Sunday, October 24, 2010

Jesus was a Good Man-or-How I went from Catholicism to Atheism and settled on Christianity

Jesus was a good man.  Five words were all that it took to convert me back from a five-year Atheist to Christianity.  I had chosen in my early 20's to ignore the idea of God and shun those who practiced religion in any way.  I decided that I could no longer put my life and well-being into the hands of a tyrant, and went on a journey that took me to many places-some wonderful, others terrifying.
I was baptized into the Catholic religion when I was born.  We attended church every Sunday and I also attended at school every Wednesday.  I remember very early in life being in awe and fear of the enormous, gothic church and memorizing the Stations of the Cross, which were depicted in the huge, stained-glass windows surrounding the entire church.  Although, from an artistic standpoint, the church that I went to as a child was beautiful; it also created in me a great sense of fear.
I stopped attending church almost as soon as I was no longer required to go.  I did not like the structure of church and certainly wanted no one to tell me what to do or how to live.  Especially not some invisible man in the sky.  I would rather have destroyed myself at my own hands than put my trust into the hands of someone I had never even met before!  I still believed that there was a God, but did not care about him/her/it and was certain that he/she/it felt the same.
After my cousin passed away I went further away from religion, spending a little time as an agnostic but quickly progressing to an atheist.  It was perfect.  The religion that I now decided to follow was the religion of the scientific method.  All I had to do was punch numbers into a given equation and I could find EVERY SINGLE ANSWER!  I even spent a grand amount of time hoping to help work on the grand unifying theory in quantum physics.  I knew, given enough time, I could know everything that there was to know.
In college, I had a great professor who also happened to be a Catholic priest.  Father Voekig taught metaphysics, which I enrolled in without looking at the course catalog, assuming that it was some sort of theoretical physics class.  I was slightly mistaken.  It was a very confusing class that was only made interesting by this happy-go-lucky priest who often criticized the very religion of which he was a trained spiritual leader!  This was a great coup on my part.  I now had more proof that being an atheist was the right choice:  here was a man giving sermons in his free time but talking bad about the ultimate CEO!  You're not going to get fired if you're wrong.  No, you'll simply go to hell.  It was all very amusing.
I began following Father Voekig from class to class, as he was an awesome instructor.  I went from Metaphysics to Philosophy of Life and on to Ethics of Peace and Non-Violence.  Somewhere along the way, I discovered a philosopher named Soren Kierkegaard, a man named Thomas Merton and, though I didn't know it at the time, paved the very road I would need to get back to God.
I slowly weaned myself off of the sciences and became extremely excited about philosophy.  Science could answer a lot of questions, but it certainly couldn't answer the most important questions.  Who am I?  What is my purpose here?  How can I determine whether something is right or wrong, especially if found in the gray areas of law and justice?  I still considered myself an Atheist and approached any religious question from an anthropological point of view: It was my job to learn as much as I could about various religions in order to be a living receptacle of knowledge and trivia.
I picked my stepson up from school one day and he politely said, "Do you know what Dad?  Jesus was a good man."  Wow.  It took many, many years of Catholic indoctrination and several years of Atheism to harden my 27 year old heart, and in a five word sentence I immediately understood what it meant to be a true, loving Christian.  I didn't have to fall on my knees and pray at every opportunity.  I wasn't required to sit in a box and confess my sins in order to have another chance at Heaven.  And I certainly didn't have to use my terrible excuse for a voice to sing hymns every Sunday surrounded by strangers.  I simply had to use the example of Jesus as a model for life.  Thats it.
Even though I may have trouble in my life every now and again, it is much easier to handle with someone who doesn't judge looking over me.  Blaise Pascal is famous for what is now commonly called, "Pascals Wager," a philosophical theory that states that there are more believers than non-believers because the penalty to not believe in God is eternal suffering and the cost to believe in God is low.  This theory coincided with my belief that religion was simply a money making venture.  I now choose to have faith rather than religion.  William James, American philosopher and psychologist, put Pascal's Wager into a more beautiful form that I'm fairly sure I would not be able to improve upon:
"We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive.  If we stand still we shall be frozen to death.  If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces.  We do not certainly know whether there is any right one.  What must we do?  Be strong and of good courage.  Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes...If death ends all, we cannot meet death better."

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