So most of the people reading this know by now that the major event in the life of Ginny, year 26, has been the decision to stop identifying myself as a Christian. (For those of you who didn't know, well it's time you did.) The process surrounding this decision began around last November; in March I made it official by sending out an email to a lot of my friends and family. As the months go by I have been thinking pretty intently still, and so when one of the recipients of the original email sent me a very belated response, my thoughts had developed a lot, and I found myself writing a new, fairly thorough description of where I am and how I got here. And then I thought it would be a good idea to post it here, for those who are interested in my ongoing spiritual development (which I flatter myself is a lot of you.)
In the email we began with the question of truth: what is truth, and what does it mean to seek it? What I'm looking for, when I talk about truth, is best described as "the non-contingent reality of the universe." (Contingent realities being things like opinions, cultural constructs, interpretations of all kinds... things that could have been different depending on the circumstances. Non-contingent realities are things built into the very structure of the universe.) It seems obvious to me that there is at the very least a physical non-contingent reality... though physicists and cosmologists may still be fairly far from understanding it. In any case, it is the job of science to uncover and move closer and closer to understanding this physical reality.
There may, or may not, be a spiritual non-contingent reality. By "spiritual" I mean relating to our emotions, our rationality, our sense of things being good or bad on a higher level than simple physical pain or pleasure. It seems intellectually plausible to me that all these things may be byproducts of evolution and culture (I do not say "mere" byproducts because I do not think this in any way robs them of importance), instead of being related to a spiritual authority which existed before humanity and transcends us. If there is such an authority, I would give it the name "God." But it is not self-evident to me that such an authority exists.
Perhaps it is a function of youth that I am so anxious to align my beliefs with the "truth" in this sense. After all, I don't expect science to provide a final answer to the questions of physical reality in my lifetime, or in my children's children's lifetime, or even in the whole course of humanity. Much more difficult for the spiritual reality. I am not looking for proof, or sufficient evidence, because I recognize that proof is impossible and no evidence is sufficient to an overly skeptical mind.
But still I think truth, under my definition, is approachable if not attainable. Scientists discover physical realities by running experiments, seeing what laws of behavior seem to apply to matter. There is always interpretation, and therefore always error, but still they approach a clearer and clearer picture of how this space-time-matter stuff tends to function.
Similarly, if there is a spiritual reality, it ought to be discoverable by similar experimentation. If a pattern of behavior really is "contrary to God's will," then the result of continuing that behavior over time should be like butting one's head against a wall: a really bad headache. In this manner, you discover interesting and important truths about the nature of walls and the nature of your head. If you have any sense you will not butt your head against the next wall you come up against, but try some other means of getting past it.
Now if you had listened to your Mommy, you might not have tried butting your head against the wall in the first place. She could have told you it wouldn't get you anything but a headache. So it can be the part of wisdom to take other people's word for some truths, instead of trying to verify them experimentally for oneself. Better yet, one could watch someone else butt their head against a wall, observe the result, and conclude that it wasn't a worthwhile endeavor. The extent to which one accepts other people's word for things, or draws conclusions from results seen in other people's lives, is a matter of preference.
Christianity, as I had always understood it, gives an extensive list of spiritual laws: descriptions of positive or negative consequences for given behaviors and attitudes. (Since the laws are spiritual, the consequences are also spiritual. The physical consequences might be quite different: one might be tortured to death, while receiving great spiritual benefits.) If you follow these laws, your spiritual health will be greater than if you stray from them. If the Christian (that is to say, Bible-centric, fairly fundamentalist Christian) description of God is correct, then following these laws is optimal and straying from them is foolish. Experimentation may not result in disaster, but you'll always be better off if you follow the laws.
This, at any rate, is a fairly good description of my attitude toward Christianity up till last fall. I followed the rules because I believed the description of God given by Bible-centric fundamentalism, and therefore following the rules seemed the only sensible thing to do. If it WAS true, then not only would I avoid a lot of pain and trouble (in the deepest sense, discounting more surface-level suffering) but I would achieve, in heaven if not on earth, spiritual fulfillment, wholeness, freedom, and peace. There is a deep longing in me (as, I think, in most of us) for something inexpressible, and it was the hope of having this longing satisfied that I clung to as my ultimate definition of "spiritual fulfillment."
