All I can say is, “Wow.”

I definitely did not expect the massive amounts of readers and comments I received on my post, “The Prayer of a Desperate Agnostic.”  I have never had a post featured before, and never have I received so many views, comments, rec’s, or friend requests on one post.  I have had Xanga sign-in lock and friends lock on for such a long time.  The last several years of my life have been really rough, and I put the locks on because I was hesitant to make too public the personal stuff I have been going through.  So for all of you new people who have now subscribed to my site (and/or are now friends with me), I would like to give you a little bit of background so you know where I am coming from with that post.  I don’t know how you all will react to this information, but I feel it is important that I tell you.  I have always felt that honesty is the best policy regarding anything, so I want to paint you an honest picture of my life to this point.  And just so you know, I do plan to take what each of you said into account.  There was just so much feedback that it is going to take some time for me to fully (and fairly) digest all of it.

I was raised in a Christian (Southern Baptist, conservative) home, and went to church from the time I was a little kid.  I read (and had read to me) the Bible on multiple occasions, and even started memorizing Bible verses from an early age.  I became a Christian when I was young, though I had pretty much believed it my entire life up until then.  After several years of “officially” being a Christian, I really started to get very active and committed to my beliefs.  I became very active in church, reading my Bible, praying, and in general trying to live a good Christian life.  I eventually surrendered to the pastoral ministry, went to a Christian college, and became engaged to a Christian woman.  I wholeheartedly believed for a long time, even having many experiences that I could only describe as “visits” or “messages” from God.  Was I really a Christian?  Without a doubt.  I believed in Jesus Christ with all my heart, believed that he had died for my sins and was resurrected, and had invited him into my heart to be my Savior.  If a Christian wishes to come along and discredit my salvation, then I would ask them to examine their own faith.  I had (what you describe and what I used to describe) as a personal relationship with Christ, so before you start questioning the validity of my faith, I suggest you look in the mirror.

I have always had a questioning mind, always asking “Why?” even sometimes when it wasn’t deemed appropriate for me to do so.  Somewhere along the line in my Christian life, my mind started having all these questions about what I believed.  I tried to shove them down for as long as I could, just because I enjoyed my relationship with God, believed with all my heart, and the questions endangered all of that.  Some of these questions were logical in nature, some were more existential, and some were questions of conscience.  I would try to ask the questions in church or other Christian settings, often times in a devil’s advocate sort of way, yet the answers people came back with were always lacking.  Many times they wouldn’t even try to answer and would just tell me to pray more, read my Bible more, go to church more, or have more faith.  No matter how much I tried to ignore them, the questions just persisted all the more.  So I started becoming more active in church, reading my Bible, praying, etc., partly because I wanted to find answers and also partly because I wanted to saturate my life with Christianity in hope that the questions would go away.  I started reading many Christian apologetics books by C.S. Lewis, Josh McDowell, Lee Strobell, and others, yet none of these ever answered my questions satisfactorily.  I had even gotten to the point where I was in doubt about my own eternal security, all because of Pascal’s Wager.  I was afraid that another religion’s version of “Hell” might be the correct one, and as a Christian I might be doomed to it instead.  As a Christian, if Christianity turns out to be wrong you may actually have something to lose, despite what Pascal said to the contrary.  Believe me, the very LAST thing I wanted to do was leave my faith.  I had a good life as a Christian, I was going to be getting married, and I already had a plan for how my life was going to be going.  I also knew that leaving Christianity would hurt so many people in my inner circle, and that was something that I absolutely did not want to do.

After years of trying to find the answers within church and Christianity, I decided I had to start searching outside of Christianity.  Again, this was not an option I wanted to pursue, yet the questions kept nagging at my mind and I had to have answers.  I had done an exhaustive search within Christianity, and I regrettably came to the conclusion that the answers to my questions would have to be found elsewhere.  And so, I decided to leave my faith.  I didn’t make this public at first, but the inner torture from not telling anyone (especially people like my fiancee) was just too great.  I finally “came out” to my friends and family about what I believed, and the reaction was just as I anticipated.  My fiancee broke up with me, my relations with my family became considerably strained, and I lost many friends.  My life came crashing down around me, and it would take me a long time to recover.  I dealt with major depression and suicidal thoughts for quite awhile.  I don’t know how many of you will react to that, but that is the truth.  I often described the feeling (especially about what happened with my fiancee) as my heart being “ripped out of my chest, stomped on, diced up into little pieces and force-fed back to me.”  It was an extremely painful experience, one that I would never want anyone else to share.

