Why I Believe

People ask me why I believe in God.

Well, it's usually more like, "How can you believe in a God that is/does this and that terrible thing, or whose existence contradicts that famous person's theory of everything.

All too often, I try to answer the complaint instead of the question.

It goes something like this (in the abbreviated version):

Me: "That's not the God I believe in."

Them: "You can't redefine God."

Well, I'm usually not rude enough to say, "Why not? People have been redefining God to give themselves excuses not to believe for, well, most of recorded history." So the conversation stalls.

By the way, I am not redefining God. I am simply taking the scriptures literally.

Recently, I thought, well, with all the getting stuck on what God is and what God isn't, maybe I should put up a post about what/who I believe God to be.

That hasn't been working. I keep getting stuck in esoteric stuff -- like what it means to call God our Father.

It occurs to me now, I should answer the first question, instead -- how I came to believe in God.

So I will.

When I was approaching eight, and the question of whether I would get baptized or not was looming, I told my parents that I thought I was smarter than God. I didn't like the program He had set up, I didn't like all the rules, I didn't like going to a church where I couldn't seem to get along with the kids my age, etc.

My dad told me, "You gotta fight from the inside."

My response was something, "Why do I have to fight this fight at all?"

Don't get me wrong, I figured out why pretty soon, but, at the time, it didn't seem reasonable. It was good advice, but for later.

My mom's response?

"Okay, you figure out a better plan. Work it up. Write it down. Then we'll talk about it."

But they did say the decision was mine, whether to get baptized or not.

I kid you not. My mom does not remember telling me this, but she did -- tell a seven-year-old kid to write up a plan to compare with God's plan.

I was not excited about the writing part, but I started thinking about this alternate plan thing. I started actively researching the scriptures instead of just taking what the Sunday School teachers told me at face value.

Don't get me wrong. I did not turn into a scripture scholar or a straight-shirt believer overnight at eight. But I learned how to use the indexes and the concordances, and started learning how to look for meaning.

I discovered two things.

One was that a lot of what the people at church were teaching was not scriptural. These were not evil people, but people are human. And it still happens. When we run out of time, we often fall back on tradition, and tradition is often wrong.

The other was that there were things I didn't like that were in fact scriptural, that, even in my naivety, I could not think of better alternatives to. And I started seeing that could be reasons for those things to be.

Yes, I'm being vague here. The details (the specific things) don't matter. 

Well, one does. This is not a perfect world, not in the way we humans think of perfection. Nor is it ideal. It was not meant to be so. In fact, the very purpose for which this world was made, to be a place where we could learn, would be completely undone if it were perfect or ideal. This was one of the things I learned sometime between the age of eight and nineteen.

This was my first experience with the Holy Spirit.

My second experience with the Holy Spirit was during my early teens. 

I had argued with my parents, apparently about going to something at church, I don't remember what. I ended up walking the two-to-three miles from home to church. The first mile or so was through the back allies, and I was in a rage -- crying and screaming. I'm sure more than one of our neighbors considered calling the police.

Much of my rage was directed at God for letting "this", whatever it was, happen to me.

I recalled one of the teachers at church talking about hearing the Spirit, and I wondered if God was going to reply to my complaints and accusations. And I felt an answer distinctly in my heart. I can't tell you what the answer was, it goes well beyond the power of human language. The general meaning was that my parents were doing what they could for me, and that I would survive, but that's just one prosaic interpretation.

I also heard an answer in my mind. I could tell you what that answer was, but I won't. I've since learned that it was the voice of evil spirits, attempting to hijack my experience with the Holy Spirit. It's a spirit of lying, and there's no need to give the adversary of our souls any further publicity.

Some of my friends and interlocutors will argue that this was all a figment of an overactive adolescent imagination.

Yes, the imagination can, indeed, masquerade as the Spirit. One of the four general sources we can get "spiritual" answers from is, in fact, ourselves. 

No, this was not the case here. It was not an answer I particularly wanted. It was not an answer I could have constructed for myself without help -- it included elements that I did not at the time have the experience necessary to make up for myself, and the conclusion completely exceeds the sort of conclusion I have been able to draw on my own.

(That answer contains, for instance, things that made it a lot easier for me to understand, among other things, calculus and abstract algebra when I encountered those in my academic career years later.)

You may argue that there is, within the human psyche, a function that can produce such epiphanies.

That assumes two things, one that what I experienced was no more than what current researchers describe as epiphany, and, two, that we do not have within us a gift from God that helps us understand truth.

Here, I will be point blank.

One: What current biomedical researchers call epiphany is the biochemical effect, not the cause, of spiritual experience, and what they generally record is from the other three sources I've mentioned above. God usually does not help us with our parlor games.

The other: the human conscience tends to get overlaid with all sorts of things, peer pressure, family expectations, social mores and ethics, tradition. But there is a core to the conscience that is nothing more nor less than a connection to God.

This is where it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. 

I'm not going to argue this point. Every human being has a connection to God within the self.

You can disagree for now if you need to. That's part of the point of being in this world, to experience what it is like to choose things.

Having chosen to recognize the workings of the Spirit, I have since had many experiences that I have recognized and can't deny. I have also had many ambiguous experiences. This does not bother me, because, as I just said, one of the things I learned was that God wants us to be learn how to handle freedom. That requires leaving us room to choose things for ourselves. It requires ambiguities.

This is not the only reason I believe, but it is a primary part of the foundation.