THE RAMBLINGS OF AN IRRITATED MIND
A few days ago someone asked me if I believed in God. While that same question would have flown by probably unnoticed a few years ago, this time around it irritated the heck out of me. I seem to have developed a strange allergy towards anything Christian. And to think I was brought up Catholic!
So why the change? In 2004 I researched certain issues regarding the history and dogma of Christianity for my Master Thesis. The process led me in a totally unexpected direction and yielded results that were both painful and invasive. It took me places I didn’t really want to go and it forced me to examine not only my own beliefs but the ones I was brought up in. And surrounded with an enormous wealth of evidence against the Church that I might have thought insincere (but until then hadn’t seen stated bluntly in black and white), I had to admit certain truths and irrefutable facts. And thus the whole experience began…
It took me months of agonizing battling with myself, going back and forth between logic and deeply indoctrinated habits, to finally be able to think, much less say aloud, that the Bible I was taught to swear by was a book of myths, legends and letters of one chauvinistic man and which was created at least a century or two after Jesus’s death. And once my eyes were open it was difficult to keep them shut.
So do I believe in God? I don’t think so, at least not in the Christian sense of the concept. And I don’t believe Jesus was the Son of God either. He was a great man (no doubt about it) and a charismatic leader and it’s a shame that so many documents describing him as such were destroyed by petty, narrow-minded men with grand political agendas. Such is the course of history, I suppose, but still I regret not being able to learn about this extraordinary man who, willingly or not, has changed the world for millennia to come.
In my humble opinion the idea of God (the power above and beyond) was created by man at the dawn of civilization because the thought that we are alone in this vast universe must have been unbearable. It is this human need for assurance, acceptance, belonging and being a part of some community that drives the existence of religion. It’s as simple as that.
Am I better for being stripped off my illusions? I cannot say. This question is complicated and runs deeper than a simple yes or no. I don’t like being lied to and withheld information from. I don’t like other people making decisions for me without giving me an option of deciding for myself and I don’t like people taking the choice away from me. So I guess in this instance at least, I’d say yes.
But the issue at hand remains the same—I’m still extremely allergic to all things Christian.