agnosticynicism

Note: This entry is long and meandering.  It’s taken me several days to write this and I still don’t feel confident in the articulation of my feelings but I’ve also grown uninspired and would like to move on to other projects so I post this entry imperfect and incomplete.  

I am writing about my own experiences with religion.  I think God is good…for other people.  I am not bashing Christianity, merely venting about my own personal experiences trying to navigate the vast and complicated concept of God and the often overlooked doubts and downsides of trying to be a follower of Jesus.  I mean no offense or disrespect.

Because this entry is so long, I don’t expect anyone to read it all (or any of it) and I have disabled notes so you won’t feel obligated to slog through this one and leave a response.  Thank you.

 
"But Jesus the truth is I’ve struggled so hard to believe
I need my maker to cure of my doubting blood
And drain me of the sins I love and take from me my disbelief
I know it should come easily but it remains inside of me
It battles and devours me it cuddles up the side of me
And whispers it convinces me I’m right…"
-Dashboard Confessional, Get Me Right

"I honestly believe with all of my soul that you love the whole world,
just maybe not me…"
–Showbread, You Will Die in a Prison

I wish I could say my final word on God is a good one.  I can’t.  I’m more distant from him than I’ve ever been.  There are days when I’m not even sure I believe at all anymore.  My life feels empty and meaningless.  My art isn’t good enough to move anyone.  My love isn’t good enough to move anyone.  I have trouble keeping friends.  My parents are disappointed in me.  My sister resents me for being born.  And a lot of days, I wish I hadn’t been.  I don’t have much to live for but I always hoped God would give some meaning to my life.  I hoped he’d reveal a path or at least tell me I mattered.  I never wanted the world.  I only wanted to be well.  That would have been enough for me.

But I couldn’t even have that much.

I’m at the point of giving up, which isn’t a good show of faith, I know, but I can only pray and hope so much and have so much faith before the failures overtake me and the exhaustion sets in.  I sit back and wonder if it’s worth it the skinned knees during genuflection.  I wonder if I should just get up and get on with it alone.  Or should I even get up at all?

My life is not bad from an outsider’s perspective.  I am financially comfortable.  I live in a warm home and have plenty of clothing and food.  But I have no desire.  I have no friends or hope.  I’m well-coiffed and catatonic.  I wake up every day in filth of mind and weakness of body.  I get up and go to a job I hate and have to pretend to be amiable while I scream inside and then go home and eat to ease the pain and then I take a nap and then I wake up and watch television until it’s time to go to bed and do it again the next day.

I don’t have lunch dates.  I don’t talk with anyone over the phone.  I have nothing to look forward to except my next meal.  My heart aches because I don’t feel loved by people or by God.  I am not motivated to live, only to exist.  I am separated from humanity and the orb of energy that oversees it.

I think almost all of us come to a point in our lives when we sit down and ponder our existence.  What is the meaning of life?  Why were we born?  Do we all have a destiny?  Are our lives our own?  What are we here for?  And if we are passionate enough about those questions, we seek the answers.

Some people have their art.  Their creations mean something to others.  It moves the artist and the consumer.  Sometimes it shift the lives of all involved.  Some people live for other people.  They have husbands and wives and children and proteges.  They are wanted, needed.  They’ve been embedded in the lives of those around them.  Among the tightly woven fabric of friends and family, I’m a pulled thread.    

What I have gained in material things I have lacked in relationships and connections with people and with God himself/herself/itself.  The ones I found myself closest to were the ones who dropped me the quickest.  And it always feels like God is a million miles away.  I hear all the time of people finding God, how God sought out the sinners and here I was, this whole time, crying out, wanting to be touched, wanting to be saved, and only grasping emptiness.

I get jealous when I hear testimonies of people who turned their backs on God or never believed in the first place but God found them.  Why does God go after the ones who don’t want him and ignore those who are desperate for his love?  Of course God isn’t ignoring you.  That correction doesn’t comply with my life.  God watches and waits while I whine and wane.  

I’ve heard it all before.  If God brings you to it, God will bring you through it.  God never gives you more than you can handle.  But what about this free will that Christians like to throw around so conveniently when people talk about all the tragedy in the world?  It’s the catch-all excuse for all the cataclysmic weather and terrorism and child slaughter and puppy abuse.  Why are kids raped?  Why are there starving people in Africa?  Why did my close relative get cancer?  It’s because God gave us free will to accept him or reject him and the ones who chose to reject him created all the pain in the world and unfortunately, some of that pain rubs off on the believers, too.  We’ve done this to ourselves.

