Since I was very young I wanted to have faith, or a religion to belong to. I was a precocious child with a sharp sense of mortality. Every night before bed I would think about death, how one would cease to exist afterwards, and how in the vast universe, my self, my consciousness would be lost, a "being unrecoverable". This emptiness scared me, and therefore I envied those around me that had faith, that believed in afterlife or reincarnation.
My parents, like most typical Taiwanese, did not have a particular religion, but since we were in Wisconsin they would send me to Sunday school just for the social activities. I enjoyed making puppets of lambs, getting pretty little bookmarks with psalms, and hearing about the stories of Christianity. And I even started praying secretly every night, my own personal conversation with God, and I would always end my prayer with "Please bless Mommy, Daddy, and my sister Jesse, and help me be a better person. Amen."
The problem with this was that even though my conversations with God were powerful for me as a child (imagine talking to the universe!), the basic assumptions and requirements of Christianity did not agree with me. I did not like the exclusiveness of Heaven to be those who believed in God through Jesus. Actually, Jesus, this towering figure who always looked so sad on his cross scared me as a child. The fact that he was crucified was only terrifying and not at all touching to me, because my eight year old mind did not see how logically it was possible that through sacrificing himself God would forgive the rest of us for our sins. And ultimately, try as I might, my critical scientific mind could not believe in Heaven or an afterlife. I wanted to so very badly. It's just that the same part of me which knew with conviction there was no tooth fairy and no Santa Claus, knew with the same intuition that people must have made up this Heaven stuff just to make ourselves feel better.
So as I grew up, I prayed less and less. I slowly adopted a more pagan method of faith, I would sometimes have conversations with the trees and the skies when I felt lonely and in need of strength. And then as I grew up more, those conversations also ceased.
In high school and college I sometimes felt a longing for those days when I did believe in God or magical trees. But I knew that I did not have the capacity beyond my logical mind to accept the doctrine of most religions, and so I gave up on looking.
My trip to Italy sparked an interest in reading the Bible. So much of western culture and art and history is intertwined with this book and its stories that I felt I should read it properly at least once. But knowing how lazy I am, I started going to a bible study in a Christian fellowship. The bible was interesting, and as a grown up, I could try to understand the discussion more from different points of view, I no longer felt compelled to parse everything down with logic.
This is where I discovered that I do have faith, just not a faith that is compatible with theirs. Or any other mainstream religion.
The God I believe in is like abstract art, there are different interpretations and different manifestations, depending on the observer. For me God lies in the power of the natural universe (why are there physical laws? and why these ones?), this pull to search for something divine that tugs at most of the human race, and the existence of a universal moral code. I believe that beyond science and atoms and quarks, there is something greater that ties us all together. Different methods of worship are just different pathways towards divinity, and all contain wisdom about this search accumulated by the generations of humanity before us. Religion is a beautiful product of humanity. Many religions believe in a single God, some, like Buddhism believe divinity is within each and every one of us and can be reached by our own work, and then some believe in multiple Gods. Yet I do not believe that any single vehicle can be 100% correct, but that every one must find their own way for themselves. And I believe that those who find it necessary to oppress other views actually are in spirit further away from that concept of the divine. When I believe in my God and not yours, it should not make yours any less valid. I should not have to destroy you or object to your ideas to prove that I am right.s
I am a person of faith, just not of any religion. And I believe in God, just not yours.
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