The wURLd according to me
I'm what I guess you'd call agnostic. I like to believe in a higher power, especially since the world is full of things I can't explain, but I'm just not sure. I've said, and it's true, that the one thing I really believe in is love and I suppose that is a higher power in a sense. It's an odd thing, being in love. It makes people do things that they never thought they would or things they never thought they could. In English we say we are in love "with" someone but as often as not you're in it all by yourself. Some people say that love hurts, that it always does, that it has to, but that's not true. Love, in it's purest form doesn't hurt at all, it's only when you start placing conditions on it and you're afraid that those conditions won't be met that it starts to hurt. Most commonly, you love someone but it's unrequited, and that hurts. Trust me, I know this, if you love someone, whether they're in it with you or not, it shouldn't hurt, it doesn't hurt, just the opposite really.
That was a side note sort of but it's important and I'll get back to it. For now it's important to note that it is a faith I have, in love and the fact that it doesn't hurt. I have no empirical evidence that love even exists, much less that it doesn't hurt. You can't see it, touch it, hear it, taste it or smell it. I say "touch" in defining empirical evidence as opposed to "feel" because the immediate response some people would have is that you can feel love. You can definitely feel it, but not in the empirical sense, not in the way that I, say, feel this keyboard under my fingers. So, the faith that I have in love is a lot like the faith that some people have in God (and in truth I can't say that I don't have a bit of that faith too). I can't prove that God exists, but I can say that I have a feeling that He does (to use the common monotheist parlance).
Mormons call this "feeling the spirit", because Mormons, like many Christian sects, believe in a holy trinity (Father, Son, Holy spirit). It's the main reason I became Mormon, and also the main reason I'm not Mormon anymore.
When I was a kid I only went to church with my friends families. My father wasn't religious, my mother was raised Catholic and then found out shortly before I was born that she was partly Jewish (the part that counts according to some) but she wasn't really religious either. So, I went to church with my friends families and most of them were Mormon. When I went to church I got a feeling that I can't really describe and because the Mormon church was the only one I'd really been to I bought in to their explanation about "feeling the spirit".
My mother wouldn't let me get baptised though, she said when I was 18 I could decide for myself. I might not have ever gotten baptised at all because between the ages of 14 and 18 I sort of...lost faith, I guess you'd say. I found it again because I had that same feeling, like being in church, when I met my ex. With all that faith back and no outlet for it (because the boy just didn't feel the same way about me that I felt about him...yet), and because two of my roommates at the time were Mormon I came back to church and started taking conversion classes.
Then, the day I got baptised, my previously unrequited love was revealed to be requited after all. Some people in the church wanted me to choose between the church and the boy and at first I just couldn't do that. How do you chose between two such similar feelings? He wasn't asking me to choose though (despite having been ingrained with a fairly large prejudice against Mormons), so I chose him both because he never would have asked me to choose and because having that feeling for him, that was so similar to how I felt in church, made me question the idea that there was only one right and true faith, and questioning that makes the entire foundation of religion a little shaky since they all claim to be the one and only right and true faith (except Buddhism and Judaism).
I thought, at the time, this feeling is the only proof I have and I'd be willing to bet that other people who belong to other religions have had this feeling too, in their places of worship or even about things other than religion (I had), so how can I say they are all wrong, their souls damned to eternal torment because they don't believe this one thing. That seemed absurd to me. I've since had the same feeling in Catholic and Episcopal churches and one night walking through St Jakob's Platz in Munich and in all sorts of other places having nothing to do with religious worship. The closest thing I can compare it to is love and I've had that feeling since too. Which just confirms my belief that there isn't any one true religion.
I recently said, sort of off hand, to someone, another agnostic, that maybe, instead of all religions being wrong, they were all right. I argued that maybe the differences (even between monotheistic and polytheistic religions) stem from the inability of man to describe this higher power. The only way we can think of to describe it is to make it an entity, like a person, or an animal, or several of either, or several of both, or an energy (like Chi), but perhaps none of those really hit the mark. My best stab at describing it is basically to say something akin to "God is love", but maybe that's off the mark as well. Perhaps it defies description.
Of course, things that defy description are difficult to understand, and we're all aware of the human tendency to fear those things we can't understand. Out of that fear is born the need to describe It and the variation in descriptions would have the tendency to lead back to something we can't understand, which, again, causes fear, unless you choose to believe your description is the right one and everyone else is wrong.
If you're a loyal reader (say hello to each other, there can't be more than two of you), then you may have read bits of this philosophy before and you likely know where I'm headed with this. You may also have noticed the change in my URL which so far just reflects my general philosophy but ultimately is going to have both this blog and my other one (this one being fear and the other faith) side by side as soon as I figure out the code that will publish both to the same URL(HTML isn't my specialty). If you've never read this blog though, you won't feel that sense of deja vu when I say that love, essentially, is faith (and logically, hate basically is fear).
