I used to believe in God. I used to be a Mormon. The two most important things in my life were God and the Church. I was sincere and tried my best to be a moral person. I prayed every night and sometimes cried because I would feel overwhelmed by God's love. I wanted to share that love with everyone in the world. I wanted to be His servant. Jesus Christ was my Savior. He was my hero and I was so grateful for his sacrifice and his eternal love for everyone, no matter what their place in life. I wanted nothing more than to be able to die happily, knowing I had done my best to serve God, and then fall on my knees before Christ and thank him from the bottom of my heart for everything he had done for me and mankind. I believed everyone would one day live happily together in the afterlife and all would be well, for God had a plan for all of us.
I wanted so much for God to be real, and He was real.
I don't believe in Him anymore. I lost my faith in the Mormon church first. It was hard. I had put so much of my hopes and dreams into this organization that it killed a big part of me to leave it. But I had no choice. I couldn't accept its "truth" any longer. I could accept its fundamental message of God's "plan of happiness," the Atonement of Christ, and the concept of an eternal family and the evolution of the soul, but I could not accept its more mundane doctrines. I couldn't accept the acts of YHWH as behavior consistent with the god I believed in. I couldn't accept that the kind, loving god I knew would demand genocide and the sacrifice of innocent animals. I also couldn't accept some of the words of former prophets of the church, such as Brigham Young, and the modern church's stance on gay marriage. I saw what Christ taught and followed that as best as I could, but discovered that what the church taught and what he taught were not the same. So I left.
The next step was to lose faith in Christ himself. I realized, after learning more and more about world religion and the origins of Christianity, that it is extremely unlikely that Christ was who the Christians claim he is. I began to look at him more and more as simply an Enlightened man, similar to the Buddha, who saw the world in a different way than most of his contemporaries and wanted to share that unique view. I believe I share that view of his, even now. Even though I don't believe him to be divine, I definitely think he was right.
The loss of faith in an anthropomorphic God happened simultaneously to the loss of faith in Christ. I essentially just "gave up" and stopped believing in Him. There was no real reason for me to keep my faith in God, other than my own human weaknesses, so I gave Him up. And that's that.
Now I believe in nothing. I don't have any significant faith to speak of. I don't know if there's a higher power, and I don't know if there's an afterlife. And that's that.
My friend has a poster on his wall that says something along the lines of, "Inside every person, there is a God shaped hole." This is true in a lot of ways, at least for me. I still want there to be a God, trust me--I do. I miss Him a lot. It's almost pathetic. A life with God is so much simpler. Whenever things go wrong, you can just rely on God to take care of you. You can leave the cares of the world behind because you are "in Christ." All the existential problems are already solved for you. You can smile at things and think, "God created that. It is perfect."
Without God, there is none of that obvious perfection. Things go wrong, and it's not part of some "divine plan." It is just reality. There is no safe-haven. You have to take responsibility for your actions. You can't just do the best you can and "leave the rest up to God." Life is so much more brutal when you're all alone.
So here I am, empty inside with a God-shaped hole in my center. I can't fill it because I am, unfortunately, a brutally honest person. I can't deny my doubts. I have partaken of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, and I can never go back to the Garden.
I can never go back to God.
No comments:
Post a Comment