O Come, All Ye Faithful

Faith and God are difficult to discuss. We may say the same words as others of a shared faith, but their meanings to each of us are very personal. I have swung from believer, to atheist, to agnostic, and back to believer. My spiritual journey started by attending a Lutheran church, around the age of ten. If I’m honest, faith as a child is largely based on reward systems rather than any kind of real belief. I always loved when we’d be sitting in the pews and my mother would look over and see me singing along with the congregation, she’d smile, and boy would I give my best Baptist choir impression. The joy she would express just tickled that spot in my brain, similar to when you give the homeless person on the corner some money. I’d recite the lessons I’d learned, pray (probably not asking for the things I should have, but c’mon what’s wrong for wanting a Sega Genesis?!), go to bible study, and attend our church youth group. It wasn’t until my teens that I began to see the glaring hypocrisy that every atheist chastises believers for. And much like the atheists I was unsatisfied with the pastor and youth minister’s answers. Mom’s smile still tickled that part of my brain though, so in the pew I sat. When I was sixteen, I couldn’t take it anymore. Seriously, some guy is just sitting in the clouds and as long as you claim to believe in him, he’ll allow you entry to the greatest place in the universe, regardless of what you’ve done? This is silly, where’s the justice? Furthermore, what happened to all the miracles? What, God took a two thousand year long vacation after 0 AD? These sounded a lot like stories to me, and I felt silly for pretending to believe in them. Leaving the church also allowed me to begin to build my own moral structures and reasonings, which fit my mid to late teen self just fine. No sex before marriage, that seemed as ludicrous to me as a man walking on water. Self discipline, limiting oneself from the things they enjoy…I think not. Faith, it seemed to me, was a frivolous devotion when the great and powerful human with its logic and science was only a few years from having it all solved anyway. Today that seems as utterly ignorant arrogance. I’m not here to convince anyone of my belief nor am I here to dissuade anyone of theirs. I’m writing this in order to offer another perspective on something that my life has allowed me to glean. 

At the peak of my faith in logic and science, as when I was a teenager, I began to find fallacies in what atheists espoused. There seemed to be hypocrisy in their preachings. When I was a senior in high school, I read Stephen Hawkings “A Brief History of Time”, I know…NERD! Let’s be real, I understood a fraction of what that book had to offer. It made one thing clear though, time began at the Big Bang. Obviously, there are a series of easy religious rebuttals to this. What started the Big Bang? What did it bang into? Why did it bang? To answer these questions physicists do a good job of postulating a guess and mathing their way to an answer. Again, this is unsatisfying. Now I have to believe in your postulation in order to agree with your math? Damn it, the mighty human doesn’t need belief, we have logic…but the science is beginning to get a little iffy. Ok ok ok, it’s fine. Prior to the Big Bang all of the matter of the universe was condensed into this little marble apparently suspended somewhere between reality and myth and that’s what kicked off the Big Bang. Solved! Please reference the previous religious scholar’s questions. This then just gets shoved under a rug somewhere and we say, “it’s just something science hasn’t figured out yet”. The bigger issue I have is that if time began then, and we’re not confident in the “then”, when did time start? I’m not about to attempt to answer that question with my monkey brain. It just seems to me that time likely runs infinitely in both directions, or at the very least into the future. The Big Bang isn’t a satisfactory answer because too many credible suppositions have been made, from the Big Crunch theory (largely debunked now), the Multiple Universes theories, and so on. There’s another major fallacy as I see it, if the universe is expanding then what is it expanding into? Insert random Physicist postulating and mathing. This question, though, does lend itself to another theory that I find interesting. What if the space that our Big Bang is expanding into, is the actual universe, and within that universe there are an infinite or finite number of Big Bangs occurring? If that is the case, then our history has many unwritten pages. Thus, Physics suddenly becomes as much as a religion to me as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and the rest. Once again, I’m left with having to place faith that at some point in our galactic history, time began…for some reason.

Is there a God? What is God? What’s God’s intention? Throughout our history we’ve given many names to God. Jesus, Vishnu, Allah, Yahweh, Zeus, Odin, and so on. I see these names as representative of the same thing. We can likewise look through the antithesis of faith, be it nature or some advanced species in the corner of the universe conducting the longest and largest physical and sociological experiment that we can conceive of. Our need for a process or power to justify our existence is awfully persistent. I honestly don’t care in which you place your faith, as long as you accept that it is out of the realm of your possibility to fully understand it. This is the fundamental issue, faith. Faith, as I define it, is the acceptance that there is a power or process that propels the universe forward in time that is beyond our control or perception. We’ve come a long way through faith, we’ve developed advanced social hierarchies, built structures that are barely conceivable, The Enlightenment, the founding of America, and the Bill of Rights (albeit poorly executed initially). Then two mistakes were made. The first was the religious conservatives misunderstanding of the Bill of Rights, attempting to press upon others a singular faith’s edicts. The second being the hubris of intellectuals, and eventually the common person, that all religions are moronic. I understand the reasons for both mistakes but, as I’ll write about later, the reason the mistakes were made was because we got lazy. We simply accepted our successes as if they were resolute, and no longer needed investigation and updates as culture and society advanced. If you haven’t noticed, which I know you have, we are suffering to a degree of pure degradation today. We’ve confused ourselves about our purpose, because without the aspiration towards something unattainable there is a persistent moving of the goal post in any myriad of directions. Can you understand, based on our social divides today, why I think that? It is apparent to me, that the more empowered we become the less control we have over ourselves.

I don’t want you to believe in Jesus any more than I want you to believe in Odin. But I do want you to believe. I’ve nearly died a few times in my life. I’ve attempted suicide (I’ll tell that story later), I’ve escaped a few mishaps by narrow margins, and last year I accidentally tempted my fate with a high voltage power line. I say this because we often forget about our mortality, and this blissful ignorance vales us from the things that truly make us happy and content. We stress over the here and now and never think beyond our time on this spinning orb. I understand the inclination to ignore all of this, and honestly if the younger me was reading this I’d mock me and move on with my life. If that’s you, I have a different offering. What is the American Project? Is it to ensure all Americans end at the finish line with the same outcome? Is it acquiring wealth and booty (I mean the pirate kind not the…you get it)? Is it nothing at all? To me, it’s none of these things. The American Project is the understanding that we’ve spent, at least, five thousand years failing and retrying to achieve individual fulfillment within a cohesive group. Identifying shared values and ideals that inspire each generation to actualize that fulfillment for the greatest number of us. Achieving new discoveries and advancements that only generate more questions for us to attempt to answer. I don’t think the American Project can ever be achieved, but the pursuit of it betters us all. If we can maintain and progress to become the beacon of human achievement in the world, that seems like something we can put our faith in, does it not? I’m asking you, the faithless among us, to put your faith in the ideals and principles that founded this country. Not its history, but rather its future. This Utopian society that we will forever fight to achieve but never actualize. I simply ask you to be an American, not merely because you were born within some imaginary boundaries, but because you want to be. Believe and strive for this utopian world that our descendants may one day inherit through our efforts. Our own heaven.