bluntandsubtle's Journal

I did my research.  I found a suicide method statistically more succesful than firearms.  I should be dead now.  I should be dead at least five times over.  But things keep happening to protect me from myself:  people dying, car accidents, events that happen only once in years repeatedly happening on the exact day needed to stop me, people I barely know showing me more kindness than anyone has in years and years.

I want death.  I lust for it.  Everyone else can have their cries for help and melodramatic calls for love and understanding.  But my love is death herself.  Unfortunately, the sheer number of times that uncanny events have happened to stop me in the middle of my death preparations has made me fear that there really is a God, and that killing myself would be a form of rejecting Him.  Part of my love of death has always been its empowerment.  I want to be in control.  I want the dignity of ending my life at a time and place of my own choosing.  I want to do it in an orderly fashion.  No tears.  No desperation.  Just calm methodical steps towards a goal of peace and finality.  And I was so close.  I had dared God; I had said "Let's see you try to stop me this time."  But He did.  

Faith does not come naturally to me.  I've always been a man inclined to trust his head over his heart.  For years, my head and my heart disagreed over God.  My heart naturally believed but my head scoffed.  Pay no mind to the heart's wishful thinking, it said. We live in a world without the supernatural.  If there is any certainty, it is science.  We need to accept that fact.  But now I'm not so sure.  After what has happened to me, I wonder if it takes MORE faith to think that someone isn't looking out for me.   

I dislike hearing both atheists and believers.  I hate the unquestioning attitude of so many believers: the way they deny evolution (or even worse, postulate a "Young Earth"), I hate the way they accept the Bible as God's perfect word when we don't even have the original copies.  I hate their lack of doubt. 

But brash atheists are no better.  Science has yet to even tell us why we sleep and yet they are so confident that there is nothing that exists that science can't explain.  Science is clueless why the big bang exploded, science is clueless how DNA first came about, science is baffled by how our material brains can produce consciousness.  Now, I'm not saying that one day science won't have answers for all these questions.  But we do not live in that day.  So as of right now--and this I believe for sure--we are ALL people of faith.  Some place their bets on the supernatural.  Others have faith that a future day will come when science can explain everything.  Either way, we all have to place our bets one way or another.

And here is where agnosticism's barrenness is revealed.   For a long time I believed that saying "I have no idea if there is a God or not" was the safe response.  It followed logically from the fact that we will never have definitive proof either way.  However, a few months ago I heard a pastor say some very wise words:  "If someone is really an agnostic, they should be in church every other week."  If I had been an agnostic most of my life, I still lived like an atheist.  And in the end, that's what matters.  All of us can sit in our philosophers' armchairs and speculate indefinitely.  However, it's how we live our lives that count.  Do we live our lives as if we are servants of God or do we live as if there is nothing greater than ourselves?  You can be agnostic in thought but not in action.  

I am a selfish ambitious man.  It is my nature to either live for myself or to live for some ideal I am pursuing.  It is my nature to demand that my mind be the ultimate arbiter of what is real.  If it is true that God has saved me over and over during this past year, then all of that must change.  Christians talk about dying and being reborn with Jesus, about the death of the old self and the birth of the new.  I see now how true that is.

If I had my choice I would choose a Godless world, a world that was simply a random collocation of atoms, a world where a few billion years ago a teeny tiny dot exploded without cause and gave birth to all we see, a world where the entire human race was simply an amazingly adaptive mutation.  Because in such a world, I would be free to follow the desires of my own heart.  I would be free to embrace death.  

Only a few people know most of my story, the story of this series of uncanny events.  And even those people don't know the whole story.  They don't know how when I didn't think there was a God, I planned to let out all the evil in my heart before I died.  They don't know what I planned to do, nor do they know the "random" event that stopped me from acting.

More and more, I consider myself a believer.  However, my biggest fear is that I am lying to myself, that everything was really just coincidence after coincidence after coincidence, and so I shouldn't read anything more into it.  It insults my pride to think I could be lying to myself like that.  (Beware the fragile pride of a proud man who knows he is an utter failure).  I've been more worried that this is all a lie lately because of something a friend of mine said when I told her about most of this.  As much as I struggle with Christianity, I find so much that is beautiful in it.  But my friend said that she's glad that I found something that "works for me."  I could have torn her limb from limb for insulting me like that.  Works for me?  I didn't make up all the things that happened to me.  It could be God or it could just be a series of miraculous coincidences, but nothing about it "works for me."  All people, whether they are believers or skeptics need to confront this basic fact--our beliefs are IRRELEVANT.  If there is a God, then believing He doesn't exist no more makes him fail to exist than believing gravity does not exist makes gravity cease to be.  On the other hand, if there is no God, it doesn't matter how much "faith" we have, our faith is still a lie.  Either God created the heavens and the earth or He didn't.  Either Jesus was raised from the dead or He wasn't.  Either Muhammad was Allah's final prophet or he wasn't.  No ifs ands or buts.  We all need to look reality in the eye and face that fact.  

So when my friend said that she's glad this "works for me," what she is really saying is that she thinks this religion thing is a load of bullshit but she's glad that it keeps me alive.  In other words, she is (although she would never use these words) saying that she's glad I've found a pleasing lie to swallow that helps me get through the day.  I hate that.  If she doesn't think that all these events were God, I'd beg her to be straight with me and say so.  But don't you dare ever tell me that you're glad I'm lying to myself.  Respect me enough to be blunt with me if you're really my friend.