Faith vs. Ambiguity

I sure have been posting a lot on this blog lately, especially considering the fact that no one is reading it, haha.  I am just blabbing on and on to no one at all, except myself.  Which is kind of nice in a sense, though I'm still trying to be careful of what I say on here, because lord only knows who could stumble across it at any point in time.  It doesn't show up in a google search of my name (I didn't use my full name on this account), but a search of my internet "alias" brings it right up.  So you don't have to do much detective work to find it.

Anyway, I digress.  I do actually have a subject for this post, so let me get to it.  Here it goes:  I just got back from the yearly summer vacay that I take with my family (including my aunt/uncle/cousins from Florida).  The Florida fam flies out to Cali and we drive down to some various lovely places ... some years spending a weekend in Oakhurst first (which is what we did this year).  Oakhurst is the town that my other aunt, Amy's family lives.  If you read any of my first few blog posts you'll know who that is.  My aunt who comes out from Florida is Sue.

To take a couple steps back and give a little background - this side of my family (my mom's side) is quite religious.  Not in a "weird" sense, but I only say "quite religious" in the sense that they are very dedicated.  They were raised Methodist, as was I, and they have all remained with the Christian faith throughout their lives, and remain with it to this day.  They are still very active in their respective churches, and one of them owns a Christian preschool (as my Grandma did as well before she retired in the mid '90's).  My younger cousins (the ones who are age 20 and younger) are all very active in their youth groups as well.

However there are about three of us older cousins (ages 28 and up) who have fallen out of Christianity and religion altogether once we became adults.  For me, it happened around age 18.  I was baptized in the Methodist church as a baby and went through the whole confirmation thing at age 13.  I went to Christian school from preschool through 6th grade.  I then went to public school for jr. high and high school, but still remained Christian through those years as well, and still went to church fairly regularly (though I was never hardcore enough to do youth group or anything like that).

When I turned 18 and started college ... I started to get more outside perspectives on religion and life in general from both friends/peers and my college studies.  My family to this day apparently still blames my "fall" from Christianity on the guy I dated from my senior year of high school through college, but this really is not correct.  He was not raised religious and I admit that he was indeed the first person I was close to who offered the non-religious perspective to me, BUT if it hadn't've been him it most certainly would have been someone else.  ANYONE else.  I was 18 and I was just starting to expand my views on life, so it really didn't take much at all to plant a seed in my head to take a step back and look at life from other perspectives.  I mean hell, if I'm really thinking back on this, my family should probably be pointing the finger at Howard Stern, because this was the same year I discovered him, and I listened to his show every day during my commutes to and from school.  He probably planted a LOT more seeds in my head at that time than the ex-bf did.  But more importantly, at the same time, I was also taking physical anthropology in college, which was the key thing that gave me the concrete and detailed information to further explore (not that I didn't learn that stuff in jr. high and high school, but at the college level they tend to give you this information in a much more objective and detailed fashion, without trying to baby you and shield you by being overly sensitive to whatever your religious beliefs are).  So it basically started from there, and over the next year or so my views on the matter started to change.

So ... fast forward to present day - Myself and my other two cousins could somewhat be considered as "black sheep" in the family due to our lack of faith and religion (NOT in the sense that our family shuns us or treats us badly thank goodness, just in the sense that they are probably disappointed and wish they could convince us otherwise).  And for some reason ... it seems as if I catch way more grief about this than the other two do.  ;-)  I'm not entirely sure why, but it may be that I'm simply the one who is most willing to discuss it.  I don't mind discussing and debating it and I kind of enjoy it in a sense ... I can't entirely explain why but maybe it's just because it keeps my mental gears moving.  And each year when we take our summer vacation with Sue and her fam (along with any other mid-year vacays we might take in between), we wind up in the discussion/debate again.  My 17 year old cousin (Sue's daughter) Taylor gets quite exasperated with me because she simply cannot comprehend why I am not religious.  And ultimately, I also wind up feeling a bit frustrated that I can't properly communicate why I am not religious.  I wish there was a better way to convey these types of thoughts between people of different beliefs, but if there was ... then a lot of the world's problems would be much more easily resolved ... everyone would get along and hold hands, and we'd suddenly have world peace.  ;-)

