The Great Leap of Faith

I just don’t understand.  I never have.  It’s one of those things I just can not wrap my mind around.  It’s the Great Leap of Faith that true religiousness requires.  I don’t know how people do it.

I’ve always struggled with the details, large and small.  I’ve been back and forth on the existence of God, how the universe was created, the afterlife, and all other such things entailed.  And I just don’t understand.  How can people believe in something they can’t see, without question?  Something that never responds to them, never even acknowledges them…  How do people do it?  All the prayers, and for what?  So God can follow "the plan," regardless of what people ask for?  To give an analogy of sorts:  Substitute your parents for God.  You ask your parents for things, large and small, and are constantly ignored.  None of the things you ask for are given to you.  Your parents ignore you all the time.  They pay you no mind, seemingly not knowing you’re ever even there.  Would you still keep asking your parents for anything, even love?  Would you still think they loved you?  I know I wouldn’t.  That’s why I don’t get it.

I guess it’s just all beyond my understanding.  Or maybe I’m just too inquisitive.  I think too much, perhaps.  Certainly there are things that point to some higher being meddling with universal events.  The Big Bang and beginnings of life and evolution would just require too many lucky breaks and coincedences to have turned out as they did.  So there was someone who at least gave us all a helping hand to start with.  But the whole Creation thing?  How can anyone believe that as ironclad truth?  Fossils?  Obvious biological links?  Even just your family tree (people have been getting taller and living longer)?  I just don’t get it.

And the afterlife?  I really don’t get this one.  Or, maybe I do.  I can’t believe in heaven and hell as they are traditionally thought of.  It’s just too ridiculous.  The real use for them, as I see it, is so painfully obvious.  It’s all about control.  "Do this, and you’ll suffer forever!"  "Do this and you’ll be happy forever!"  How can someone actually think an invisible part of them will float out of their bodies and enter either eternal damnation or neverending bliss?  I know it helps people to think their dead loved ones are "in a better place."  But is it at all possible that heaven isn’t a better place?  How do we know?  No one’s ever come back with pictures to tell us about it.  And what if someone’s idea of heaven is burning for eternity?  Do they just get sent to hell?  Or is there a place for that in heaven as well?  There are just too many questions for me to jump blindly into it.

Then again, truth be told, I can’t jump blindly into anything.  I am not able to jump off the ledge without a safety net.  And perhaps I just hide behind all my questions as a reason for not jumping.  But there have been times in my life when I probably needed to make that Leap of Blind Faith…and I just couldn’t do it.  No matter my pain, no matter my troubles, no matter my despair…the logical side of me just…couldn’t…do it. 

I like to think I know the real reason people believe any of this stuff.  If something has been (very) widely accepted, believed, passed on, and regurgitated long enough…it becomes truth.  No questions, no speculation.  It just IS.  I know how that goes…I was a history major in school.  History is the same in that regard.  Caesar was murdered by senators?  Sure.  Ok.  It’s been written and repeated for over 2000 years.  So it must be true, right?  I think this is really how the Christian religions became as they are now.  It’s been believed for so long, it just has to be true.  The Chroniclers of Their Age have so much power.  They influence how their version of the world is seen forever.  The Apostles (uknowingly, of course) used the same tactic.  What they "saw" (did they, or did they make it up?  We can’t ever know for sure…until time travel is invented) became what they told, and what they told became what was written down, and what was written down is what became believed.  People can’t even pass a simple message around a room of thirty people without screwing it up, so how did The Message make it all this way without being tainted from it’s original form and intent?

All these questions are why I just don’t…and can’t…understand religion.

Sayonara.