I was born with 5 feeble senses and have had to do my best to make sense of the world through them. Luckily, my fellow humans have devised tools in order for me to extend those senses into realms which would otherwise be inaccessible. My evolved brain gives me the ability to employ reason and deduction which allows me to compensate for the inadequacies of my innate senses. The problem I have, is that much of my society expects me to forgo the uses of my senses and reason and accept certain paradigms as unquestionably true.
At some point, I was informed by my fellow humans that there was a realm beyond my senses regardless of the enhancements I might employ. There was a supreme being who created the heavens and the earth. Two thousand years before my birth, he sent his only son to instruct mankind in his expectations and requirements to be employed from that point forward. This messenger amassed a group of followers who in turn, recounted their impressions to a variety of authors, who in turn transcribed them onto a written record. These various records were combined into various compendiums as time progressed and finally reworked into a tome of collected works which we call the Bible. The conventional wisdom is that this book, though written by man, was directed by the divine influence of the creator and thus, accurately details the requirements and expectations of God.
According to many Christians, the passages in the bible are historically accurate and verbose and their meanings are absolute… therefore not subject to a large degree of interpretation. They also tend to believe that bible is transcendent and the passages can be interpreted irrespective to the time and/or context which it was written.
There is little question in my mind that I would be happier if I could get past some of these sticking points. I have a great admiration and respect for my country, the United States and am a firm believer in the ideals, values and goals held by it’s forefathers. I wholeheartedly believe that the success of this country was derived from it’s Judeo-Christian underpinnings and the further we stray from those values, the closer we come to it’s undoing. I identify with religious conservatives and find it easier to live with and trust them. I share most of their values and agree with almost all of their views on society. Conversely, I find secularists and other left-leaning ideologues loathsome, for the most part, and even dangerous when it comes to sociological issues. I believe that belief in God is benifical and intergral to the continued success of society.
So therein lies my dilemma… I am a conservative Christian trapped in the mind of a secularist. Most conservative Christians find my agnosticism utterly horrifying and repugnant (when i choose to reveal that fact). I am either rejected by my peers or relentlessly proselytised by them.
On the other hand, when I reveal my conservative beliefs to a liberal-minded secularist, they find it equally repugnant and horrifying. I suffer an equal loss of social standing and am subjected to an equivalent degree of intellectual admonishment.
Therefore, I am left to conceal the fact that I am agnostic… and clandestinely search for the intellectual bridge which can span the gap between reason and divinity. I have seen things in the world which make me wonder, which make me challenge my doubts… but it has never been enough to get me all the way there. Conversely, I have never came across anything which is incompatible with God or even much in the way of contradictory evidence. At the limits of what is knowable… there is plenty of room for a God… therefore, I am convinced that the two intellectual pursuits are completely compatible.
If there is a God, and he endowed us with senses and intellect and placed us in this universe… surely he meant for us to employ those senses in every way possible and uncover everything we could about his creation. If at some point, we discover something which is contradictory to the Bible… then we can either accept it’s limitations as a work of man, or in man’s interpretation of the work of God… but it makes no sense to discount new information.
Since God created the universe for us, surely he wrote things in the stars for us to someday read. Thus the heavens herald the word of God just as loudly and accurately as the Bible. When faced with new, objective information found in God’s creation… as measured by the senses he endowed us with… I can find no good reason not to update, append or correct previously held beliefs. Maybe the author of that verse in the Bible interpreted God incorrectly… maybe we are interpreting the author incorrectly; maybe it was written allegorically instead of literally; maybe the meanings have changed since that time… I don’t know, there are many explanations.
I also find it difficult to accept some commonly held beliefs as to God’s purpose for us all and I also have difficulty to the extent, which he intervenes in peoples lives. I would be more comfortable with a God who snapped his fingers at the birth of the Universe, setting in motion all of the matter, energy and time… possibly with the foreknowledge that we as his children would emerge from the chaos and eventually develop into loving, free-willed beings. It seems to me that a supreme being would want his children to adopt his wisdom, his love and develop into beings who were independently capable of expressing those qualities without regard to the promise of eternal euphoria, or eternal anguish. That choice would be meaningless if there weren’t diametric qualities which one could adopt just as easily. I also believe that merely cloning the qualities of the creator without individualizing them in some unique way would be also meaningless (certainly boring). Therefore, it stands to reason that a creator would want his children to merge, re-express and dare I say, improve upon those qualities which he espouses. Given the equal levels of undesirable qualities one could choose from, it must be expected that a continuum of individuals must emerge, few of which expressing entirely god-like qualities and equally few expressing entirely ungodly qualities. Where is cutoff? At what point does God decide that you have too many ungodly qualities and then… what does he do with you? Does the creator expect you to devote a significant portion of your limited life on worshiping him? Or, rather is life a gift for you to enjoy and the creator gains satisfaction from the way you live it and how you discover an employ those god-like qualities on his other children. Can it be that a failure to be “saved,” or failure to recognize some abstract truth be a deal-breaker for God? Maybe he wants you to just do your best, enjoy life and be kind to his other children rather than sing,chant and repeatedly thank him for the gift. Maybe he just wants children who he can have a meaningful, enriching eternity with especially if they are a unique, free-willed being who may not be exactly like him… but enriching eternity none-the-less.
