My Religion

I am an agnostic. There, I have said it. I didn’t choose to be one. It just means that I am not convinced that God either does or does not exist. I confess that I want there to be God, a loving God. But, there are a lot of opinions about whether God exists. That tells me that God (if God exists) has not chosen to clarify to humans exactly what he wants of us. Oh yes, I’m familiar with the Abrahamic faith that has branched into three major faiths and countless variations within them. Abraham was was a semitic guy born a couple of millennia before Jesus. He is credited with launching the idea of monotheism (after receiving information from God) and becoming the leader and teacher of those of the Jewish ethnic group. After Jesus was born, the belief in God was spread well beyond ethnic Jews to others who proliferated. Then about 600 years after Jesus, Mohammed (also a semitic guy) came along and founded Islam. He admired Jesus but didn’t credit him with being God incarnate on earth like the Christians do. What do I think of these three big monotheistic religions today? They are on significantly different tracks. The most intense Christians are rather obsessed with what’s going to happen after they die. The most intense Jews are rather obsessed with what happened before they were born that makes them especially chosen by God and entitled to certain land. The most intense practitioners of Islam are rather obsessed with worshiping God, covering up their women, and defending themselves against being exterminated or expelled from their homeland by people identifying with the earlier two Abrahamic faiths. Lest I sound too cynical, I must say that I have had treasured friends of the highest character from all the big three including my Egyptian immigrant buddy with an Islamic father, a Jewish mother, and a Croatian Catholic immigrant wife who introduced me to my beloved wife. Where does all of the above leave me? I was raised as a Presbyterian. My parents were devout believers, attending church every Sunday. They took me to Sunday school, taught adult Sunday school, and sent me to a week of vacation bible school every June, right after school was out. I would have preferred to stay home and dig holes in the yard to fill with water along with the neighborhood kids. But, I believed everything my parents told me about God and Jesus. Even as a child though, I had some tough questions. My parents once invited the minister over to answer the questions that they struggled to answer for me. I festered over questions about what to do with making defensive war with the “Thou Shalt Not Kill” commandment, etc. By the time I reached the 9th grade, I got welcomed into our church youth group. They were a wonderful group of kids who totally accepted me, unlike many of the snooty new kids at my Junior High school who came from wealthier neighborhoods. Of course I fell in love with one particularly beautiful, nice, and intelligent girl, Eve, who was two years older than me. She loved me too (like a brother - she said). I knew she was out of my league, but she mentored me to take a leadership role. Thus set in motion, I eventually advanced to the esteemed status of youth moderator of Congaree Presbytery. That was after Eve had gone off to study religion at Agnes Scott College. In spite of my strong Presbyterian heritage and community, I gradually became a doubter toward the end of high school and beginning of college. First there was abundant evidence that humans evolved from other apes millions of years ago. The Adam and Eve story seemed totally improbable. I had always feared Hell and hoped for Heaven but I became skeptical about the ways my religion asserted were required to make it into Heaven instead of Hell. First of all, the afterlife preached to me seemed to be divided into two extreme alternatives, being burned alive for all of eternity or living forever in a blissful spiritual place with loving souls including God, Jesus, angels and sinless loved ones. It seemed to me improbable that God would devise two extreme post mortem futures for mostly mediocre humans. Moreover, it seemed very improbable that I could sin my ass off, then atone with great remorse and believe that Jesus had paid the price of my sins by being tortured to death by the Romans. But, doing this was supposed to get me into heaven? Not convincing! Notwithstanding all my expressed doubts, I have consciousness or a soul. I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. Lets just call it my spirit. I can believe that after billions of years of celestial bodies smacking together and creating elements, these could have resulted in a primitive mindless life that chemically reproduces itself. I can accept that this early life evolved into ever more complex reproducing organisms through natural selection. Finally there were humans like you and me. Sure, we have a big grey juicy computer called a brain in our head that is amazingly complicated. But no matter how sophisticated it is, how does that create consciousness? Some say that if a computer is made sophisticated enough, it automatically will have consciousness. I don’t buy it. Thus my consciousness, i.e. my spirit makes me suspect there just might be a creator God who transcends anything we can understand about physics and astronomy. There’s another reason I think there may be a creator God of unimaginable or infinite intelligence. The observations of physics have indicated that there are at least three spacial dimensions, and a time dimension. Recently some physicists have suggested that there may be at least three dimensions of time. Try to wrap your juicy grey brain around that. These aspects of physics have manifested in a finite number of particles or waves of certain forces and frequencies that are exactly interchangeably identical and have methods of connecting together into molecules like metaphorical legos. These legos tumbled around and attached until, voila, after a few billion years of natural selection, they made humans. Did this just originate from utter nothingness without design? It seems very improbable to me. Today I am an assembly of legos and consciousness. What do my years of contemplating lead me to do with myself. Well, I have this thing called a moral compass. Maybe it came from my parents and others whom I’ve interacted with over the decades. Though I’m skeptical about Jesus’ divinity, virgin birth, miracles, and resurrection, I am in lockstep with actions and teaching attributed to him about loving and caring for others, including foreigners. I love most people and even animals that don’t sting or bite. I feel compelled to be nice to these assemblages of legos with probable spirits. I want all others to feel the same way. I want the earth to remain longer without becoming a wasteland of human mismanagement and aggression. I hope there’s a God. If so, I hope God gives me an afterlife of some sort where I can be productive and joyful. Meanwhile, y’all be good to each other and take care of the planet after my legos fall apart.