So, if the non-believers have poisoned the world and everything bad that happens to us can be chalked up to free will, to the choices we’ve made, to all the good we have rejected, then did God really bring us to these tragedies and if he didn’t, is he really going to bring us through it?

From my experiences, it seems unlikely.

God owes me nothing.  I know that being a good person does not equal a free pass to a good life.  Bad things happen to good people, people better than me, all the time.  I’m not unaware of this.  But it still seems unfair.  I never did good things expecting good rewards.  I always did good things because I genuinely never wanted people to hurt or to inconvenience anyone.

But it is much easier to be mean.  It’s easier to be selfish.  And I could have been if I chose to be but I didn’t.  It’s not so much that I feel I need a reward for all the good I’ve done but I guess it feels like I should at least deserve some recognition, or at least a break from the constant sources of pain that creep up on me and pull me down every day.  That way of thinking is selfish but what’s the point of trying to beat back the natural brutality ingrained in all of us if there’s no small consolation?

Life is not fair.  We hear this all the time.  We heard it from an early age when we couldn’t get that toy or when we turned into teenagers and every day was hell while in high school and when we got older and didn’t get that job, when loved ones broke our hearts and left, when the fire took away our home, when disease infiltrated our family and ourselves, when we were robbed or beaten or raped or put down, when we realized we will never be the rock stars we imagined in our youth, when we finally stood back and looked at ourselves and realized we weren’t that great.  When we realized we were forgettable.

You would think we’d eventually internalize it, accept it, and move on.  Yet, we still complain when we don’t get what we want or find ourselves in inconvenient circumstances, be it large or small.  We compare ourselves to others.  We wish we could be other people.  It’s free will.  It’s random chance.  It’s not fair.  But life isn’t fair.  No one, not even God, said it would be.  But there’s still this innate sense of justice and balance that we all feel the world should possess all though there is no such system set in place.  Bad things happen to good people.  Awesome things happen to bad people.  Life is unpredictable and terrifying and I wonder where God fits into this frenetic fray of fabulous misfortune.

But maybe luck and the lord are two separate entities.  Maybe God has nothing to do with my everyday entropy.  He is not responsible for the consequences of the rhythm of my heart.  But even if that were the case, why can’t he tell me he’s there for me regardless of the dumb decisions I make or when a wall of woe falls down upon me separate from my own will?  It’s the separation, the cruel inactivity that hurts the most.  I know of and have read of people who have said they’ve heard the voice of God call to them, to tell them which way to go or what to do or simply to say I’m here and I love you.  What makes them so different?  What makes me so unreachable?   

I just feel like all the hope and belief hand prayer hasn’t done much for me.  But how do I really know that? Aren’t unanswered prayers still answered in their own subtle way?

That’s another part that really frustrates me about Christianity.  You never really know if anything you are doing/saying/praying is having any affect at all on yourself or those around you.  People say they’ll pray for me.  I’ve heard it for years yet I have felt no great shift in my relationship with God or people.  I do not feel better about myself.  If anything, I get worse every day.  It seems not only are my prayers faulty but I am exempt from other people’s as well.

But what if all that pent up prayer broke loose one day and I found myself with a good job and a good hairline?  You want something long enough and there’s a good chance you’ll get it.  But is that God fulfilling a prayer request or is that just free will in action again?  Maybe the dice finally rolled in my favor.

Or does communicating with God really work?  Maybe after sending up enough flares of faith, God perks up from his slumber and starts listening.  And maybe the people at the bottom have a say as well.  Is prayer only as powerful as the believer?  How adamant in your advances toward God do you have to be before he starts taking you seriously?  Is it just really ourselves giving power to a concept?  Is God simply the will within us all?

If God is the only one who can make any real change in the world and if we can convince God to make those changes through our prayers, do we possess within us some of God’s power?  Does that make us an extension of God?  We are made in his image.  Maybe we share some of his influence too.  Is God’s will my will?  If so, is my will turning against me?  Can I not even help myself?  Am I relying on a God who’s essentially me, a boring, bloated man?  There’s an entity in the ether separate from me that doesn’t care or I’m actually the apathetic one.  Either way, it doesn’t sound too appetizing.

