I'm curious to know what kinds of conversations you think I'm having with atheists that bring out this frustration, though.
i'm not an atheist, i'm an agnostic. but i'll try to quickly tell you how i got there.
let's put aside organized religion. i'm really not all that upset or betrayed by the Catholic (i am a baptized and confirmed Catholic) Church's teachings. obviously, i think they're wrong, to put it mildly, but i also know that it's a human institution -- so, whatever, i think. i absolutely reject the rules of organized religion as having any sort of divine approval. certainly the 10 Commandments have lots of great suggestions, and certainly there's much that's beautiful about most of what Jesus taught, many people have made their own lives (and the lives of others) better because of these rules and the inspiration. but not me. maybe when i was a child, but no longer. i don't place any more credibility in those above and beyond my own lived-in experience.
so, rules aside, and getting to the real meat of the issue -- is there a deity, is there something beyond this, is there something within me that will continue after my body dies. that's the real issue, isn't it? that's what's at stake?
well, for me, through a combination of experience and learning more and more both intellectually and emotionally, it really does seem to me that there isn't a God. it's all so explainable -- religion -- and the big question is: why does there have to be a God? the universe could continue just fine without one. it seems entirely irrelevant to existence. we obviously don't need God to live and function. isn't it more logical that existence simply is, that it's not willed into being, that it's not designed and crafted, and that there isn't a love and logic behind it all. i think we can create all that for ourselves, and that's powerful and beautiful, but i really do think, deep down, in creeping moments, and it almost fills me with dread, that there's no there there, there's only what we put there.
let me talk about that dread. that dread, to me, feels awful, but it also feels like it's where religion comes from. that it's brutal, but yet honest, to actually face the dread -- that we are alone, that we are big bags of water on a rock floating through space, that none of this means anything *beyond what we allow it to mean* -- and process it for what it means: there is no God. it seems to me that the dread is so unbearable, that it makes you wake up in the middle of the night feeling as if you are drowning, that the thought of blankness, of nonexistence, of nothingness, is so terrifying, that religion gets us through the night, but that it is, ultimately, comfort. and it feels, i don't know,
brave to stare the dread in the face and call it what it is.
that's where i am.
however, i do want there to be a God. a God could logically exist (though it seems that this position is more complex than that he doesn't, and therefore is less likely to be true). and i do find other people's experiences compelling. it's certainly not for me to tell them that what they experience isn't true, even if i can easily explain it at least in my mind. i also find it compelling the stories of being in a room when someone actually does die. i have not experienced this, but i'm told that it does feel as if something has left the room, and when you see an actual dead person, there's such a remarkable, tangible difference that it does feel as if the body is inhabited by something. but what?
so that's why i come down as an agnostic. because i can't absolutely rule it out.
