how they changed their minds: guest post from Ben
Following my blog series in spring 2015, How I Changed My Mind, I thought it would be cool to do a series where I invite others to tell stories about how they changed their minds on faith-related issues. This post is from my friend Ben. We started at Christian liberal arts university together, back when many things seemed simple to both of us. We now both understand what it is to grieve a sense of safety and certainty. This is a powerful expression of something that I don’t think everyone understands about those of us who doubt and who lose faith: we would have chosen to stay where we were if it had been a choice, but it isn’t.
You gave my life meaning, kept me going through everything that life could throw at me. You gave me certainty and the confidence to push forward in life without having to worry about screwing it all up. After all, there’s nothing to worry about when you are completely certain that an all powerful, all knowing deity has your back. I knew you loved me, and I knew that you would always be there.
I studied biology and physics, and found an earth that seemed billions of years older than I believed that it could be. But this didn’t shake me, after all, there are a thousand creationist responses to all those pesky observations. Even if those failed, there was no reason you couldn’t have meant that first bit of Genesis in some symbolic way.
I studied history and learned about how the evangelical tradition, which I accepted as obvious, had arisen from seventeen hundred years worth of traditions interpreting and reinterpreting the story of a man named Jesus. But, while this caused some discomfort, I was still certain that there was nothing in history that was outside of your plan. Maybe I could adopt practices from those traditions which would bring me even closer to you.
I studied the bible, and learned that there are a thousand different ways that people have read and interpreted the scriptures. Scriptures that I had read and re-read dozens of times and believed were your literal, inerrant word. But this didn’t cause me too much grief, you were still there, and you still cared. Besides, the scriptures can be just as powerful as inspired works that contain spiritual truths, even if they aren’t totally inerrant.
Slowly I began moving more and more into a liberalized version of Christianity. New information that didn’t sync up with what I knew about you had to be synthesized. Often it would be necessary to force two cognitively dissonant ideas together.
The bible doesn’t talk a lot about homosexuality, but where it does, it doesn’t come off as very enlightened. It was easy to say things like “well, it’s their choice to live like that” or “God will give them enough grace to overcome this struggle” when I didn’t know anyone who wasn’t straight. But once I did it became very clear very fast that a) no good god would put someone into this kind of impossible situation, and b) I couldn’t love someone and expect them to try to carry a burden that I couldn’t touch. So I strained all my cognitive musculature, and pulled together the idea of an inspired scripture and of you being a loving god as tightly as I could manage.
Then I studied philosophy.
And I loved it. I loved learning about crafting arguments, and being logically consistent, and discovering meaning in the world. I loved philosophy because of you. Because I knew that loving wisdom and loving you were the same thing, and I was totally convinced that following any direction to the truth would necessarily lead me back to you. After all, you were the way, the truth and the life. But every day philosophy challenged the way I thought in some new subtle way. I’d run to apologists who might have a good answer to these challenging ideas, but rarely got a satisfying answer. I’d chalk it up to your mysterious nature, think to myself that you were beyond my comprehension and move on.
I tried more and more to escape from rationally explaining your existence by throwing myself into a more experience oriented version of Christianity. I attended worship services, spent more and more time in prayer, and devoted myself to spiritual practices. But I couldn’t find anything beyond some emotional tears once a week during a music service. But my faith was still there, whether I could feel you or not I wasn’t about to give up. I still had certainty that you would be there when I needed you.
Then philosophy broke my back.
I’ve read the bible from cover to cover nearly fifteen times, I’ve practiced lectio divina, and I’ve prayed my way through Augustine’s confession and a hundred other devotional works, but I have never prayed over a written work so fervently or for so long as I prayed through Anthony Flew’s parable of the gardener. It was only a two page excerpt, but just twenty four words were required to cause my whole world to disappear right beneath my feet:
Just how does what you call an invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener differ from an imaginary gardener or even from no gardener at all?
As I read those words you disappeared. Your presence, which I was so certain of even if I’d never really felt it, evaporated. The lights all turned off and I was all alone. I spent months afterwards trying with a renewed sense of urgency to find you, failing. Reading and rereading scriptures that promised that if I sought you, I’d find you, but you were nowhere to be found. I prayed for four hours a day every day for six weeks just to get some inkling that you were there, or that you at least cared a little. But you were either hidden behind a veil so thick that I couldn’t hope to find you without your direct intervention, or simply a being that never was.
So, here I am, trying to build something out of all the furniture that was built with you in mind, left to rearrange ideas with the knowledge that you aren’t going to show up, even if most days I still wish you would.
titsay
vaporwave
discoholicmusic
jacobvanloon
dededos
izzy806
