November 25, 2007

  • Unbelief

    Here's a something that I wrote during my meditations today and a good example of today's topic of criticism:

    Tell me why I should still believe in God?  Scratch that.  I believe in God I just don't believe that he's for me or that I want a relationship with God.  Why?  Because I cannot believe that he is for my good.  Maybe for others--I don't know their stories--frankly I haven't heard many of them at all.  All I know is my own life.

    The one big factor is his promise to supposedly "prosper me & to bless me."  Also that if I "ask, it will be given.  Knock and the door will be open."  I mean that most people say that I don't have a right to ask anything from God & that he doesn't have an obligation to answer.  Correct.  Supposedly he loves me, but I haven't seen him do so or make good on those promises.  Others will respond by saying that he doesn't work on my terms to prove himself or that he's been working for my good behind the scenes.

    Any reasonable person will need more than that response.

    I hate disingenuous "Christians" that would answer that way.  Don't they know how perfectly ignorant and arrogant that makes them sound?  Not to mention half-assed?  How many true testimonies of God have I heard from credible people?  Hardly any.  Most tales are half-baked bits of mumbo-jumbo droppings from the lie-like-the-devil-to-save-face tree.  Come on.  You are not fooling me.  Half-assed stories from half-assed people.

    Just another reason to not want a relationship with God.

    If most of "his people" or at least people who represent him have never had a real tangible answered prayer then why should I believe the case that he answers is true?  Because he said so?  And since he is God that's all that matters?  Hogwash.  "Faith" is too convenient for those faithless to use as an excuse to never face their faithlessness.  Hell, everyone is faithless and has to confront it whether it is a nugget or a mountain.

    Another half-assed answer would be to give a bunch of advice and quote scripture.  That's very nice.  But again meaningless because of credibility.  Why the Hell should I take advice from a person who has never experienced God's fulfillment of promise?  Worse yet, that smacks of sympathy and heartlessness.  We all know that sympathy is of the devil.  It's only feeling bad without real compassion or obligation to love and act in genuine love.  Like making a donation to charity.  It's more meaningful to suffer with the suffering than drop a cool million.  I don't think I need to go into the idea that advice and quoting scripture to the suffering is also heartless.  I don't want to hear it, nobody does.

    Worse still are those that'll say that I've got to love first to experience love.  Are you "Christians" supposed to love first as you say?  Where's the love in that response?  It's precisely people like you that don't love or act in love that have brought me to this point in the first place.  Stuff it.

    But I don't blame you.  Not fully.  If God gave you any real experiences you might be different, but he didn't.  As for me, I'm one of you.  I've had only one real prayer request all my life: I want significance, acceptance, and to be loved.

    But I know that will never happen;  that that prayer will never be answered.

    So I wait to have my mind changed by true believers with real testimony.  I don't mean about relationships, but something true that God has done for them.  Not some half-assed story of "healing" or other dubious, flashy, and generally false miracle or some other sanctimonious rant about selfishness, faith, or other generally Pharisaical finger pointing (I don't claim to be a Christian or holy or anything except a human who is frustrated and annoyed by supposed Christians' meaningless and ultimately hateful responses to people who genuinely hurt), but something deep, a real request--something personal that really was answered.

    I doubt I'll ever hear any.

Comments (3)

  • hey sam, i sent you a message.

  • who's your girlfriend?

  • I think it is a healthy thing to be pissed off at God, and humanity, at least periodically.  You will get no quarrel from me on those points.

    As to "testimony," it is a word I shy from, probably because every so-called Christian has a "personal testimony" they practice in front of a mirror five times a day, with the express purpose of converting people to Christian belief.  Maybe they deserve a reward for their efforts, I don't know, but it is a thing I don't care for.

    Regardless of all the above, however, I'm strongly convinced of God's presence and interest in my life.  I don't know that I could convince you that I have evidence, per se, of God's actions -- I don't know that you really want to be convinced, for that matter.  But you bring up the question, so I'll hack away at it for a few paragraphs.

    I have been a misanthrope most of my life.  I could say more, but let it suffice that I am anti-social and independent enough not to care whether I have any friends or not.  Yet I am married; I love sharing the company of an intelligent woman, and always have, to a degree.  But I don't crave companionship, and so would be just as content to be a monk or something.  A book and a cup of coffee are all I need.

