Over the years I've learned enough theology, philosophy and sociology to understand that a large portion of adults believe in a supreme being, higher power or deity. Me, I just believe in God. Why, you ask? Yeah, I've been asking the same things.
Warning: those who don't want to know that I've questioned my faith and religion stop reading here. You'll be pleasantly unaware that someone who was actually in theological seminary fifteen years ago has, more or less, come full circle. I've added some weird opinions about the state of the world, death and the universe as a whole, but that's more an argument in semantics.
Now why would a man who was so staunchly Christian conservative question the existence of God? I haven't, more accurately I'm questioning the paths that are available to understand and experience God. As a child I was taught and believed that God was an unknowable enigma that just was. No questions asked. Growing up I further was given the instructions that you do what the church tells you, work yourself into a frenzy and don't EVER experience doubt or you'll lose the magic, fall from grace and go straight to the lowest depths of hell. In the thirty six years that I've been alive I've read the Bible, cover to cover, I'd guess about fifty times. At one time or another I had most of it memorized and could quote scripture and verse with the most accomplished of theological students. And yet, what all of that got me was a head full of contradictory and incomplete data and a heart full of longing to experience the world I'd been kept and kept myself sheltered from.
Okay, take all that good, wholesome religious fervor and add an adolescence out of a Stephen King novel, enough stupid mistakes as a young adult to make Charles Manson blush (and go insane AGAIN), toss in two really bad marriages and then stir it all up with undiagnosed manic-depression. It's no wonder I wound up weighing 430+ pounds. Personally, I think I was slated to become a drug addict but the paperwork got lost and I hated seeing what it did to my older brother. Screwed up? You bet.
I asked God for help... what I got was an education that I didn't bargain for. In the last sixteen years I've experienced most of the ups and downs that life has to offer. I've become a father, been nearly killed twice, lost one wife and my kids because I was an idiot, the other wife I lost to another man and, eventually, her illness and death and I've had far too many occupations. For many years my friends jokingly called me "Job" because no matter how bad things got, they would always get worse. I clung to my faith and cried out for help always believing that if I just had enough faith it would all turn out okay. Then, one day, about ten years ago I had a profound revelation...
Shit happens.
No, really. Okay, seriously, I mean it. Actually, what I'm trying to say is that life throws things at you that no one intended. Not God, not man... no one. Life just has a way of happening. It's okay though, because I've also discovered that good exists everywhere and if you look hard enough you'll find it. I'm not trying to throw the whole "divine plan" thing out the window. I look around and I see a design. It's like one of my favorite people to quote, Mark Twain, said,
"None of us can be as great as God, but any of us can be as good."
The evil there is in the world is free to run a rampant and unrelenting charge over each and every one of us. The balance is that good has no limitations, either. Our job, as human participants in the whole affair, seems to be discriminating between the two. It's our burden in order to experience the most amazing aspect of all creation... free will. It gives us a carte blanche to be anything, anyone we choose simply at the effort of our own desire and ministrations. It doesn't mean that we aren't bound to a code of ethics. That's where the finances come in, I guess.
Take any God fearing, red-blooded man or woman and put them in a situation that is hopeless and they'll eventually find that they are tempted to look outside their own understanding and search for the divine. Man lets man down. The world is imperfect and inadequate. Ergo, there must be something else, right? Hello?!?!
Well, that's me. I'm desperate. No, I'm not starving, homeless and, GOD FORBID, I haven't lost my internet connection. However, I'm looking at being unemployed, in the classical sense, without insurance and the debts are growing. I know that I'm blessed. Don't get me wrong. I just don't want to lose it. I don't know the hows or whys of things and I don't have the control I've always depended on. It's all going horribly pear shaped! Still, I find the good all around me. Jackie (the most blessed thing in my life), the kids (they love me even though I'm a lunatic... I hope they don't grow out of it) and the opportunity that I have to finally do what I've always wanted to do because of the support that I have from the previously mentioned prisoners, er, circus freaks, uh, victims, DAMN! What I mean is, I'm out on a wire but I feel like I've got a net. It may be an exercise in faith but, when you get down to it, what in life that's worth doing isn't? I just hope that I can start standing up on the wire more instead of spending all of my time clinging to it and mewling like a starving kitten. Only time will tell... and the blogs you people suffer through.
Now it's time for a top ten.
The Top Ten (slightly silly) Reasons To Believe In God:
10. When you look around and see all the beauty wouldn't it be nice to be able to give a little credit to someone... or blame the guilty?
9. After twenty-five years of attending church "religiously" I can sum it all up in one word... afterglow.
8. Have you ever wondered what it would take to prove that he doesn't exist?
7. (drawing again from Twain) People miss the most obvious quality that points to a creator... their laughter.
6. We're not gambling with life, here, the stakes are eternity... I'm going with the safe bet.
5. Einstein said, "When the solution is simple, God is answering." Look around and ask again.
4. You're reading this and thinking about the existence of what, nothing?
3. What if God started doubting your existence?
2. Have you seen this guy's army??? I don't want to piss Him off.
and the number one (slightly silly) reason to believe in God:
1. To err is human, to forgive divine... to point and laugh, inevitable.