All of these events did temporarily halt my search, but I eventually managed to pick up my search again, this time incorporating sources from outside Christianity.  I started reading books by Dan Barker, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens, and a lot of what they said really seemed to make a lot of sense.  I also started researching other religions and philosophies, such as deism, Buddhism, Islam, and humanism.  I also went back and started re-reading some of my other Christian sources, but from the new perspective I now had.  I read “Mere Christianity” by C.S. Lewis.  I read “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobell.  I even started reading the Bible again.  I have also had other Christian sources recommended to me since then (I know many of the people who commented recommended some as well), such as Ravi Zacharias and Ray Comfort.  I read all of these sources (Christian and non-Christian) with as open-minded of a perspective as I could, because I really wanted to know the truth, whatever that may be.

Where am I at now?  As my last post suggests, I still don’t know what the answers are.  I still have to classify myself as an agnostic, just because I still don’t know.  To be honest, I don’t think it is possible for us to know.  There is “evidence” used by all sides to support their claims, a lot of it that seems contradictory, and it is hard to sort through all of it and determine what really is true and what is not.  Though the more I search, the farther I seem to get from Christianity.  I can believe in God, but the more I research and the more I think, the less I think that the god of Christianity is the true God, if God even exists at all.  There is so much I see in the world that doesn’t jive with the “God” proposed by Christians, and therefore I have not been able to go back to Christianity.  It is also a HUGE step to go from believing in God to believing in Christianity (or any other religion).  A lot of religious people offer their “proof” that God exists, and then seem to assume that if you then believe in God that you will believe their religion.  It doesn’t necessarily even follow that a belief in God has anything to do with religion at all.  I may pursue a “relationship” with God, but (despite what a lot of Christians say to the contrary) that doesn’t mean it has to be in a Christian sense.  Can I have a relationship with God without religion?  Can I have a relationship with God without the Bible?  I think, if it is possible to have a relationship with God at all, that these are very possible.  Though as my search progresses, I seem to be leaning more and more toward the idea that God doesn’t exist at all, that the whole notion was just posited by human beings eons ago.  As Dan Barker put it, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” and I simply do not see extraordinary evidence for the existence of God.  Perhaps I am looking in the wrong places.  Perhaps I am not considering all the options.  Perhaps my mind isn’t as open as I’d like to think it is.  I have limitations, and I know that the reason(s) for not seeing it may very well be caused by these limitations.  I also know that I am not perfect, and so if there is any fault to be found I am sure I bear my share of the blame.  There is just so much to sort through and I have a hard time finding inner peace with anything I have encountered, no matter how hard I try.

I don’t know how many of you, my readers, will react to this.  It may offend you, it may encourage you, it may challenge you.  I don’t know.  I just feel that the most important thing in my search is to be honest, honest with myself and with everyone else.  This is where I am at right now.

Oh God in Heaven, Creator of the Universe, hear my earnest plea.

I don’t know if you exist or not.  Everything in my mind tells me that there is no evidence for your existence, that the belief in a god as an explanation for the unexplainable is irrational.  From all my reading and understanding, this seems to be the primary reason why any sort of religion came into being, and why many people still believe in you and follow religion today.  Yes, I see things around me I can’t explain, but people centuries before me once attributed things to a god for which we have perfectly realistic explanations for today excluding a deity.  Without a doubt, many of the things I cannot explain today will one day be explainable throughout the progress of humanity, as we learn more about the world and universe around us.  Does this mean that you were not necessarily involved in the process somehow?  Not at all.  You may have set things in motion to let us decide our own fates, curiously watching as we learn and grow into greater understanding.  But then again, you may not exist at all.  We may just be some cosmic accident, somehow developing consciousness and sentience despite all odds.