The biggest problem with these types of debates, of course, is that religious people and non-religious people use entirely different forms of logic when coming to their conclusions about life.  I see the logic that religious people use as basically a LACK of logic (or at least a partial lack of it).  Religious people look at me, in turn, as having a complete lack of the all important thing called FAITH.  But arguing faith against logic simply doesn't work ... it's like comparing apples and oranges.  It's like pitting two debaters against each other who speak completely different languages.  If one debater only speaks Chinese and the other one only speaks Spanish, their debate ain't gonna get too far.  You might as well just repeatedly slam your head against a brick wall and then be done with it.

Another problem I run into in these discussions with my family is that I actually find myself holding back a little bit.  I hate that I do that because I don't think it's fair to them ... as they are asking me to give my full opinions ... and I am not entirely giving them what they're asking of me.  Why do I do this?  I think it's two things: a) Religion is a comforting thing to have ... it makes people feel warm and fuzzy ... and frankly I don't want to try to take this away from anyone.  It must be a great thing to be certain that there is a higher purpose to all this, and that all our friends and family who have died over the years are having a big party together in heaven, rather than just each being individually dead and completely gone.  I'd feel like kind of a dick attempting to take this away from anyone.  It's a very miniscule chance that I could ever actually sway someone over to my point of view, but you never know.  And b) Taylor is almost the exact same age I was when I started exploring other perspectives, so I think I'm a little afraid to even plant any seeds.  But Taylor is also in a very different place than I was at her age, so the seed would probably ricochet off a force field anyway.  She's way more active in her church and youth group than I ever even came close to being, and she is likely going to attend a Christian college.  Her studies there will likely be different than what I got at the college and university that I attended.  So yeah, maybe I should just simply be honest with my family when we have these discussions instead of holding back due to fear of their reactions.

In any case, after last summer's vacation and discussions with Sue, Elias sent me a video he found on YouTube called "My Spirituality as an Atheist", because he thought that it gave the message of the non-faith person's point of view pretty well.  Now, I should say that I have never identified myself as "atheist", because it is much more of a firm stance that God DEFINITELY does NOT exist (as far as I understand it).  Where as my point of view is simply that I don't KNOW if God exists, so I can't declare one way or the other (or something else that no one has thought of).  I don't KNOW if any of the world's religions are correct.  My strong suspicion is that none of them are, but I don't KNOW that.  So I've always identified myself as Agnostic instead.  But the point of view of the atheist is still definitely one I relate to much more than the "theist" view at this point, so I find myself agreeing with the overall sentiments in the video.  I didn't send this video to Sue last year mainly because I guess I didn't see much point in it, and didn't want to offend her.  But this year when we got back from the vacay, I found myself digging through my old emails to find the link to it again.  I found it, and then I went a step further this time and explored video maker's whole YouTube channel, and got pretty engrossed.  He is an interesting guy ... and he has some funny videos too.  Here is the original video that Elias sent me:

He doesn't state everything in the exact way I would state it, and his wording when describing religion is strong enough to probably offend any Christian watching it (something I would try to avoid).  ;-)  But what I like about it is that within the first minute and a half, he does captures one of the exact major conclusions I came to when I did my re-examinations of religion at age 18.  And that is that NO ONE knows what the hell this damn universe is about, where it came from, or what the meaning of life is.  NO ONE.  Man is the only creature on Earth with the capability to even question it, so that is what we have always done.  The various religions that exist around the world are humans' attempts at an explanation.  That's IT.  They are stories and explanations made up by humans.  Humans are FLAWED... as we have proven over and over again throughout the history of this world (and as is also well documented in the Bible itself).  Human life on Earth presumably began with people simply existing, and not knowing why.  Humans used the limited tools they had at the time to attempt to explain our existence, and religion was born as a result.  We now have a good amount more scientific knowledge than we had a few thousand years ago ... BUT it's still just a drop in the bucket compared to everything we DON'T know of the universe.

