First of all, I guess this is sort of a selfish thread, since it’s about my current train of thought. Don’t be condescending to me though, please…most of you should understand what I’m saying, as long as I can get it put into words right. Also this post is probably going to be extremely long, but for once I’d actually appreciate a cunning dissection of my post, because I’m just not sure what to think anymore. Here goes.
I had an epiphany today, about my religion. Or maybe a more accurate term would be a ‘paradigm shift’. I dunno. I was more or less raised as a christian, though my parents were never forceful about it. They taught me about the bible, God’s word, and so forth. I was baptized as a baby, and I chose to be baptized again when I was ten, after I reached what I considered a pretty good understanding of the Bible on my own. My parents were pleased of course, but I didn’t do it for them, nor did they pressure me. I felt secure, felt understanding from the theology, and made the decision on my own.
Nor was I unequipped to make this decision. I was abnormally smart for my age (was reading 6th-grade levels when I was 3 years old, read my first Stephen King book, ‘The Gunslinger’, when I was 7 I think), was doing high-school level math in late elementary school. As such I’ve had what I consider a higher intellectual capacity than most kids for the majority of my young life. It’s been scientifically proven that I’m not a dumbass; I took an IQ test in college 3 years ago, and my range was between 140-152, which they tell me is not genius level, but well above average.
So, imagine how my time-hardened, faith-reliant, experience-shaped mind felt when I woke up this morning and discovered that my faith in God is dwindling, if not gone already. I guess it’s been going for a while now, and I could feel it. All this time, I’ve prayed and prayed, prayed for guidance, for deliverance. I prayed that if this feeling were the work of Lucifer, that God would help me ignore that influence and guide me back into His embrace. But the feeling only grew stronger. Today, when I woke up, I think the cord all but snapped, only a few final threads of doubt holding it together.
Look at our history, at the world today. How many have died in the name of God? There’s a quote somewhere (I forget who said it, it was someone important though): “The main doctrine of a fanatic’s creed are that his enemies are the enemies of God.”
That statement gives me chills, because that’s what the meat of every war has been over. I guess many people believe that the Iraqi insurgents, the taliban, and other groups must sit around, chuckling evilly, with a Seifer-like smirt on their faces, congratulating themselves on how evil they are. But common sense tells us that this isn’t the case. They are doing what they think is right, what they think God wants them to do. And what are we doing in return? What we think God wants us to do.
After reading and replying to Sinistral’s post on that christian museum, it sort of hit me how fucking fictional the Bible seems to be. I feel like a heretic saying it, almost hurts to say it, but shit… Noah’s Ark? The Garden of Eden? Fiction just seems to be the adequate word. It’s all gripping when you’re five years old, but read some fictional works by Koontz, King, Crichton, anyone else, and a smart person could base an entire religion on The Gunslinger. Ka, Ka-tet, and all that.
I don’t know what to feel, because I’m so mad. I’m mad because I don’t know what I’m supposed to believe. God is supposed to be all-powerful, but good and divine, yet he orders countless acts of inhumanity against people at random, followers of his word included. World Wars II’s persecution of the Jews come to mind, as do the Catholic Inquisition. ‘Acts of God’ include tsunamis, tornados, hurricanes, and so forth. Why do ‘acts of God’ apply only to things that kill an abnormally large amount of people, or at best are possessed of an enourmously large and uncontrollabe destructive force?
When these things happen, it is said that they happend because ‘the devil is at work’. If God is all powerful, then why does He let the devil hurt those who would come to Him? Who sets forth arbitrary laws and rules and punishes all who disobey (or even fail to believe) by roasting them alive in a slow fire for all eternity, (though it makes him really sad) and justifies all this purely on the basis of his power. How does this make him “good”? What then is his definition of “good”? Does his might alone make him right? How does this make him any different than Hitler or Attilla the Hun? By this definition, the cruelest human tyrant that ever lived was an angel by comparison, even the devil himself is “good”.
I guess I’m angry because when I look around at the human situation, really look at it, I feel cheated. People of this board, how many theoligical arguments have I gotten into with you? Many. Never have I gotten gotten personal, or overly rude (I really tried not to, anyway), but looking at it now, it feels like I’ve backing up a divine presence that does not exist. a lie, if you will. A work of fiction, written by people who may have meant well in believing a sense of right and wrong, good and evil, and so on, but in the end perpetrated a great lie. Ironically, the Bible foretells of a great lie.
So, if there is no God, no afterlife, perhaps no soul, then what is there? I’m all but certain that I’ll be in Iraq shortly, and if I die over there (or in the inevitable invasion of Iran, we all know it’s coming), I’d like to know that there’s more benefit to my life than the life insurance policy that will go to my wife and the son I’ll not be able to see born. But I don’t think there is, and this shakes me. In this age of horror and misunderstanding, it’s sad that the only true acts of honor and valor we see anymore come from fiction. Final Fantasy 8 gives me a better example of service, faith and willpower than does any scripture of the Bible. How sad is this?
Have you played Metal Gear Solid 3 (slight spoiler warning)? During the last fight, Snake’s mentor goes on in a monologue about the idealogy of a soldier and how they must interact with their country’s decision makers: “A soldier is a political tool, nothing more. That’s doubly true if he’s a career soldier. Right and wrong have no place in his mission. He has no enemies and no friends. Only the mission. You follow the orders you’re given. That’s what being a soldier is.”
I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention at the time she said it (too busy checking out her cleavage), but it all came back to me today. From that slight excerpt, you get the idea of what is ingrained into a soldier. My cousin, who’s already graduated from Army BT in Ft. Benning, tells me that’s pretty much what they hear about. But in the service of this country, service to God is intertwined with it by the higher-ups who would instill this fanatacism in you: “You cannot lose, you have God on your side”.
I say, bullshit. I don’t regret my enlisting in the USA. I will learn the one thing that no amount of reading can teach you: how to be a soldier, a killing machine. How better to protect your family from the sickos parading around the world today, many of them acting under orders from God?
