From: Jeffrey W. Spencer <ahtitan@aol.com>
To: adrian
I was raised Catholic. I was never really given an option (like most kids); my mom was Catholic, so that's where we went. Like most Catholics, I simply accepted the information I was given without giving it much thought. I was kid, what did I know? Anyway, around the time I was 12, a thought occurred to me during the homily: "Wait a second...this is all based on a book. Just one book. We could just as easily have based all our beliefs on the rules to Monopoly, or Hamlet." That thought sort of simmered at the back of my mind for several years...the seeds of doubt, if you will.
During my senior year of high school, I would go on the aforementioned retreats. It was at this time that I thought I wanted to be a priest. I wanted to make the Catholic church more accessable to youth. I was rather upset, though, when my church spent 83 thousand dollars on a new pipe organ. I felt the money should have gone to...oh...feeding somebody or something.
Then I went to college. I started to wonder why, with all the different denominations of Christianity, why Catholicism was the correct one. After all, all these people are believing basically the same thing -- what makes Catholics inherently right? Of course, after that line of thought, the next logical step was, "Well, what makes the Christians right? What about Hindus, Buddhists, Jews?" I started to question the validity of individual sect, and of organized religion in general.
(A lot of these ideas were solidified by their verbalization during conversations with Mad Max. Max was (is?) a former math professor from Indiana State University who was fired for teaching the Bible in class. He would go around to various major universities and preach. At Indiana University (Bloomington, by alma mater), he would set up outside Ballantine Hall and quite the crowd would gather. He would denounce the girls in shorts as fornicators and tell us all that we were going to burn in the eternal fy-errrrrr! I knew I'd achieved greatness when he resorted to speaking to me "in tongues.")
The more I learned about the Christian God of the Bible, or at least of Max's bible, the less I wanted to worship him. I could not reconcile a love for a God who would be so petty as to say, "Well, you were a great person, but you didn't believe in Jesus, so your gonna burn."
This progression, combined with the fact that some pretty nasty things were being allowed to happen in the world, led me to doubt that there was a god up there at all, and certainly not the traditional Christian God. I started thinking that God was a fairy tale created to assuage our fears of death, of no meaning, of no control. The Christian God began to look a lot like Apollo driving his fiery chariot across the sky that we now know is the sun.
Condensing things a bit (Arrgh! Too late!! You've droned on forever!), much thought and 10 years later, I believe that we are indeed without a higher power, that there is no meaning save that which we define, that the ideas of God and the soul are just panaceas for a people who can't get over needing a parent. It's a nice idea, and it might actually be better if there was a truly benevolent God to care for us and protect us. But there isn't. We will no longer need God when we become enlightened. Until then, a great many people still need to keep the man behind the curtain alive. And a few of them are even successful at making it a healthy, non-destructive, thoughtful part of their lives. I, however, do not believe.
Well, there you have it. I don't know how common that path is, but it's been a thoughtful one. It seems now so painfully obvious that there is no higher power, and I'm increasingly impatient with people who insist on ignorance. I live in Elkhart, Indiana, USA, and have precious few (read: none) likeminded people with whom to discuss ideas.