Re: I am affronted by the presence of god
@GrannyCheeseWheel I can only begin to imagine what you're going through. Personally, if I was in your shoes I honestly don't think I could do it. So you have my respect! I really hope the remainder of your grandma's life is spent in relative comfort, that she passes peacefully and serenely when the time comes, and that she ends up in heaven or wherever she believes she is destined to go, if anywhere.
As for the whole religious discussion, I think I'm a bit too simpleminded to argue the absolute truths/falsehoods, but I'll do my best.
As a kid my grandpa tried to get me into religion, I think I wrote about that way back in another thread. He is a strong believer in Christianity.
The big sticking point which kept me from accepting religion was that I couldn't understand what God actually was.
My grandfather tried to explain this to me quoting the Bible, at least the Bible he learned from. But I had trouble understanding what he was on about. It sounded like a random story that was fun to imagine, but hard to believe. God could be so powerful, so all-knowing, so pure, yet so elusive. The more I heard about him, the more I didn't understand him.
As a teenager, I used to find peace by telling myself that if our God is all-knowing, it will know I have trouble believing in it, it will see that in my aura or whatever emanates from me. But, because God is pure and God forgives, it will show me once and for all that it exists when the time is right, and if the chance never arises before my death, God will still see the love in my heart of skepticism. But something about that just didn't sit right; religious people's faith seems to go deeper than that. They don't have this mentality that God must prove its existence. They respect and worship God with unwavering devotion. And I'm sorry, but that is just not me.
It's time for one of my stupid analogies. It would be like me bragging about a new computer and claiming I can do whatever I want with ease. I can play epic games. I can write documents. I can talk to people online. I can do research. If you knew nothing about computers, you'd think it was the most amazing thing ever since sliced bread.
But then let's say I tell you that computers do have limits: I can't watch these HD videos because my Internet connection isn't fast enough, I can't have a discussion with my computer about how much it is crippled because the hard drive went out, and I certainly can't depend on it to get me a soda when I'm thirsty. A skeptic might, when presented with this, want to know why these pros and cons exist. But a non-skeptic, someone who accepts that the world works a certain way due to higher powers they can't control, might possibly just shake their head and live with the limitations, the caveats, and the annoyances.
In a weird disjointed way, that's how I always felt when people tried to talk religion with me. Religious people seemed to not want to question things, they wanted to accept that the world worked a certain way which was out of their hands. Now, I'm not saying that everyone who is religious is not a skeptic or vice versa, but it's something I've been pondering as of late.
Every time I asked a simple but hard question, I was not given a straightforward answer, because they could not give one. If I asked "Why can't the computer get me a soda?" I was not told computers aren't mobile. I would instead be told something like "Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't want you to use it for that." And if I followed that up with a further query, they would get frustrated and tell me they could see I wasn't going to get it, and to forget the conversation took place.
Okay, throwing the computer analogy out because it was stupid, but yeah... maybe it explains my angle? I dunno. Religion felt like a mold that I could never really feel out. I wanted to, though, because it seemed to calm people, give them something to look up to, but I couldn't get it. It bothered me for a while, made me feel like I was the ignorant idiot and everyone else was smarter than me, but after a while, I just said I don't really care, and lost most of my interest in it.
Recently I became aware of the possibility that some people treat religion and church as sort of a social gathering. A friend of mine tried to encourage me to go to church once because I would meet nice people there. "You don't have to be euber religious to go to church," he said. "Many churches around here are extremely gentle with it."
To this, I argue what's the point? If you're going to be religious and go to church, isn't your goal to feel God's divine presence? I dunno, maybe I am distorting the purpose of a church and overestimating what churches were designed to do, but I always thought if you're gonna go, take the whole hog. Don't put your toe in the water and tell me you're wet. But a lot of people around here treat it like that, and I've even heard a few stories where people were encouraged to go to church in response to ordinary life issues which everyone goes through.
"If you go to church, your car might not get fixed, but you can maybe find nice people who will point you in the right direction to fix your car." Stuff like that. Sure, that may be true, but that's.. stretching it a bit isn't it?
Again maybe I'm thinking too much in black-and-white. I know it's something I do and it's something I have to work on, but still. I'll never understand it.
Another thing I have trouble with is people who seem to believe in two powers. I feel it every time my grandpa tells me he preys that doctors will find a way to cure my blindness, and I just want to ask him, who are you rooting for here? Are you rooting for God, and if so, why trust the doctors to do that? God could do it better right? No wait, God was the one who supposedly made me blind in the first place, as though the blindness was the price we needed to pay so I could have my talents. So if not that... then are you rooting for the doctors, but asking God to give you strength until it's over? Does the Bible or whatever religious text you follow allow that? Or, are you rooting for God to grace the specialists and surgeons with the divine energy they need to perform a truly excellent procedure? Isn't that still crossing a blurry line? You're essentially saying "God I trust you, but sorry, I've found a better deal because I don't like the hand you've given me, but yeah I still need help to see it to completion." None of it sits well with me.
My theory is that some people, at least, don't truly have a straight and narrow path to go down. religion gives them something to hang on to, but in a crisis, they realize their higher power isn't going to appear in flashing lights and make it all better, yet that's precisely what they need. They're encouraged by the millions of people who are treated successfully for ailments all around the world using medical science. That's my theory anyway, it's probably crude but yeah. The only way I can settle it is to concede that science and Christianity both have nothing to do with each other in 2021, and each practice sort of goes on trying to stay out of the other's way.
I'm with jayde though, I do believe a higher power could exist, but I really don't know if one does. When people ask me about this, I always tell them that I don't think us human beings are capable of knowing the answer. I firmly believe that if we could know, someone well before me would have been able to prove its existence by now.
Right now though, I struggle to define how far I am willing to take this agnostic view. I am in full support of science, but I do feel like there is an order to the chaos which science is going to be hard pressed to justify. Some days I'm okay with a truly scientific view. It keeps intellectual thought interesting. But other days, I feel there must be something else. I'm open to scientific explanations more than others, but if there is a higher power at work and it can somehow be proven to exist or touch me in some way, I will try to accept it as truly existing. There are a few moments where things seemed to happen in ways which went beyond random chance, so I dunno. Maybe there's more to it than the scientific method.
When I was younger, I did argue with myself about whether mystical forces and higher powers may exist. As a child, I went through phases where I felt we all had a mystical energy surrounding us that gave us our talents, strengths and weaknesses, and I tried in vane to identify it. I was even somewhat open to meeting psychics or wizards back then. Of course, I never did meet one, or at least not a real one. I now know I was just super self-conscious and I compared myself to others far too much, but as a child, the prospect of non-explainable things was a very real thing to me. Even so, I was well aware that I was chasing something very elusive, and I didn't actually expect anything to come of it. Put it this way, I would've been as intrigued with a clever trick as I would have been with the real thing.
Those childhood feelings do resurface from time to time. Not often, but they sometimes do.
The first time I heard about Reiki I legitimately wanted to believe it was real, because even though I am a skeptic, I don't like to dismiss things right away. I like to understand them if I can, and I felt that if I could only feel the right auras or something, that Reiki would make sense to me. I felt the same way about telepathy for a little while too. IN the end, rational thought always prevailed, leaving me with a dismissive attitude afterward, but during those phases where I was chasing the unicorn, some of my friends did think I was a bit crazy when I asked them to help me process this. They were more or less like, "Dude, you know that shit ain't real, come on now!" They of course didn't say it like that, but I knew they were thinking it, and I was too.
But yeah, that's quite enough from me I think!
This is a very interesting thread, I'm just happy it hasn't exploded into flames. What a messy world we live in, eh?
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