Genesis

I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it. - attributed to Mark Twain

No one can accuse me of not giving Christianity a chance.  I was baptized into the Presbyterian church and regularly attended Sunday School and church services from when I was a young child until I left the area to attend college.  In my teens I attended a church camp in the summer, and a weekly Fellowship program the rest of the year.  I studied the Bible, participated in the church choir, and helped my parents out when they taught Sunday School.  Overall my experiences in church were positive, and I still have great memories of church camp.  So my current beliefs are not a reaction to any negative experiences related to my religious experiences as a youth. 

I remember learning Bible stories in Sunday School.  I remember never being quite as into the Old Testament stories as some of my peers seemed to be.  They never really rang true to me, or seemed to have a lot of relevance to my life.  In public school I was particularly interested in science, and these stories seemed to have little bearing on that.  I had a strong love of astronomy that started at a fairly young age, and the creation story of the Bible seem a whole lot less plausible than that which read about in astronomy books.  

When I began attending Fellowship, I remember feeling a big relief when our pastor explained that as Presbyterians we did not take the Bible as the literal word of God.  The creation story of Genesis was not to be taken literally, God did not create the world in six days (or at least six earth days, who knew how long a day really was for God,) and the Adam and Eve story was an allegory for the "Fall of Man" and set the stage for the Messiah to later appear and forgive our sins. We were taught that if the Bible was the "Word of God" at the very least, it had been written down by men, and translated many times though the years. 

My pastor wrote the following letters down on paper:

G O D I S N O W H E R E

Now depending upon how one spaces this out one can read this as:

GOD IS NOW HERE

or:

GOD IS NOWHERE

Clearly we have the potential for some serious mistranslations. 

It was a huge weight off my shoulders for me to not be expected to take the Bible literally, because, if it had come to that, I would have been done with the church.  And while I would have enjoyed the opportunity to sleep later on Sunday mornings, I still wanted to believe. 

Why did I want to believe?  I can think of a number of reasons.  For one it seemed like it was something that good people were supposed to do.  I used to be jealous of those who could find comfort from religion; those who believed that God "had their back."  Wouldn't it be great to be able to pray, and believe that your prayers were being heard?  I was never much of a prayer.  When I was desperate I might occasionally pray.  I figure that it might not help, but it couldn't possibly hurt.  

I think the greatest reason why I wanted to believe was because I was afraid of dying.  I wasn't so much afraid of death itself, as I was of what comes after.  Namely, I was afraid of being a "nothing."  That is how I know to this day, that my faith was never that strong.  I never, ever truly believe that I was going to Heaven.  Was I afraid of going to hell, absolutely not.  As Presbyterian's there was never a whole lot of talk about hell.  God is a forgiving god, and if anyone went to hell, it surely was only the worst of the worst.  Mass murderers and Hitler might go to hell, but I certainly didn't have to worry about it.  I also didn't believe that God would send me to hell for having a lack of faith.  If God (we are talking the new testament God 2.0 here) was truly that forgiving, then he wasn't going to punish me for having a hard time with the faith thing.  

It wasn't even that Heaven sounded like it was all that great, (Check out the song Heaven Must Be Boring by George Hrab ), but it seemed to beat the alternative of not existing.  It seems strange to be afraid of nothingness.  After all, one doesn't know they have ceased to exist.  However the idea of no longer being alive, of no longer being able to experience anything, terrified me.  I would think of this while lying in bed, and my heart would race, and would sometimes even break into a cold sweat.  Even the idea of reincarnation didn't offer any solace to me.  Sure my soul might go on living, but "I" would not.  The thoughts, memories, and sensory experiences that added up to the experience of "me" would be gone.  So for all intents and purposes so would "I" cease to exist.  So the idea of a Heaven wherein my sense of self would persist beyond my earthly physical body, held a great appeal.  


However, no matter how much one want's to believe something, that doesn't make it so.  Our society places a lot of importance on the power of believing.  Kids are told in school and in TV and other media that they can be anything they want to be.  Of course this really isn't true.  Most kids are never going to be President, or a pop star, or a starting quarterback in the NFL.  I am a strong believer in the power of positive thinking, but one needs to be realistic as well.  This is also where I have a big problem with the power of prayer.  If one believes that if they pray hard enough for something that their prayer will be answered, it kind of takes away a lot of the incentive to actually take action.  "God helps those who help themselves," to me just seems to be an admission that prayer doesn't really work.  I recently came across this quote:

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime; give a man religion and he will die praying for a fish  - Unknown

So as much as I wanted to be a believer, it was a constant struggle for me to do so.  The idea of "Faith" - that one should believe even without empirical evidence, just seemed so contradictory to me.  In school I was learning about science, and the scientific method.  A theory did not gain scientific acceptance until it could shown via experiments or other proofs, to be more or less irrefutable.  But I was supposed to accept God and religion purely on faith?!  I could not then, and never will be able to subscribe that sort of "faith."

I continued to attend church, mainly because I enjoyed the social aspects of it.  However, when I went away to college, there were so many other social opportunities that I felt no desire to get involved in any church services.    Somewhere around that time I decided that I was an agnostic.  I don't remember where or when I first became aware of the term, but it seemed to describe my faith.  I was not ready to completely denounce the existence of God, but until more compelling evidence came along, I was going to stay on the fence.