There is really no way of knowing if you exist or not without you revealing yourself to us in a way that we can all understand.  Of course, if you do not exist this would be impossible.  How can one expect to hear or see something from a being that does not exist?  If you do exist, yet do not interfere with the progression of events on our world, then such a revelation would go against your strict policy of non-interference and would therefore taint the results of your cosmic “experiment.”  I say “experiment” with all due respect.  I do not mean to insinuate that you treat us like lab rats or salivating dogs; I merely mean that you have a great deal of curiosity, a quality (I believe a good quality) that has rubbed off on us, your creations.  There are many who say you have already revealed yourself to us through sacred religious texts, and if you are indeed proactive within our society then perhaps you did.  But there are so many different religions out there who claim to have your words to us.  How do we know which of them (if any) are true?  I suppose it is possible that all of them contain some form of message from you, yet the followers of each insist that their belief system is the only correct belief system.

Oh God, there have been many people throughout history (and are today) who have waved banners of religion and done horrible things in that name.  There have been inquisitions, holocausts, jihads, holy wars, and crusades all waged in the name of religion.  If any of these people do carry your true words, they certainly don’t seem to care too much about who they trample in their path.  How many billions throughout human history have been killed by the sword of religion?  Much of this seems to derive from the mutually exclusive properties that the religions in question share, believing that since their belief system is the only correct one they must abolish any other dissenting belief system.  Many of these religions claim that they do what they do out of love, saying that since their way is the only way they must remove anything that might lead people astray.  They use fear tactics, manipulation, and even warfare, whatever is necessary to convert people.  They believe that doing whatever it takes to further their belief system is for the greater good, because it will remove all heresy and will win more people over to the “right” way of thinking in the long run.  But is it really worth it?

God, if you do exist, surely you had a reason for creating us other than just to watch us suffer.  The very act of creation alone is an expression of curiosity and love, so I find it hard to believe that you would go to the effort of creating us just to find ways to make us miserable.  Therefore, I find it hard to believe that you would reveal yourself in the form of religion, knowing full well how many would suffer and die as a result.  I have personally been witness to some horrible atrocities done in the name of religion that have left people dead or scarred for life.  There are many out there who have rejected a belief in religion or any form of God because of the traumatic experiences they have faced.  Will you truly punish these victims, forcing them to endure a second “Hell” after the “Hell” they have already faced in this life, all because they didn’t believe (with good reason)?  How can this possibly be justified?  In general, how can such pain and tragic loss of life be for the “greater good?”  Could you not foresee what religion would ultimately lead to, that believers would torture and kill each other just to further their cause?  A reasonable explanation is that you could not foresee what would happen, meaning that – for all your powers – you still have limitations just like us.  Or perhaps the true revelation (if it exists) is not to be found in religion at all.  Then again, perhaps the very idea that you even exist was postulated and/or manipulated by those in power so that they might control people.  Perhaps the initially innocent belief in a god that doesn’t exist grew way out of hand.  Regardless of the reason, I find it difficult to believe that any religion truly carries your message, at least not in the form that you intended.

This brings us back to the initial question of what your true message is, if there is even one to be found.  I have spent many years painstakingly searching for answers, desperately trying to find some truth amidst all the strife and conflicting opinions.  Yet, for all my efforts, it seems the deeper I dig the more questions I encounter.  Will I ever find the right answers to these questions?  Perhaps some of them, but probably not all of them.  Yet religion insists that my eternal destination rests on finding the correct answers, which is considerable pressure to find the correct answers to life’s toughest questions in the limited time I am alive on this Earth.

God, if you do exist, I am trying my best.  I don’t know if I will come up with the right answers or not in my lifetime, but please bear with me.  I am doing the best I can to live a good life and find the right answers to these questions, using the tools that you gave me to determine what that is, yet I fear I will still end this life with unresolved questions.  All I know is at my disposal is the experiences I have in this life, and even then there are times when too much stimuli cloud my judgment.  There is so much confusion in my mind and I have a hard time sometimes distinguishing what is true and false.  If I die under a belief system that is false, please have mercy on me.  It is not my intention to displease you.  It is actually quite to the contrary because I am doing what I can to be what you created me to be.