    But one day, in college, I fell in love.  (This was before I met my wife.)  This girl was pretty, and brilliant, and innocent, though highly literate.  We went to classical concerts together, and art museums and the like, and over the summer and winter breaks we corresponded -- in an age of e-mail! -- via handwritten letters.  You see, we both had a romantic attachment to the hand-written word.  I thought, there must be a God.  And I really believed God had brought us together, because everything was so easy, so "meant to be."  I had not, at first, dared to believe that this would become a romance.  But our friendship, with all our trips to concerts and museums, really seemed like dating.  After more than a year of this, I foolishly professed my love to her, and she positively recoiled.  I couldn't believe it.  She was Beatrice to my Dante, but only in my eyes, not hers.  But isn't that exactly how it was for Dante?

    It may not sound convincing to you, but the experience really taught me something about God.  The fact that the whole situation struck me as a Beatrice/Dante kind of thing got me thinking.  Dante saw God's love in the person of an unrequited love.  The relationship I had with that girl -- the relationship continued through college, even after she refused to date me -- was a profound relationship.  She was of the few people I've ever met who has seemed to have a soul.  I loved her for it, and I could stand to let her go, because just knowing she existed was enough for me.  And her existence, the depth of her soul and the kinship we had, could not help but teach me of God's existence -- even though there was great pain, too.

    Having had such an experience, and seeing the same reflected in Dante's writing, I could say that God gave me something deep and beautiful in those years.  There were other things, too.  One of those nights, I went out to a dark field to watch a meteor shower, on one of the last days the shower would be visible.  I waited an hour and a half in freezing temperatures, yet saw no meteors.  I had nearly given up, and was walking home when I prayed, 'let just one meteor streak overhead'.  I was euphoric, still happy in my revelation that life could go on without this girl.  Then, there it was, the hugest meteor I'd ever seen.  It lit the sky across a third of the canopy of stars overhead, and it left a wide trail of fire behind it.  Never seen anything like it, before or since.  It may have been coincidence, but I thought it was an answer to prayer.  More than that, it was like a sign of a covenant -- God was telling me that understood the situation rightly (I mean the situation with the girl).

    I began to write more, and better, poetry than ever.  I was interested in life and writing to a degree never before.  In fact, I miss that time, because I don't always feel that good, anymore.  The truth is, it is very very hard to keep up a relationship with God, because He doesn't always give you these high points in life to enjoy.  The trick, I think, is to remember well the good and the bad, all that has happened, the things that changed you, because, good and ill, these teach you how serious life is, and how serious God is.

    Almost a year ago, my wife had a miscarriage.  This put her in a state of despair, and with time, and some grief-counseling sessions, she realized she was irate at God.  She thought she had done everything right, that she believed and therefore would be given the baby she wished for.  That God would let her down like this, was a real blow to everything she believed in.  Like you, she tired of having Christian friends just quote scriptures at her.  Ultimately, though, she came to see God as less of a soft-sided, sweet angelic figure, and as somewhat more like a serious, and often inscrutable, Greek tragedy, full of terrible profundity.  In the personal tragedy of our miscarriage, together we saw that, damn it all, this is how life is in a fallen world.  Yet there's something beautiful in a world of such extremes....

    Take, for instance, the recent Thanksgiving holiday.  Our anniversary is November 25th (yesterday).  Roughly a week ago, on November 17th, we had our first child.  A month prior, my sister and her husband had their first baby.  It happened that this is the best time in all our 7 years of marriage, for us to have had a baby.  My insurance covered nearly all the cost, and we had a great doctor and a great hospital, and some great community/Christian support.  Nobody (save maybe God) planned it this way, but this has unquestionably been our happiest time in many years.  These things just can't happen by coincidence.

    So, in my 29.9 years on this planet, I have found that not every story has a happy ending.  God is an eminently serious author, who knows where the beauty is in tragedy, and where the pitfalls are in romance.  And he writes all kinds:  tragedies, romances, comedies, and, dare I say, satires.  If he pisses you off every now and then, even if it's by his apparent absence, you can be sure it isn't without warrant.  Then, too, I'm sure he expects you to be angry.  Just don't mistake his silence for absence.  More than likely, it is a silence that is 'pregnant with meaning'.  That, or you're looking in the wrong places for evidence of his presence.

    But yeah, just ignore the ones who merely quote scripture at you.  They likely haven't a clue.

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