of/for God. It takes great courage and faith to live that way, and I find it admirable. (unless your Mindia living your life through God, because if so, I didn't know God cursed so much
)
However, I've never "felt the spirit" moving in my heart, if you will. I have always doubted my faith and I have always argued with myself over what I really believe in. I'm either too realistic, or not naive enough, or it's just not meant for me to believe it. I've opened my heart to it many times, and it's just never been something I could truly have faith in.
I've seen miracles, I've had amazing things happen to me, I've been lucky and unlucky. I have never been able to credit any of it to God, or prayer, or anything like it because it doesn't feel right in my heart to do that.
However, I do feel this:
Many people
hope that there's life after death. The idea that everything is blank, black and nothingness for us when we die frightens them. It's pretty grim, I agree, and I'd like nothing more for there to be
something more after my life. If I live every day hoping that there's something once I die, and there isn't...well I won't know it anyway. If I live everyday hoping that there's something once I die, and there is, and all I did was HOPE, then I'm shit out of luck.
It's the living of the life that's always been where my religious beliefs seem to just...stop. Even as a small child, I was not a child of God. I am a good person, I treat others well, I treat myself well. My indivual code of morals and values are that of everyone else. In fact, I'm sure that without Psalms and Proverbs to read from, we'd all eventually come up with the same or similar code of ethics for ourselves.
Noone ever pushed me to come up with my own morals, values and principles. I learned the ones from Psalm and Proverbs. Again, if I hadn't learned what I learned when I was growing up via going to church and learning about Jesus/God, and if Psalms and Proverbs didn't exist, I'm convinced that eventually someone would have had the same ideas. It's not like the ways the Bible tells us to be are harmful. In fact, they are very good rules for life and none of it is offensive. Sure, there are things that are debatable, such as "spare the rod spoil the child" and so on...however, I think that overall, it's not a bad way to live. You can't really go wrong.
There are many reasons that my intellect will not allow me to argue for a God to exist. There are many reasons that my intellect and knowledge for the human body and the ways that it works can't deny that something amazing and more magnificent than the sprout of a microrganism or a big bang got us here. The creatures in the bottom of the ocean, what we see and look at every single day are all evidence that we got here somehow....and if one big man did it all...I'd like to meet him.
I like my imagination, I like that when I think of a God I think of someone more along the lines of a mad scientist who ran out of things to do and one day made some people to populate a planet.
I have a hard time believing that a religion based on a woman convincing a man to do something they weren't supposed to do landed us here, having babies in pain and being shameful when we're naked.
I ask too many questions to be able to subscribe to this faith. Yet, we just wont' know until we die, and like I said, if you lived your life in the hopes that something was there, but never with the faith that it was, there's only one way to find out and that is to die. Life has to end before it can begin again, or stay that way...a black nothingness.
I'd like to believe that there's more, but for some reason my heart has never been able to subscribe to that.