What the hell about all the other galaxies that exist out there?  Where does the universe end and where does it begin?  Coincidentally, the other day Elias was watching some random show on the Science Channel or one of those channels, about this topic.  Consider these facts and tell me if it doesn't blow your mind at least a little bit: So, as we know, the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun.  Our sun/solar system also revolves around the center of our galaxy (The Milky Way of course).  It takes 250 MILLION years for our solar system to make just ONE circuit of our galaxy.  You know what that means?  It means that in the entire history of the human race, we've traveled less than one 10th of 1% of that orbit.  !!!!  And when I say "the entire history of the human race," I mean the entire 200k or so years that we have evidence of our existence (rather than the 5k or 6k or whatever it is that the bible talks about).  O.k. here is another fact: Our sun is just one of 200 billion stars in our galaxy.  200 BILLION!!  And, our galaxy is just one of 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe.  !!  i.e. That's just as far as we can see.  That is INSANE to me.  What other life exists out there in other galaxies, if any?  What other life exists on the as-yet undiscovered planets in our OWN galaxy, if any?  Do other universes exist or is this the only one?  We have no idea.  For the most part religion doesn't even TOUCH on any of this because humans had no idea that all this other stuff existed at the time they created and documented it.  Space is referred to as "the heavens" because it's the perspective of a human looking up at the sky from our little planet and seeing the sun, the moon and the stars (and maybe they had identified the planets visible to the naked eye by that point, not sure the exact timing, but they certainly wouldn't have understood much about exactly what they were).  I'd be shocked if humans are able to figure out even a miniscule fraction of the mysteries of the universe prior to completely nuking ourselves into destruction.

So the point of all this is that all our religions consider Earth and humans to be the most important thing in the entire universe.  To me this seems incredibly narrow-minded, given how indescribably IMMENSE the universe is and given the fact that there is still so much we DON'T know about what else is out there.

Elias brought up another important point on the larger topic when we were talking about it the other day as well.  If someone is, let's say, Catholic, how would they answer the question "Why are you Catholic instead of something else, like Baptist?"  Would they be able to give a good reason for that?  Chances are, they would say, "Because I was raised that way."  Well, then what if you were born in Utah?  Would you be Mormon?  What if you were born in Iran?  Would you be Muslim?  What if you were born in India?  Hindu?  Probably.  Why is your religion better than all the others?  Let's say you're one of those less common people who have actually studied several of the major religions and then picked one for themselves based on what they learned.  Well in that case I would still ask, how do you know that's the right one?  Are you really the authority on this matter?  How can you even say?  Again it goes back to my feeling that to pick one religion and immerse myself only in that feels very narrow-minded.

This is another video by the same dude I mentioned earlier (AHughman08), which I think, even better than the earlier video, captures the mind-expanding realizations that I had when I was 18:

Again it's not perfect in every way but it still captures the essence of my experience and life views quite well. With the main point being: Nobody knows.  No one.  If someone tells you they know, they are either mistaken or lying.  Accepting this fact was actually a more freeing experience than anything.  It is honestly a kind of a relief to no longer have to constantly attempt to fit every life experience in with my religious beliefs, and to try to force the ones that don't fit, to fit.  To squeeze the square pegs into the round holes.  It's like a weight or a cage being lifted away.  Once you do that, you can simply ... live.  And keep wondering and learning without any sorts of limits or perimeters.

I've got other thoughts on this topic but this damn thing has gotten so long that it's starting to turn from a blog entry to a dissertation.  I'll put my other thoughts into a later entry.  ;-)

p.s. Thanks to AHughman08 and his YouTube channel for the videos, which are entertaining and helped me to organize my thoughts.