I Don't Believe In God
I have recently been thinking a lot about Christianity. I grew up non-religious, but when I was around 8 or so I sincerely wished God existed because the prospect of death scared me a lot... it terrified me. But when I was around 12 I gave up all hope because I understood the psychological nature of religion and the absence of positive evidence for any particular one.
When I was 17 I started to meditate and learned a lot about Hinduism and Buddhism, religions that I still find fascinating and beautiful. Somehow, the assumption that we are all one and that we are all God sits very well in my mind. That's why I could feel good thinking about Hinduism but not Christianity; to be a different thing, a mere creation separate from God seems rather strange when you see that in consciousness everything divine exist. So while I have never believed in Hinduism, I still think about it in much higher terms than Christianity or Islam.
But about 9 months ago I met my current boyfriend. I am gay and he is too, haha. And I love him very much. We have a lot of things in common, such a geeky interests and a love of math. But, strangely enough, he happened to be Christian. I first thought that was strange, but I just went along with it. He never tried to impose his beliefs in me, nor the other way around and we never talked about religion. For all intents and purposes, it did not play a role in our relationship. That is until I brought up the topic of consciousness. I myself think the soul does not exist, we a re just a stream of consciousness with no underlying essence. And even though he thought about it as something interesting, he would not embrace this possibility entirely. We then talked about life after death, heave and hell and God. He told me that he started to believe and be more religious when he went through some tough times during high-school and met an sympathetic religious group. But he never quite managed to explained why it did make sense. To him, religion is something you believe, not because you have rational reasons, but out of love. This, to me, did not make any sense; I want my beliefs to reflect reality accurately... otherwise it is like hacking my brain to feel good by damaging its fundamental functions.
I do not know why this has made me irritated at times. I just want him to be rational, but I also see how his irrational beliefs can help him in a way. Of course the situation is all the more stranger by the fact that he is gay. He had some problems with one group he attended because one pastor preached to him about how he had to live in celibacy and follow Christ in chastity. So he got very angry and had to re-think his faith. Ever since, he now "has opinions" such as the belief that the Bible is not the perfect word of God and so on. But he is cherry-picking. I think that he does not want to give up the wonderful feeling that he gets when he feels loved by God, but he struggles to find a rational framework to justify the belief, so he simply numbs his intellect and stops thinking. And this somehow irritates me a lot... I can talk to him about anything in a very sophisticated and intelligent way, but when it comes to beliefs of religious nature, he blanks out and refuses to admit that we should have good reasons to believe in strange things. I think that he knows that it is irrational, but still chooses to engage in it, and this irritates me all the more when he implies that those who believe are virtuous for that... Virtuous for having a broken belief engine?
Anyway. His mom is very Christian, probably of a more literal form. She gave me some books to read, such as "Mere Christianity" by C.S Lewis and "The Looser Letters". I read them and I hated them. I was very open minded indeed, wanting them to make sense. If they did make sense, then I would not feel irritated when thinking about my boyfriend's beliefs... at least they were justified in a way. But these books are terribly. I mean, they seriously are philosophical vacuous. I have read a great deal of philosophy in my life, and I have encountered some serious analysis on the nature of reality and metaphysics. Serious analysis never conclude that there is a God, because the evidence is not there. Not a single argument has ever worked. But C.S. Lewis takes a couple random arguments (such as the moral compass argument) and pretends that they proof God. And not only that, but claims that only a fool would not understand them... or, of course, you were a person who does not want to admit that there is something greater than you because you have a huge ego. Well, I would love God to exist, but I will not break my reason engine to believe. In any case, I sometimes feel that his mother will not accept me unless I believe in it. And that she probably buys into Lewis interpretation and thinks that I don't believe because I don't want to surrender to a greater force. But that is not the case.
But after all, this situation has made me read a lot about Christianity and I am greateful that now I know about it from the words of those who are regarded as intelligent and rational thinkers like C.S. Lewis (ha!).
One thing that I have gotten out of this mess, though, was listening to Alan Watts and his view on Christianity. It turns out that Jesus probably never meant to say that he was literally God. He had a mystical experience of realizing that we are all God, like it is common in India, but had not way to explain it to the people around him. And this is fascinating. The whole of Christianity might be fundamentally mistaken, but the reality is actually more interesting. Jesus was, in a way, the Krishna of the West :-)
To finish, I'll share a quote that shows this issue very clearly:
""I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument based on Jesus as liar, lunatic, or Lord was predicated on the assumption that Jesus had called himself God. I had long ago come to believe that he had not. Only in the latest of our Gospels, John, a Gospel that shows considerably more theological sophistication than the others, does Jesus indicate that he is divine. I had come to realize that none of our earliest traditions indicate that Jesus said any such thing about himself. And surely if Jesus had really spent his days in Galilee and then Jerusalem calling himself God, all of our sources would be eager to report it. To put it differently, if Jesus claimed he was divine, it seemed very strange indeed that Matthew, Mark, and Luke all failed to say anything about it. Did they just forget to mention that part?