As I said, I know it’s not God’s fault.  Obviously, I haven’t been trying hard enough.  I’ve been a textbook Christian, thinking if I follow the one-two-three step rule of salvation that I’ll live a happy life and go to heaven.  My world was dictated by words and rules, cold and calculated.  I’ve put God in a meat box, limiting him to something human, something I hoped I could understand.  I’ve been trying to barter with blood and bone.  But God is not opaque or easily evaluated.  God is transparent and intangible, a vapor of hydrogen and hope.  He is incomprehensible and refuses to make sense no matter how hard I try to justify my lifestyle or my pain.  God will not change for me.  And I won’t change for God.  What has kept me from leaping off the page and practicing the inked out rules and regulations in my own life?

A big part of it is sacrificing the flesh and gluttony that are really the only things now that keep me going, the only things that prevent me from finalizing my death and straight-shooting into hell.  It’s easy to pray but it’s hard to practice self-sacrifice, to let go of the vices that feel good but are ultimately destructive.  But I suppose I wouldn’t need to turn to these devices if I had some divine intervention.  The lord has not been with me so I pray to Godiva.

The first step in becoming a better Christian is to actually believe in what you’re supposed to worship.  I’ve always struggled with believing.  When I first learned about Christianity and Jesus, I just accepted the fact that he existed at one point and then died and came back to life.  People in church told me this and I nodded in acceptance.  It was something I accepted as truth instead of actually internalizing it and believing it, if that makes any sense.  It’s like accepting that Abraham Lincoln existed.  I believe it because people have said so but I also don’t think about it too deeply.  Of course, it’s always easier to believe in something when you have concrete proof, evidence that you can see.

I can’t see God.  I can’t hear God.  I definitely can’t feel God.

When I studied Greek mythology in high school, I thought it was silly that anyone could ever believe in so many gods with so many absurd stories.  But it got me to thinking: is there really a difference between Greek mythology and Christianity?  A lot of people view the Bible just another good story.  And that makes a lot of sense.  How is Greek mythology different from any other story or any other religion?  Who said Christianity’s story was not just another good, intricate tale?  How is Christianity right and everything else is lumped together as fairy tales or ignorance?

I’ve known quite a few Christians and they seem so genuine and earnest in their beliefs and it makes me think there has to be something to it.  It makes me uncomfortable to think of someone embracing something that isn’t there, to put their entire heart and soul into something and allow it to influence their lives, orbiting around nothing more than a story.  That faith, that gentle conviction has to be based on something legitimate, right?  But if you talked to those ancient Greeks, they were probably just as devout and dedicated to their deities as we are ours.  It must go back to giving that power your own power.  Maybe they think they are embracing God when really they are just tapping into a more enlightened version of themselves, bringing it out by the sheer will of their belief in it.

There are days when I get so down, I just want to give up on God entirely.  I want to push him aside (more than I already have) and forget about trying.  I want to give up.  I don’t want to go into the opposite direction and dive directly into sin but I would probably feel less tired if I stopped knocking on heaven’s door and just went home and went to bed.  I’m not outright rejecting Christianity.  It’s just a case of realizing Christianity doesn’t match up with who I am and the confusion it has caused me.  There’s so many aspects to Christianity I don’t understand.  I can’t love my neighbor because I don’t feel capable of love anymore.  I can’t be kind or charitable because I am too bitter.  I’m too tired and too selfish to care about anyone but myself.  

I’ve genuinely tried to seek Jesus.  I haven’t gotten very far.  Many would say I wasn’t trying hard enough, didn’t have enough faith, didn’t pray hard enough.  That’s fine.  I wouldn’t disagree.  Maybe the truth is I just don’t desire it enough to want to change.  I’m a heathen through and through.

But I feel bad because I would like to be a follower of Jesus.  I don’t want to be a lost and aimless atheist or agnostic.  Atheism seems too dismissive.  It just makes more sense to me, in my humble opinion, that there’s something out there who put us here or something that’s going on outside of us.  I’m just not sure if it’s God or some other force.  I mean, with my string of bad luck, I believe there has to be a higher power at work.  There are days when things turn so sour for me that I know it can’t be random chance or free will.  It can’t be a roll of the dice, a spin of the cosmic wheel, because even random chance works in your favor at some point.  No, for me there has to be a withered wizard, behind the scenes, orchestrating my madness.