Last fall, though, I began questioning whether the description of God I had accepted was accurate. By the end of December I had decided that it was not convincing. There were a number of reasons for this, which if you're curious I can lay out for you. But the bottom line is, the central premise on which I had constructed my philosophy of life collapsed. I no longer "knew" what, if any, spiritual non-contingent reality existed, and I no longer had a handy-dandy manual for living the best possible life.
So how to make decisions? I don't know if there is a God, of any kind, and if there is I don't know what that God is like. I don't know what choices might be wise or foolish, good or bad. All I can do is experiment; find out what happens when I butt my head up against this structure over here. I do this in the hope of moving closer and closer to what truth there is, and I'm willing to take a certain number of bruises.
Of course one has to start somewhere. A good experimenter has a set of basic premises, and a hypothesis to test. I start with the belief that love and beauty are spiritual realities, if anything is. These are two core values that I am not willing to give up; if God is opposed to them, then I am opposed to God. (If you've read The Silver Chair, think of Puddleglum right after he stomps on the fire.) At this time, nearly all other values and beliefs (including nuances of the definitions of love and beauty) are up for grabs. I will investigate them on the basis of my own intuition, reason, and experience. If nothing else, this means that whatever beliefs I come to will be honestly and thoroughly mine, something I could never say when I was getting them primarily from a book of teachings.
But, my correspondent says, Christianity is not a book of teachings, and truth is not a set of spiritual laws. He says Truth is a Person, and that person is Jesus Christ. Okay. But I don't know that person. I know a book, a book that describes the sayings and actions of a person. A critical reader of that book may have many questions about the accuracy of that book. Are the gospels accurate accounts of what Jesus said? Were important things added or left out? Even if you accept the gospels as accurate, do you take the rest of the Christian Bible as divinely inspired?
All worthwhile and pertinent questions. But in my opinion the biggest question to be asked by a reader of the Christian gospels is this: is Jesus, called Christ, alive or dead?
I don't know the answer to that question. In my opinion, the answer to that question determines whether the history of humanity is a comedy or a tragedy. If Jesus is alive, then humankind gets a "happily ever after." Like the very end of the Narnia stories, where all wounds are healed and all wrongs made right, and we begin to see meaning in everything that seemed impossibly meaningless.
On the other hand, if the life of Jesus of Nazareth ended at the hands of Roman soldiers, then human history is almost certainly a tragedy. Not to say that it is meaningless: at the very least, we create our own meaning, simply by existing and stubbornly interpreting the universe as if it has meaning. We have things to strive for, we have hopes and loves, we cannot help creating. But we are weak; we die. If we have no ally who transcends the blind natural forces of the universe, then we are doomed to entropy and decay, no matter how great our creations may be while they stand. Even imagining some fantastic human future where we master the tools of life and death, even in the utopian daydream where, hundreds or thousands of years from now, we at last create our own heaven (which, as far as I can tell, is the highest hope an atheistic philosophy can offer)... even if that dream should come true, there will still be all those of us who have died... myself included. Meaning and beauty there may be, but it is meaning and beauty that ends in death. Thus, tragedy.
I don't know whether Jesus is alive or dead. At this time I don't feel any particular urgency to place my bet one way or the other. My projects and my decisions will be about the same. Here's one thing I don't believe: if Jesus is alive, and if I die tomorrow and find myself before a divine tribunal, I don't believe I will be barred from the "happily ever after." I don't believe it because everything in me rejoices at the possibility. I know the reaction to encountering heavenly glory is traditionally fear and trembling, but I can only imagine myself laughing with joy at finding it was all true after all.
So that's where I stand right now. Feel free to respond, in a comment or an email, with any questions or arguments or perplexities you might have. My apologies to those who are still waiting for responses in conversations started three months ago, and my double apologies to those few of you who have known me as a Christian for many many years and are just now finding out. You're probably a little shocked; I know I was.
Oh, here's one more thing: three months out from the official decision, life is good. I feel a freedom and an honesty in my life that I didn't have before. I am (slowly) learning to speak who I am and what I feel about things, without always feeling hampered by the external laws I was supposed to be following. Where this path takes me I don't know, but right now, I am at peace with who I am and excited about my life.
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