growing up Christian Options

[eunie03]

I've lived a pretty dogmatic life. I haven't known much else. I started talking to a friend who's a philosophy major, and he up and tells me he thinks we just disappear after this. We have no soul, no spirit. We just live and die, and decompose. Like we never existed.

It's kind of pointless then. To live a Christian life.

I've been trying to get away from it since the end of high school. Christianity, I mean. But no matter how hard I try, it's so hard for me to believe that this is it. That there's no heaven or hell. Then I think about all the years I've wasted going to church and essentially just talking to the ceiling in my room.

It's just as easy for me to doubt it all.

Anyway, the point of my topic. If you've grown up in a church, you've probably noticed how much stronger the fire is in the newborn Christian. Growing up with it... it just makes everything mundane and routine. Have you ever denounced Christianity, just so you can have that newborn fire? Do you think it's a sin? To want to experience the world and gain some sort of insight before blindly following the faith?

[*mipadi*]

About a year ago, I faced this sort of "crisis", I guess you could say. I was torn between the multiple faiths I had held throughout my life. When I was a boy, I went to church regularly, until about third grade, when my family stopped going. My mum was always a Christian, still is; I'm not sure about my dad, but I don't think he buys into everything. I considered myself an agnostic--I didn't believe in God, but I wasn't quite ready to rule anything out.

However, after having a few classes, particularly one on Japanese literature (of all things), I began to wonder: is there an afterlife? Who created this world? What happens when we die? Surely something as beautifully created as the human, and more particularly, the human mind, cannot simply wither away and disappear into earth upon death? There must be some way that it is saved. My faith began to slowly shift towards a view of a deity and an afterlife. Something, I mused, had to have created this world, and the cosmos, and the human being, and all the animals and plants and so on and so forth--it was too beautiful to not have been created.

Eventually, I joined a Bible study group to try to make sense of the Bible. I even started having one-on-one sessions with the leader of the group to try to make sense of specific Biblical passages that I had questions about.

In the end, however, I decided the whole Christianity thing was a myth.

Partly it started due to two classes I had that dealt directly with Greek and Roman religion. I realized that if one were to go back thousands of years, to ancient Greece and Rome, one would find that those people believed in Athena and Apollo and Artemis and Zeus and Hercules and so on and so forth just as strongly as some people believe in the Christian God--yet, very few people seriously worship the Greco-Roman gods anymore. They're classified as "myths". Studying religious history, I found a number of other examples of religions that were once seriously worshipped, but now have been relegated to books on mythology. And I realized something: Christianity, or Hinduism, or Judaism, is no more special than those religions; in five thousand years, people will be writing texts about the "mythical God" and these people called "Christians" who worshipped this guy.

It was then that I realized that it is purely human arrogance to say that we, as a species, are too "beautifully created" to cease to exist upon death. For better or for worse, I believe that is what happens: one dies, one rots, one turns to earth. And that's that. It sounds like a sad way to live one's life, but I realized something else: when one is dead, one won't care about one's fate; and even though his friends may be terribly upset, at least they are still living. In was at this point that I decided that the key to happiness and balance in life is not to live so one can get into a mythical heaven, but rather, to live so one makes the most of everyday, and grows and matures as a person as much as one can.

Another deciding factor was in looking at the world around me. I decided that if I were to buy into the idea of a deity, then the god must be like the Judaist "jealous, vengeful god". I simply cannot buy into the fact that, given all the destruction in the world, God is an almight, benevolent force. I understand the idea of free will and can somewhat buy into that, but what about destruction such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean last December, or Hurricane Rita? How does the concept of a benevolent god play into those disasters?

In the end, I've found that science is a much better explanation for the world around me. Science requires some faith, just like a religion, but at least concepts can be proven, I feel, rather than just relying on blind faith. I think it offers much better explanations than religion.