I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching." - 'Jesus, Interrupted', Bart Ehrman
When I was 17 I started to meditate and learned a lot about Hinduism and Buddhism, religions that I still find fascinating and beautiful. Somehow, the assumption that we are all one and that we are all God sits very well in my mind. That's why I could feel good thinking about Hinduism but not Christianity; to be a different thing, a mere creation separate from God seems rather strange when you see that in consciousness everything divine exist. So while I have never believed in Hinduism, I still think about it in much higher terms than Christianity or Islam.
But about 9 months ago I met my current boyfriend. I am gay and he is too, haha. And I love him very much. We have a lot of things in common, such a geeky interests and a love of math. But, strangely enough, he happened to be Christian. I first thought that was strange, but I just went along with it. He never tried to impose his beliefs in me, nor the other way around and we never talked about religion. For all intents and purposes, it did not play a role in our relationship. That is until I brought up the topic of consciousness. I myself think the soul does not exist, we a re just a stream of consciousness with no underlying essence. And even though he thought about it as something interesting, he would not embrace this possibility entirely. We then talked about life after death, heave and hell and God. He told me that he started to believe and be more religious when he went through some tough times during high-school and met an sympathetic religious group. But he never quite managed to explained why it did make sense. To him, religion is something you believe, not because you have rational reasons, but out of love. This, to me, did not make any sense; I want my beliefs to reflect reality accurately... otherwise it is like hacking my brain to feel good by damaging its fundamental functions.
I do not know why this has made me irritated at times. I just want him to be rational, but I also see how his irrational beliefs can help him in a way. Of course the situation is all the more stranger by the fact that he is gay. He had some problems with one group he attended because one pastor preached to him about how he had to live in celibacy and follow Christ in chastity. So he got very angry and had to re-think his faith. Ever since, he now "has opinions" such as the belief that the Bible is not the perfect word of God and so on. But he is cherry-picking. I think that he does not want to give up the wonderful feeling that he gets when he feels loved by God, but he struggles to find a rational fr
Anyway. His mom is very Christian, probably of a more literal form. She gave me some books to read, such as "Mere Christianity" by C.S Lewis and "The Looser Letters". I read them and I hated them. I was very open minded indeed, wanting them to make sense. If they did make sense, then I would not feel irritated when thinking about my boyfriend's beliefs... at least they were justified in a way. But these books are terribly. I mean, they seriously are philosophical vacuous. I have read a great deal of philosophy in my life, and I have encountered some serious analysis on the nature of reality and metaphysics. Serious analysis never conclude that there is a God, because the evidence is not there. Not a single argument has ever worked. But C.S. Lewis takes a couple random arguments (such as the moral compass argument) and pretends that they proof God. And not only that, but claims that only a fool would not understand them... or, of course, you were a person who does not want to admit that there is something greater than you because you have a huge ego. Well, I would love God to exist, but I will not break my reason engine to believe. In any case, I sometimes feel that his mother will not accept me unless I believe in it. And that she probably buys into Lewis interpretation and thinks that I don't believe because I don't want to surrender to a greater force. But that is not the case.
But after all, this situation has made me read a lot about Christianity and I am greateful that now I know about it from the words of those who are regarded as intelligent and rational thinkers like C.S. Lewis (ha!).
One thing that I have gotten out of this mess, though, was listening to Alan Watts and his view on Christianity. It turns out that Jesus probably never meant to say that he was literally God. He had a mystical experience of realizing that we are all God, like it is common in India, but had not way to explain it to the people around him. And this is fascinating. The whole of Christianity might be fundamentally mistaken, but the reality is actually more interesting. Jesus was, in a way, the Krishna of the West :-)
To finish, I'll share a quote that shows this issue very clearly:
""I had come to see that the very premise of Lewis’s argument was flawed. The argument ba
I had come to realize that Jesus’ divinity was part of John’s theology, not a part of Jesus’ own teaching." - 'Jesus, Interrupted', Bart Ehrman
By:
OreoMath
Age:
18-21
,
Male
