Here’s some more incoherent emotions of mine:
- Sometimes I interpret my faith of the last years as being based on an infinite longing. I interpret my faith of the last years in the following way: I didn’t have much reason to believe that God exists – but neither did I have much reason to believe anything else. And since I knew I had this incredible longing for “the light”, for wholeness, for “salvation” and happiness, I took an adventurous, crazy step and threw myself into Christianity. Not because I was so certain of its truth but because I found it so infinitely meaningful and attractive that even if there was only some little chance of it being true, it was worth it to make the bet (a very Pascalian line of reasoning).
Now….. when some of the Christians I know enjoy their easy certainties, I do not feel understood. They just lean back because they have their belief that Christianity IS true to relax upon. They can lean back because they’ve sorted it out and can base their faith on a comforting and certain knowledge of the truth about God. If they are of that kind, they do not understand just what kind of big struggle it is for me to believe. They do not understand just how adventurous, heroic or crazy it is of me, to venture faith. They have never felt the despair upon which my faith rests.
- Actually, many of the feelings I’ve listed so far apply symmetrically to being a non-christian. I consider many secular people so ridiculous in how convinced they are of their position. I look down upon so many secular folks – they take it for granted that they’re right and they don’t see all the problems there are with their worldview. I am even angry at them because of their despising attitudes towards my faith. If I more explicitly left the faith than I do now, they could think “Finally, this poor indoctrinated soul has come to his senses, too, and has accepted the obvious. He managed to deceive himself for so long in order to have a clear identity and live in a fundamentalist fantasy world. Must have been difficult for him to leave that.” They don’t realize that even now, I actually still think there are so many things that are intellectually much more better captured by a religious worldview than by a non-religious worldview.
- I might be terribly embarrassed: For so long, I’ve defended Christianity infront of others. And now, I myself must acknowledge that there are so many difficult sides to it. Indeed, I think embarassment in many ways is an important topic about my current “faith crisis”.
- I might be angry: For so long people have handed this faith over to me and have passed it off as something trustworthy. Shouldn’t they have been more careful in what they’re giving me? Didn’t they know within that it might just be a beautiful myth? (It’s actually interesting to see how many people in their deconversion stories talk about the disappointment they experienced as children when they realize that their parents have known that Santa is unreal all along)
- I am so angry at this universe. Why must it be shrouded as a riddle? Why is this urge in us to go beyond eating and sleeping to find some deeper meaning — but at the same time there is no answer to our questions in which we can find peace?
- I am embarassed (again, this seems to be a forceful emotion) of not being more courageous. Often, I just feel like I stick with faith because I’m too timid to break off. I am not courageous enough to disapoint people and live a life without comfort. This lack of courageousness is embarassing.
It is a beautiful myth. But don’t mistake myth for something that is untrue. Religion is simply misunderstood, bastardized mythology. Mythology is where the truths are, because that’s where the great metaphors are. We require metaphors to understand greater truths beyond our inherent human limitations in perception and speech. Christianity is merely the schizophrenic child of a very long lineage of mythologies. It is merely one way of attempting to understand the same mythology, the same grouping of metaphors, the same truths, that we’ve been grappling with for ages and ages.
I appreciate you being honest with your own struggles with Christianity. I recommend that you break away from its limitations if you really want to get to the truth. Study the mythologies of all cultures past and present, including the current Western mythologies of science – especially physics – and psychology. You’ll see they’re all fundamentally related, and all in proximity to the knowledge and experience of God.
The idea that that some of the most important things might not be accessible to human thought and speech but be accessible to MYTH/METAPHOR, is indeed convincing.
However, it is also a very difficult idea. If truth gets so much more twisted than we’ve thought it was in our little narrow human thinking, how do we then sort out which myths are true and which are misleading?
(BTW, you’ve cast your theorizing about myths in simple human language – if myths are beyond simple human language shouldn’t our talk about it be so, too?)