The God Question, Part 2

After twenty-five years as a true believer in God and the Bible, agnosticism began to creep into my life. It didn’t happen in a mad rush or because of some calamitous event in my personal life. Agnosticism reared its confusing head because religion is a strange mixture of blind faith and cultural theocracies. Cracks began to appear in my armor as I pondered the probabilities of anything (heaven or hell) lasting forever and the multitude of unanswered Biblical questions that began to eat at me when I looked at them in basic terms of black and white.

“and I will dwell in the House of the Lord forever.”

Truth be told, the words eternal and forever really started to freak me out. I had absolutely no concept of the terms and their relationship to time. I wasn’t going to live forever. My house was not going to stand forever. The earth was not going to last eternally. I loved to play with my kids and cuddle with my wife, but I wouldn’t want to do it forever. Of course, the alternative, post-life promise of an eternity in Dante’s Inferno- was even more disturbing. Instead of worrying about going to heaven or hell, I found myself worrying about going to either place, forever.

Another problem with my perception of God that nagged at me for years was the patriarchal designs of religion, especially in my professed faith of Catholicism. Like bread and water, men and women had to exist as biological equals for humankind to flourish. Put into a historical context, ancient societies were predominantly patriarchal, hence if God’s existence was fictional, one would expect a religious epiphany or hysteria to be witnessed and scribed in primarily masculine terms. One of the main reasons for my skepticism in Catholicism was the fact that this branch of Christianity had a gruesome history of not only marginalizing women, but burning them at the stakes as heretics.

It was also during this time of incertitude that I became more aware of what the people around me were saying about God. Now that I had tuned out the clergy, I found myself having revealing conversations with friends and neighbors about their religious beliefs. What I discovered was that if I asked twenty people about their concept of Christianity, no two answers were ever completely alike (even between spouses). The only spiritual theme I heard on a consistent basis was the term: “God has a plan for all of us.” This really bothered me because these true believers suggested that human beings were nothing more than pawns on an earth-sized version of the Game of Life. What was the purpose of existence without free will? Why bother to live, love and laugh if a great puppet master was out there pulling our strings?

Johnny didn’t die in the car accident because God had planned the where and why of his death from the moment of conception. Johnny died in the car accident because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was nothing more than nonsensical, bad luck. To believe otherwise was pure and unadulterated simplicity, a mythical dogma fobbed about our theocracy because people were afraid of the truth. Afraid perhaps that we were all alone- and that God didn't really exist...