truth

so i had a long conversation with an old college friend the other day... one of the few friends i have left from my extremely religious days. we had a really good chat about where we are, catching up and all that, as well as about life, God, religion, and all that good stuff. I really miss discussing that sort of thing. I still think its important, but it seems that most non-religious folk aren't really interested, and the religious folk i know (mostly christians) don't want to discuss it with someone who's gone over to the dark side.

specifically, i think the reason for the latter is that they feel threatened. it's alright to discuss God and faith with someone who's never believed in any of it, but...someone who used to and now doesn't.... has already 'tasted the goodness' and has for whatever reason, consciously rejected it. that's fair enough. still frustrating, but i can see where it's coming from. I wish it weren't the case, and not just for my sake. I think people are threatened in part because Christianity is ultimately not defensible by reason. I don't mean it's not plausible, i just mean at some point it reduces to a mystery, which is where faith comes in. that's all well and good, as long as you have enough faith :) I didn't, and I'm willing to bet there are many christians who don't either, and who suffer the way I did -- wanting to believe and not being able to.

for this reason (and others of course) i greatly prefer where I am now. christianity always required me at some point to rest my knowledge on faith. there are many aspects of christianity that are supported by real life evidence, but there are many that aren't. that doesn't mean they're not true. but it does mean that if you choose to say 'i know they're true' or at least 'i believe they're true', you are forced to use faith as your sole defence of that statement. (this is of course not limited to christianity...see examples that follow) i feel much more comfortable saying 'well, i don't know'. I DON'T know if heaven exists, I DON'T know if quarks are anything beyond numbers, I DON'T know that dinosaurs looked the way paleontologists say they did, I DON'T know if Jesus is/was the Son of God. and of course i'm not saying that everyone should feel more comfortable this way... just that I do. if you KNOW that you're going to heaven, more power to you!...but I don't. (it's the existence of heaven that I'm unsure of... not my ability to get there ;)

Anyway. i digress. but this brings me to what i had meant to bring up, in a roundabout fashion. in that conversation that i had, two things struck me:

one, i was told (through a narnia analogy... anyone remember puddleglum?) that even if the christian picture of the world isn't true, it sure as hell beats the crap out of the alternatives, therefore it is worth believing in. there are two things about this that bother me. 1) reality is of value to me. if something isn't true, then sorry, it can't be better. the other thing is, even if you could ignore that, and pretend that it WERE 'better', what kind of mind fuck would you be doing to yourself, believing in something you didn't think was true?? this came up in a discussion of heaven. i said i missed believing in it, which i do. to some degree. and the point was raised (not by me) that it is better to believe in something good, even if you're not sure it's necessarily true -- but for me, to believe in something is to consider it true. i CAN'T believe in something and simultaneously doubt its truth. (here a distinction should be made between fundamental doubt and transient doubt... but that's a story for another day. suffice it to say that i'm referring to the fundamental sort) so if that's my alternative, i lose nothing and in fact gain peace of mind by saying 'i don't know. I am not rejecting the christian picture, i am simply saying i have no convictions that it is true.'

the other thing that struck me is that christians are fairly easily satisfied with the notion that 'you believe'. and to quite a large degree it doesn't matter what you believe in. for instance, there are camps of christians who think the creation story is literal. who think God created the world in 7 days dammit, and the world is 5600 (or some such number) years old, etc. then there are the camps who believe that it's all a big metaphor, the point is that God is sovereign and was responsible in some fashion for the world's beginning. THEN, there are those that take the Genesis account as a whole other literary statement about something or the other. Now, these are ALL acceptable in protestant christianity. they'll disagree about it, but they're ok with that disagreement. you can be a God-fearing christian and join any of those camps. what you MUST do, however, is believe it's true. what's it? the bible. as long as you believe scripture is divinely inspired, and that God is holy, to a large degree it doesn't matter as much what you think scripture is SAYING.

may I just say...i find this rather strange.