There are days when I’m indifferent and I’m okay with being indifferent.  I can’t make up my mind one way or the other so I simply don’t make up my mind at all.  But when I do think about it, I feel like there’s something missing.  There’s something I haven’t explored, some reasoning that hasn’t crossed my mind.  Am I still looking at things the wrong way?  I tried reading my Bible, tried praying to God, tried giving God thanks for all the small blessings in my life, even sat back and listened, tried to open myself up to receive God.  I waited with swelling ears, hoping for a booming voice but settling for a tiny whisper.  I only heard the hum of a fan and the frailty of my faith as it fell over.

You’ve got to pray more.  You’ve got to be sincere.  You’ve got to let God find you.  You have to seek God.  You have to have faith.  You have to keep having faith until God decides you’re good enough to get in with him.  Until then, he will be absent.  He will throw death and disease and dandruff your way and if you break, even a little bit, even if for a second, you’re not a true believer.  And now you have to feel guilty because you slipped and you have to start over and endure more of God’s unregulated tests for an unspecified amount of time to hopefully receive a vague feeling of acknowledgment or until you’ve convinced yourself you have.

You can get angry at God because he can handle it.  The bigger concern is whether or not you can handle it.  How many times can you get in the prayer position beside your bed and feel the rocks of regret pummel your brain before you have to stand up and shield your skull?  You have to bear the brunt of life and have faith that comfort is coming, which isn’t comforting at all.  It’s nerve-wracking because you feel nothing and you try to keep the faith and pray and have a real relationship with Jesus but it’s hard because Jesus is a bit of a flake.  He promises he’ll be there for you if you believe but then he’s not.  Even if he is and we just don’t know it, he’s still not. 

How does it make me feel better to tell me Jesus is with me when I can’t feel it or see it or know it?  How does it make me feel better to say that’s why I have to have faith?  Faith is believing in the face of doubt.  But I’ve doubted and still believed and still struggled and still felt separated.  How much faith does it take?  How much do I have to pour into this measuring cup of Christ before he swings down and gives me a pat on the back?  Maybe it’s easy for you to tell me to have faith because you’ve seen results.  Maybe Jesus has been spending all his time with you.  Don’t monopolize the messiah, please.

I’ve always struggled with believing, with trying to be a good Christian.  I’ve put up this cloak of Christianity.  And I’ve tried to follow the rules.  I talked to God like I would a best friend, like the kind your pour your heart out to while on the phone and on the other end they’ve put down the receiver to go watch television while you drone on about your dates and doldrums.  And I always wondered what was wrong with me.  I always wonder why I could never get it.  The more I learned that being a follower of Jesus wasn’t about rules and more about a relationship, the more I thought I would become a stronger Christian but I actually drifted further away.  I always thought I was different but now I wonder if I’m just damned.  Discarded.  Born to lose.

I don’t know if what God is what man has claimed him to be.  I don’t know if God is what I thought he should be.  I don’t know if God never claimed to be anything and we’ve just gotten it all wrong.  But all I know is I’m tired.  If God has been testing me, I have failed.  Many times.  I need a helping hand, a cheat sheet, a little reassurance before I can regroup and reclaim my faith.  Until then, I don’t think I can get behind being a Jesus follower.  At least not in the way it’s been presented to me.  At least not as a religion.  I’m too cynical.  And I don’t believe enough.  I always tried to be an example of a good Christian but I’m not.  I feel like I’ve let a lot of peopledown, including myself, and yes, even God.  As much as I’m angry and confused with God, I know God’s too perfect to be a prick.  It’s only my perceptions that have pegged him heartless.  But perceptions, although problematic, can be powerful.  Because now I feel heartless too. 

I feel I’ve been worn down into a cynical agnostic and there’s really nothing anyone can say to change my mind or pull me from my descent.  I’ve done my own research.  I’ve read books on the subject.  I’ve interviewed friends of different faiths and so I’ve heard almost all of it and none of it has made me feel better about being battered by God’s neglect.  Maybe it really is all in my mind.  Maybe I am asking too much.  Maybe I’m not good enough to be reached.  I’ll concede to these criticisms.  But I’ve tried to correct my errors in judgment before and never found relief or redemption.  I’m mostly convinced there is none to be found.