The form of Christian fundamentalism I was raised with never really took with me. There was always something about it that I didn’t like. As a young adult, I studied philosophy and religion. I guess I was looking for something to believe in. I did learn quite a lot. But to be truthful, there are some things I didn’t get. I didn’t understand certain things, and I found some ideas to be strange and some even odious. But then again, some things resonated with me. However, I never completely adopted any kind of systematic belief system as my own. Never actually found my home. I liked Plato, but I didn’t become a Platonist. I liked Kierkegaard. I especially liked how he described a person’s inner life and their loneliness in such depth and complexity. However, I never quite made that leap of faith he talked about. Nietzsche helped me to see through the homophobes. Nietzsche knew that moralizing often had nothing to do with ethics. Moralizing is often a sleazy trick to shame someone so you can gain dominance over them. I got that, and I liked knowing that, but Nietzsche’s view of life was way too harsh for me. I liked some aspects of Buddhism and Hinduism without ever becoming a Buddhist or a Hindu. I spent a lot of time studying Tillich. I liked his concept of the courage to be, and accepting acceptance. If we can just believe we’re loved and acceptable as we are, life would be much easier. But for Tillich, God was so abstract, so beyond our comprehension. I never felt any emotional connection. Never anything I would feel comfortable calling faith.
Some might suggest that maybe I’m a rationalist and a skeptic, and that might be true to a degree, but like Fox Mulder from The X-Files, I want to believe. I want to believe in something beyond the ordinary. I want to believe there’s something other than what you can find out by observation and logical inference. I love stories about the supernatural, and I love science fiction. After seeing Close Encounters as a boy, I hoped so much that gentle, accepting, altruistic aliens would come and whisk me away to some otherworldly paradise that I began to believe it would eventually happen. It was my version of the Rapture. It was kind of like my religion for a while.
When I’m watching a spooky movie or reading a scary book, I often become uneasy, especially if it’s late at night. I’ll start looking over my shoulder. Every little unidentifiable sound will make me shiver. Sometimes I don’t even have to be engaged in a scary story for this feeling to come over me. In my younger days, I used to get so scared, I’d leave my apartment in the middle of the night and walk around town by myself. I think most would agree that was an irrational thing to do. I was probably much safer in my apartment behind a locked door than walking the streets of Morgantown at two o’clock in the morning. But at the time, I couldn’t shake the belief that there was something threatening in my apartment. What was I afraid of exactly? I don’t know. I don’t want to call it a ghost or a demon or a psycho killer because the fear wasn’t that specific. I just felt there was something in my apartment with me, and I wanted to get away from it.
On the other hand, hope is something that has never abandoned me completely even when I was experiencing severe depression. It’s probably what kept me alive. But is hope really rational? Almost every day, we hear about fanatics and psychotics killing people, sometimes by the dozens. And we’re all headed toward a catastrophe of one kind or another. We’ve all lost people we’ve loved. Many of us have faced our own mortality. Many of us have been in car accidents or had to undergo emergency surgery. It’s only a matter of time before we fall off the wall, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put us back together again. So why not just give up now? I’ve thought about it many times, but there’s a part of me that just doesn’t want to. So far, that part has always won. I hold onto my hope. Can I explain it or justify it? No, I can’t. But it’s there. Is it a kind of nascent faith? Maybe, but I don’t want to put that label on it. I don’t want to define it and burden it with a lot of “shoulds” and “thou shalts.” And it’s not like I didn’t try to find some systematic structure for what I think and believe, but nothing ever seemed to fit. As I get older, I’m trying to become more comfortable with my hazy feelings and gut instincts.
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