The God Question, Part 3

Now, at 46, I find myself lost in limbo. Intellectually, I cannot fathom that anything but evolution has gotten us to this point. Science is our savior and also the destroyer of faith. Genetics, the human genome, and a myriad of other scientific breakthroughs have taken us to a place where we know almost everything about the origin and history of our species. When I compare this knowledge to Biblical myths, my rational mind cannot accept the theocratic dogma as anything but an interesting story.

But I’m also a moral coward, and cannot let go of the faint possibility that something exists beyond the death of our physical bodies. While I have absolutely no faith in the Bible or the Koran- I’m not ready to declare myself an atheist. Call it hedging my bets, but I just cannot make that leap with some of the weird things that have been recorded regarding near-death experiences and that haunting sense of déjà vu I sometimes get that I’ve been somewhere else in another place and time.

Without an afterlife, what is the value of our lives? Why should we go through the motions of being our brother’s keeper if we aren’t accumulating tickets to Heaven? If there isn’t some tangible reward for good behavior, why bother? This is a question that haunts me as I vacillate between god versus nothingness. Do the horror and atrocities of two thousand years of religious hypocrisy outweigh the threat of damnation that has kept most of us walking the straight and narrow path for centuries? If we all woke up tomorrow and declared that God and Heaven are myths, would we become a civilization of murderers and thieves?

I can’t answer that question, but I’m relatively certain that we would not, as a species, degenerate into a horde of barbaric misanthropes, ala Attila the Hun. While it is true that the Bible (at least the New Testament) has a code of ethics that we would all be wise to follow, there is something beyond the Ten Commandments that is instilled in most of us, some innate understanding that human decency is part of our genetic code, and without it, we have no future and no chance of sustaining the human race.

Several months before my dad died from cancer, he told me in a moment of candid honesty on the golf course, that he didn’t believe in God, Heaven or Hell. His revelation didn’t surprise me. He had never been very religious, despite a strict Catholic upbringing, and he was always one of the most pragmatic people I had ever known. His statement also didn’t make me feel any better or worse about his impending death. It did make me realize that we are all lost when it comes to the question of faith and the possibilities of life just coming to an end.

So, my long search for spiritual truth has led me to the brink of intellectual freedom and the fear of a life that will end abruptly, without conscious transition to another dimension. I am paralyzed. Secular humanism is the factual light at the end of the tunnel, yet I find myself trapped in a self-imposed purgatory, caught between the truth of science debunking the religious fantasy and the fear that there is something beyond the light.

I’m very uncomfortable in this place, but I’m stuck here for now.

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...

The God Question, Part One

Plucked from my mother’s womb, I was thrust into a world of religious ceremony and true belief. From an early age, I witnessed the solemnity of Sunday services, rosary beads on bedroom dressers, and wooden crosses on barren walls. I believed in God because the Bible said he had created the heavens and the earth. I believed in God because my parents told me he was watching down on me from the heavens. I believed in God because I didn’t want to get a movie-of-the week disease and die at the age of seven. I believed in God’s higher power because men who stood behind wooden pulpits told me in stern voices that indifference would be followed by an eternity in a fiery hell.

My God lived in the fluffy cumulus clouds that filled the atmosphere on humid July days. My God had a Disneyland in the sky for deceased children and a floating park filled with flowers and hungry ducks for the elderly. My God had the resonant voice of James Earl Jones and the handsome, bearded face of Charlton Heston. My God hated the Viet Cong because they were blood-thirsty Communists and loved America because it was a Christian democracy. My God cured me when I was sick and made me suffer when I misbehaved. My God granted me small miracles from time to time (like not letting my parents divorce when I was eleven) and punished me with sleepless nights of remorseful fear for the salvation of my mortal soul.

When I entered my teens, my belief in God forced me to lie about who I was and what was ruminating in my adolescent mind. This was the Catholic phase of my life and I believed that priests were walking, talking, human versions of the Holy Creator. My limited understanding of the Bible led me to believe that nearly everything short of breathing and prayer was a sin. God had more rules and bylaws than the Boy Scouts and the United States Senate, combined. Sitting in the darkened confessional box, palms sweating, as I tried so very hard to remember the exact script, I felt lost because I just couldn’t bring myself to tell the priest all of my true sins. Instead of feeling relieved after reciting my contrition, my young mind was often filled with agony over the eternal ramifications of not being honest with God’s chosen proxy.

After high school and into my college years, organized religion and God ceased to be a reflective part of my every day life. I stopped going to church, primarily because I realized that I had quit listening to the priests and ministers years ago, and also because my Sundays had devolved into a day for sleeping in, watching football, and thinking about how much I hated Mondays. But despite my slippery decline from daily devotions and sometime’s worship, I had still not shaken my fear of eternal damnation. It was too hard, too ingrained in my DNA. I had been packaged out of the womb as a God-loving, jaundiced newborn, because this was America. Believing in God was like taking your medicine. You either faithfully took the pill three times a day or your body withered and died. Because of my indoctrination, I still prayed every night without fail, rationalizing that a quick rendition of Our Father and the 23rd Psalm would somehow save me when and if I reached the pearly gates of heaven.

God was out there, wasn’t he?