#14

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

My faith was a very well-defined thing, very dogmatic. I based my entire life and my outlook on it. It gave me a purpose. So when it was truly shaken for the first time, it was pretty traumatizing. Once part of it stopped making sense, the entire thing started to fall apart. The thing with Tara was hard because up until that point, God had always been there for me. I felt comfort when I prayed, and even if things didn't instantly change, I always felt better believing in and talking to God. Something would always happen. So after two months of crying out to God every day, begging him to at least give me a sign that he was there or to give me some sort of hope that things would get better, I found myself doubting his existence. My faith had always been a very personal, emotional thing. I could argue intellectually for it, but my belief in God had always been founded in emotion rather than fact. If somebody did make an argument against God that I found myself unable to totally refute, it still wouldn't shake my faith because my faith wasn't based on an intellectual understanding of God - it was based on how I felt about him and the relationship I believed I had with him. So when I found it difficult to emotionally invest in God, everything else started to fall apart. Once the emotional base was gone, I started to doubt the rational reasons I had for my faith. I started reading books on theology and talking to my youth pastors, even joined a Bible study in an attempt to understand God and have him make sense in my head, hoping that maybe if I could believe in God intellectually, somehow the emotional part would come back. Weirdly enough, the more I read and talked and thought about it, the less I believed. The Bible study in particular was detrimental to my faith. It was led by a guy who was finishing a degree at Bethel and wanted to plant churches (and, oddly, happened to play guitar in this Christian rap-rock band I was into a few years prior), so dude knew his shit. And when I would ask about stuff that bothered me in the text (we were reading through Luke), his answers either didn't make sense, seemed contradictory, or made God seem like kind of a shitty dude. Eventually the study broke up, and while I continued to go to church most weeks and tried to pray with some regularity, it just didn't feel the same. Not only was the emotional part no longer present, but the intellectual part was starting to rapidly crumble. I started thinking about changing to another religion, and looked into Buddhism for a while. There were things I definitely identified with - lots of the zen stuff, and the ideas about life being about finding the balance between two extremes - but the spiritual aspects fell short. Shortly after that, I considered atheism/agnosticism and decided to listen to God is not Great by Christopher Hitchens at work one day. That book would end up being the thing that finally shattered what little scraps of faith I still had. The way Hitchens systematically went through and undermined most of the historical and intellectual aspects of any sort of faith in the supernatural blew my brain wide open and forced me to change my mind about my reasons for believing in God. So with the emotional part already gone and then the intellectual part defeated, I found myself completely unable to believe in God - which fucking hurt. I was depressed about it for a while. But eventually I learned to rely on myself, to be okay with life being totally meaningless. And there's actually a sense of comfort and freedom that come with that, sometimes. Sometimes it sucks, but sometimes it's good, too. There are definitely times I still want to believe in God, and there were a couple periods where I even tried giving God another chance (usually when I'd been listening to a lot of mewithoutYou). I don't know if my desire to believe in God ever fully goes away or not. I think about faith and religion a lot, at the very least; maybe even on a daily basis. But the intellectual block in my head keeps me from ever fully committing. I can't force myself into faith just because I want to believe, just like I can't force myself to believe in anything else I don't think is real. There's also stuff in the Bible that makes me not want to believe in God even if he is real - shit against women and gay people are two big ones, as well as a lot of the hyperviolence and overreacting that goes on in the Old Testament. It also seems that Calvinism is probably true, and I don't buy that at all. I don't know how I'm free if everything is preordained - but then I also have trouble believing that God doesn't know what is going to happen at every second throughout history, so I don't know. I find some of the paradoxes wonderful and beautiful, but I can't wrap my head around that one. There's stuff about the sins of the father being passed on for generations, which I also think is total bullshit. And while I could just take the parts I like and leave the rest, that feels wrong, probably because my faith was so well-defined earlier in my life. It feels like I'm cheating somehow. My attitude is pretty all-or-nothing when it comes to God. That's also the reason I have trouble believing in something amorphous and ill-defined. If there aren't rules to follow, I don't see the point, I guess, other than comfort... and it's difficult for me to believe that I was created by something that has no expectations of me. I'll admit that there are selfish reasons for it, too. I think if I start believing again, I'll probably have to stop taking drugs and swearing and a whole host of other things. I'll have to start going to church regularly, and if I don't tithe I'll feel guilty for it. And yet... I don't know, if I was truly able to believe again, giving up all that shit would probably be worth it. So yeah, I don't know. That's a pretty good summation of my faith and my feelings about God, I guess.


It was the emotional that kept me believing and it is the rational that keeps me from believing.


Sunday, February 26, 2012

Basement-dwelling
On a shitty day
At the end of a strange weekend
In the middle of... what?
Nothingness
Peppered with meaningless events
Points of something surrounded by void
The ones with you burn brighter
But sometimes they sting my eyes
Though usually (unfortunately) not enough to make me cry
I like to think I'm at my best when I don't feel
But that's only because numbness is better
Than acknowledging the constant emptiness in my chest
I wish I knew how to make it go away
Until then, I'll fill it with another drink
Another drug
Another night spent with you
(Though never in the way I want)
Every measure simultaneously filling and deepening the abscess
Some days I can't wait until it takes me over