…And the rambling continues

Define your faith.
What religion are you? What do you believe? Where do you go to church? Are you going to heaven? Do you believe in heaven? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in Satan? Do you believe anything?

“You’ve changed so much since high school. You used to br Susie Christian and now…you’re just not.” ~ Brian

“She said you were the nicest person here and she could tell you were a Christian. I can see it too.” ~ Val

“If you believe in Christ, you are a pathetic loser. Any idiot can prove Christianity is just a bunch of pathetic lies.” ~ random diary

I’ve been bombarded lately in very subtle ways with challenges to what I believe. Its not straightforward questions, but every day something else makes me think about what I call my religion, my faith, my Christianity.

The world today puts so much pressure on declaring what you believe and practice – Christianity, Judism, Hinduism, Wiccan, atheism, pantheism, science, etc. The list goes on and on. I’ve heard highly intelligent people argue for hours on the factual proof of Christianity. I’ve been told over and over ‘Don’t believe what someone tells you. Find out for yourself.’ But you can’t always do that. I can’t travel to Israel to see the Temple or try to locate the tomb of Jesus or look at relics from that time. I can’t look at the relics and tell you where they came from and what they really mean. I can’t travel back in time and see the death and resurrection of Jesus (or lack thereof). I can’t travel back to the creation of the universe and see how it all really started. I have to take what other people tell me and decide if I’m going to believe them or not. I can read the Bible and memorize everything in it, but it doesn’t prove that its true or false. I can memorize the Koran and every other religious book, but it doesn’t mean I’ll know what’s truth and what’s false. Faith and belief come into play when you have to decide what to accept as true and what to accept as false.

Every can agree that bones are white and blood is red. But who decided that the color of the bone should be called white. Who named the colors? Who sat down and decided the color of a clear day’s sky would be blue and the color of healthy grass would be green? What if I started saying the color of grass was okita. And plants were all the color okita. And the rainbow wasn’t red, orange and blue. The rainbow was lipza, mayji and hunap. People would think I was crazy but would I really be wrong? Could they prove that I was wrong? Not really. Somewhere in history, some cave man started saying grass was the color green and his neighbor caught on. The phenonenom spread and soon every caveman was saying grass was the color green. It was like the whole planet went ‘Ok, we’ll call that color green.’ It was never challenged. Religion didn’t happen that way. Maybe religion started when some annoying cavekid, you know the ones who ask 60 million questions a day, asked his cavedad, ‘What makes the sun go up and down?’ The cavedad, tired after a long day of trying to start fire, answered smartly, ‘Some guy flies it across the sky.’ The cavekid tells his friends and they grow up to tell their kids, who embellish the story a little, and soon we have a chariot and horses driven by an immortal being. Then some smart aleck guy decides to stick it to his father and prove him wrong. He proves that the sun does not go around the world, but vice versa – he proves the world travels around the sun. And there is no guy with a chariot. All of a sudden, centuries of beliefs are upthrown and screwed up.

Religion is always being challenged and changed. Ancient Greek believed gods were living on Mount Olympus. The Ancient Romans had similiar beliefs. But I have never met nor heard of a person who today believes in those same gods. Does that make the ancient gods of those times false? Perhaps the whole world is mistaken and those ancient civilizations had it right. Zeus and Hera are probably laughing their heads off at the silly practices we have today. The point is you can’t prove any religion. Not to everyone’s satisfaction. You can’t prove beliefs. You believe on faith, tradition and gut-instinct.

My parents raised me as a Christian, so my traditional belief would be to follow what they have told me. And as a child, I didn’t question it much. As I got older, I started thinking about what they had told me. I met people who believed very different things than me. I started to question what my parents had always told me. I questions the validity of the Bible and therefore everything written in it.

Even at a young age I accepted the fact that the Bible could have been written by one very bored and imagainative person who passed it off as truth. I remember asking my mother how she knew this was not true. Her answer was less than satisfactory. She told me no one could have lived through all those times and could have known what to write. I asked her what historical fiction was then. She didn’t have an answer and I stopped going to her for proof. I decided I should figure it out on my own.

Well, my findings brought me no closer. Christians just accept the Bible as truth and can find circumstantial evidence to support their beliefs. Non-Christians can find circumstantial evidence to support their beliefs. If you believe in something strongly enough, you will find whatever you need to support it.

So what do I strongly believe? I believe I love coffee. I believe my hair will never curl perfectly. I believe music will always have an effect on my life. I believe my parents will always love me. But do I believe I am going to heaven? Do I really know what is going to happen when I die? The answer is that I don’t know what’s going to happen when I die. And frankly no one does. Religion and faith are there to explain what we don’t know. People don’t know how the sun, moon and stars got there so we make up stories and explainations to suit our minds. Some believe in the big bang. Some believe God just went “click.” Honestly, I’m not sure it really matters. What matters is what lets you sleep at night. If you can find comfort in the stories of the Christian Bible, that is your right.

So I guess the real question to religion is what keeps me up at night?