This is the fifth and final part of my five part series about my journey to Christianity and back. Here are part one, part two, part three, and part four.
Leaving Christianity was a really hard process. After having what I thought to be many genuine experiences with God, I was left feeling at a loss for how to make sense of the world. I am still trying to find my balance. To center myself. To figure out what it means to be.
It’s not about god. I don’t really believe in god, though there’s a part of me that easily could. Because I know that there is something more. That is why a strict rationalist view of life just doesn’t resonate with me. It doesn’t resonate with a lot of people, I think, for the same reason.
There exists something that is bigger than ourselves. But it’s not god. I’m not 100% sure of that, but I am quite sure. Sure enough, anyway.
I haven’t quite put my finger on what it is, but I think that it’s us.
All of us together make up this thing that’s greater than the sum of its parts. That’s why people feel fulfilled when they join a religion. It’s not god; it’s us. We need each other. When we help each other, it creates personal satisfaction, but it also produces good will that carries on and produces more. It – metaphorically – takes on a life of its own. But it can feel like there’s some outside force at work, some guiding hand, god.
But if that were so, how can we explain the times when it doesn’t work out?
“God’s ways aren’t our ways.”
“God works in mysterious ways.”
No. That’s not sufficient, in any sense.
I prefer to think, rather, that it is not god. We have an interdependence that goes far beyond what we can see. It is so deep, it can feel like there must be more, something that is bigger than ourselves. But we are it.
The universe is indifferent to our existence. It doesn’t care what happens to us. There is no god looking over us, with his divine plan, guiding our lives. The universe doesn’t care if you get that speeding ticket, if you get that promotion, or even if you get cancer. It doesn’t care. There is no other way to explain all of the bad things that happen, without revealing a god so twisted and sadistic as to not deserve our worship. After all, he’s playing with our lives and we don’t even know his rules.
No. Events happen and they happen by random chance, more or less. That person two cars in front of you that died in the head-on collision could have been you. The fact that it wasn’t doesn’t mean that god spared you and not him. It means you won the toss of the cosmic dice that day.
But just because the universe is cold and meaningless doesn’t mean that life is. It matters. You matter. We all matter. We matter to each other. And I don’t just mean that you matter to the people who love you, or even the people who know you. You matter to humanity as a whole. Everything you do affects the rest of us. And we’re glad you’re here.
The other day, I posted about how I got my start in blogging. Without the person who introduced me to blogging, I might never have started blogging. Without the local alternative daily reporter who started a blog about Vermont blogs and linked to me, I might never have gained the audience I did. Without that exposure, I probably would not have met the person who I turned to for support when I left Christianity. Without that support, I really don’t know how I would have gotten through that, the most difficult time in my life.
Something as simple as telling someone about your blog can lead to that person making a new friend. I’ve made a lot of wonderful connections through blogging, all because someone told me about his blog.
In just that one small example, you can begin to see how seemingly meaningless actions can profoundly effect the lives of those around us. When we get into the ways in which we all love and support each other, our interdependence become mind blowing.
Every little thing we do in our lives affects someone else. When taken together, it creates this web of support that enriches our lives and makes them better. It also gives our lives significance and meaning. It creates something that is bigger than us, something that transcends our being.
But it’s not god; it’s us. And really, isn’t that enough?
I like to present this thought experiment to people:
Consider the lowly cell in your body. It’s alive, yet all it knows is the community of cells around it. It is not intelligent by itself, yet as a collection of cells that make up the human, the whole is something altogether different.
No individual cell could possibly comprehend what it is a part of. And you, as a cell aggregate, have no real awareness of any individual cell, nor do you care much if a given cell lives or dies, which cells do on a regular basis without us even knowing.
It is quite evident that the intelligence and awareness of humans is an emergent phenomena of the aggregate of cells: your particular brand of awareness and intelligent is emergent from the particular collection of cells and the peculiar configuration within you.
The question is, then, can the consideration of how a collection of living things that results in the human being give us any insight into a reality beyond us?
Is it possible that we are apart of an organism of which we are unaware?
Somewhere it was written: “Know Thyself and thou shall know all the mysteries of the gods and of the universe”.
This either deep insight or pure baloney.