A New Understanding

I used to think the world was created by an all powerful, all knowing being, one with a plan and a purpose for what was created.  Life’s goal was to determine where I fit into that grand design.

For many years of the in-between time in my life, I still held to the idea of the initial creation being just that, a creation.  How could all this beauty and incredible co-ordination just have happened by chance?

Today, after many years of not being overly concerned with what was, mostly because my life was so full of all the things that are, that it necessitated full interaction with the present, I’m beginning to revisit what I think now.

It was always a stumbling block for me that when things were left on their own, they didn’t move together in some new thing, they broke down and degraded.  Things didn’t compose, they decomposed.  Leave a bag of watch parts for 50 years and you won’t have a watch, you’ll have a bag of rusted metal. Not order but entropy…the gradual decline, over time, into disorder.

Yet after a day of working in the garden, tonight I realized that this isn’t always so.  Over time, a pile of leaves becomes a pile of soil, full of the microorganisms that help new things grow.  There’s something new and very useful that comes of ‘leaving’ that (pun not really intended but unavoidable) and the same can be said of seeds.  You leave them alone and flowers, trees and food come from those seeds.  Nobody has to actively build babies; they also grow entirely on their own.  So all those years, I could only see one side of it.

As I’ve let go of the indoctrination of my upbringing, I’ve taken care not to simply substitute one set of ‘answers’ for another; to not substitute an atheistic perspective for a religious one. That really only moves you down the same line, just to a different spot on it.  I don’t know how we got here or what we’re supposed to do here, if anything.  I’m OK to live in the question, in not knowing.  In that state, new information is a lot easier to recognize and evaluate.

And it does come, the new information.  Sometimes it dawns slowly, quietly, and other times it overwhelms with understanding.

Breaking free of the confines of the way of thinking I was raised in (as were my parents and their parents, for generations in the past) has been an often painful, lonely and grievous experience.  And it’s also been freeing.  As I’ve left the web that imprisoned me in ‘safety’ and ‘purpose’ I’ve actually found safety and purpose. Over the last years, even with tremendous turmoil and upset, having gone through events I’d never imagined I’d have to go through, I’m the happiest, the most content, the most curious and the most open and secure I’ve been in my life.

It’s true what a prophet stated many years ago… “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free”.

Broken Friendships

In the twists and turns of the journey of life, many people have been my friends along the way.  At the least, friends share common interests; they are supporters, allies, chosen family.

As far as word meanings go, a friend is a lover, literally.  The definition and word history of ‘friend’ is:

Latin: amicus (friend) and amo (I love)

Greek: philos (friend) and phileo (I love)

Old English: freond (friend) and freon (love)

The wounds from a friend then, can be harsh because you have let them into your life as a trusted one, as a ‘lover’ in that sense.  Betrayal isn’t expected.

The closer you feel to a friend, the more wrenching the sense of betrayal.

The most devastating betrayals in my life have been those by ‘christian’ friends.  These friends presented themselves as special, as family; as trustworthy, implying permanence in the relationship. The sense was that of a special, deeper, more real relationship, fully worthy of trust, one in which betrayal was not even considered.

Why then, did these ‘christian’ friends reject the relationship?  Cool the communication?  Break the bond?

None of them has ever said why, though I’ve asked.  Response has been vague, noncommittal, unexplained. 

Which makes it even harder.

So here’s my attempt at answering my own question:

You are fearful that my own search for truth might expose the deception you live in.  It’s a wonderful deception that gives you comfort and hope, but it’s not explainable because it’s not real.  You’re fearful that my questioning might somehow infect your own belief with doubt.  Your beliefs aren’t based in evidence but in wish and hope and what someone wrote in letters long, long ago.  

Maybe you try to convince me of your sense of danger in or discomfort with my questioning, but you can’t communicate.  It seems like we’re speaking two different languages.  So without words to explain your fear, words that are yours and not simply parroted from ‘holy writings’, words that can be understood as simple, logical, factual, you simply turn away and turn off.  

Why are christians so afraid of what’s real?  Why do they need to hide behind belief?

The definition of belief is ‘an acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof’.  Especially without proof.  Something that has evidence for it doesn’t require belief. If you live your life on evidence, that’s quite different from living your life on ‘belief’. There’s a sense of grounding, of connectedness, of reality in evidence that is missing in belief.

To live on evidence is hard.  It’s gritty, it’s messy, and it’s often painful.  It’s no accident that many people in the world hold to one belief system or another. Real life is pretty raw.

Christians in particular seem to travel through life guarding their hope of belief for another life to come, one in which they will be surrounded by people who think as they do, one in which all their ‘enemies’ will have been destroyed, one in which all their dreams will come true.  That’s a big hope to defend.  What happens if they lose it, if their mindset changes to one that’s no longer satisfied with belief, but seeks truth? It’s a big fall from such a place. 

I don’t blame my beloved friends for protecting themselves, for holding onto their dream.  I just wish they didn’t have to hurt me so much while doing it.