Baking a Theology From Scratch

It seems to me that the highest form of spiritual evolution involves a certain level of discomfort. It is relatively comfortable and easy to select a functional system of belief and adhere to it, labelling any portion of that system which evades comprehension and contradicts experience "faith." In fact, I would go so far as to say that faith is nothing more than the unique capacity of the human mind to believe whatever the hell it wants to believe. This is a seductively tidy paradigm, and all the more so because it is not inherently harmful. It is simply not the most advanced, Truthful form of spiritual consciousness. I would say that such dogma-centered worship is to real, honest spirituality as employment is to entrepreneurship: easier, but less rewarding and inefficient. Please, cherished reader, do not take me for one of those small-minded individuals who mindlessly echoes, "God is too big to fit inside of one religion" in an effort to spare themselves any of the hard work and difficulty that is inherent in spiritual honesty. Read on, and share my experience.

Like many, I was once a highly religious person. I read the Bible eagerly and painstakingly. I participated at church to the exculsion of nearly all other activity. I was scrupulously, prudishly moral and ethical. And I was miserable. You see, my religious upbringing had left no room for my experience, namely that I was (and am) gay. My feverishly agile mind successfully contraverted my experience for many years, and it would likely have continued to patch holes in my belief successfully ad infinitum if it were not for my stubborn attraction to men. However, about five years ago I ceased to trust my intellect and reason quite so far, and began to lean more heavily upon my intuition and experience. My internal balance of power was forever upended, and I began, as it withstood the burden of trust, to believe my experience almost exclusively, and relegate my reason to a supporting role.

Suddenly, I was faced with a dilemma. Many of the arguments in defense of God and the Bible suddenly lost their edge, based as they were on shaky ground to begin with. Like many, I had convinced myself that my beliefs were carefully constructed to support that which my reason had discerned. In reality, I had skillfully constructed reasons to support that which I had decided to believe. As I began to realize this inversion, I grew disgusted with my beliefs, and jettisoned them all, to the point of disavowing belief in God altogether. This is not to say that I bcame an Atheist, but rather that I crashed my operating system, and started to write a new one from scratch. Here is, so far, what I have come up with: God exists.

I do not simply rebelieve in the divine; that would be easy. The rational arguments for his existence, however, remain unpersuasive to the objective mind. As William James puts it, "Causation is indeed too obscure a principle to bear the weight of the whole structure of theology. As for the argument from design, see how Darwinian principles have revolutionized it" (The Varieties of Religious Experience, 477). To add my own morsel, the story of Noah's ark is, if taken seriously, itself an excellent argument for the process of evolution, for no vessel of the dimensions described in Genesis could hold even a small percentage of the species to which we can ourselves bear witness. Instead, God has ceased to be something I have reasoned into belief, and is something that I experience. It is just as true to me as if I experienced it with my first five senses (that is to say, doubtable only with effort). My perception goes beyond those senses, and relates to me that I am not the most sophisticated form of life. If I really need to adorn this understanding with reason, I need go no further than this: If there is nothing more sophisticated than I am out there, if I am myself really the biggest thing I will experience, life shall be phenomenally tedious and I choose death.

This is not, of course, satiating. It unlocks another level of questions: Is this, which I choose for want of a more fitting term to call God, benevolent? Does it even have a personality, let alone some investment in my life? Is it all powerful and omnipresent, or merely one of a set of similar, equal beings? Understand that this simple truth: "God exists" is as unsatisfying to possess as it must be to read. It seems to me, though, that the subsequent experience of constructing a theology from an absolute tabula rasa will be a noble and consuming occupation for life.