That brings me back to the, rejected, idea that love hurts. I figured that out (that love doesn't hurt) because I was in love, at first unrequited but ultimately returned and it didn't hurt, not until the break up of the (7+ year) relationship and then only briefly and only because I was afraid, for about a minute, that breaking up meant losing him, and therefore that feeling, completely and forever. Of course it didn't mean either of those things, he's still a good friend and I've had that feeling for at least one other person since, but fear isn't always well founded. The minute that I decided, and make no mistake it was a choice, to let go of that fear and believe that it was for the best it didn't hurt anymore. It was the fear that hurt, not the love, and I was right, it was all for the best, so there was nothing to fear anyway.
Someone I know, put into words this philosophy of mine way better than I ever could, he said that true faith conquers fear. That same guy is fond of saying that faith is a choice and he's absolutely right. It is a choice and when you have a choice that means you have options. What I believe is that when you choose not to be afraid you are choosing faith. Maybe you are putting that faith in God, or maybe in Karma, or maybe just in yourself, but it's faith none the less. I have lots of faith. I'm not always entirely sure what to put my faith in, but it's better than the alternative.
That was a side note sort of but it's important and I'll get back to it. For now it's important to note that it is a faith I have, in love and the fact that it doesn't hurt. I have no empirical evidence that love even exists, much less that it doesn't hurt. You can't see it, touch it, hear it, taste it or smell it. I say "touch" in defining empirical evidence as opposed to "feel" because the immediate response some people would have is that you can feel love. You can definitely feel it, but not in the empirical sense, not in the way that I, say, feel this keyboard under my fingers. So, the faith that I have in love is a lot like the faith that some people have in God (and in truth I can't say that I don't have a bit of that faith too). I can't prove that God exists, but I can say that I have a feeling that He does (to use the common monotheist parlance).
Mormons call this "feeling the spirit", because Mormons, like many Christian sects, believe in a holy trinity (Father, Son, Holy spirit). It's the main reason I became Mormon, and also the main reason I'm not Mormon anymore.
When I was a kid I only went to church with my friends families. My father wasn't religious, my mother was raised Catholic and then found out shortly before I was born that she was partly Jewish (the part that counts according to some) but she wasn't really religious either. So, I went to church with my friends families and most of them were Mormon. When I went to church I got a feeling that I can't really describe and because the Mormon church was the only one I'd really been to I bought in to their explanation about "feeling the spirit".
My mother wouldn't let me get baptised though, she said when I was 18 I could decide for myself. I might not have ever gotten baptised at all because between the ages of 14 and 18 I sort of...lost faith, I guess you'd say. I found it again because I had that same feeling, like being in church, when I met my ex. With all that faith back and no outlet for it (because the boy just didn't feel the same way about me that I felt about him...yet), and because two of my roommates at the time were Mormon I came back to church and started taking conversion classes.
Then, the day I got baptised, my previously unrequited love was revealed to be requited after all. Some people in the church wanted me to choose between the church and the boy and at first I just couldn't do that. How do you chose between two such similar feelings? He wasn't asking me to choose though (despite having been ingrained with a fairly large prejudice against Mormons), so I chose him both because he never would have asked me to choose and because having that feeling for him, that was so similar to how I felt in church, made me question the idea that there was only one right and true faith, and questioning that makes the entire foundation of religion a little shaky since they all claim to be the one and only right and true faith (except Buddhism and Judaism).
I thought, at the time, this feeling is the only proof I have and I'd be willing to bet that other people who belong to other religions have had this feeling too, in their places of worship or even about things other than religion (I had), so how can I say they are all wrong, their souls damned to eternal torment because they don't believe this one thing. That seemed absurd to me. I've since had the same feeling in Catholic and Episcopal churches and one night walking through St Jakob's Platz in Munich and in all sorts of other places having nothing to do with religious worship. The closest thing I can compare it to is love and I've had that feeling since too. Which just confirms my belief that there isn't any one true religion.
I recently said, sort of off hand, to someone, another agnostic, that maybe, instead of all religions being wrong, they were all right. I argued that maybe the differences (even between monotheistic and polytheistic religions) stem from the inability of man to describe this higher power. The only way we can think of to describe it is to make it an entity, like a person, or an animal, or several of either, or several of both, or an energy (like Chi), but perhaps none of those really hit the mark. My best stab at describing it is basically to say something akin to "God is love", but maybe that's off the mark as well. Perhaps it defies description.
Of course, things that defy description are difficult to understand, and we're all aware of the human tendency to fear those things we can't understand. Out of that fear is born the need to describe It and the variation in descriptions would have the tendency to lead back to something we can't understand, which, again, causes fear, unless you choose to believe your description is the right one and everyone else is wrong.
If you're a loyal reader (say hello to each other, there can't be more than two of you), then you may have read bits of this philosophy before and you likely know where I'm headed with this. You may also have noticed the change in my URL which so far just reflects my general philosophy but ultimately is going to have both this blog and my other one (this one being fear and the other faith) side by side as soon as I figure out the code that will publish both to the same URL(HTML isn't my specialty). If you've never read this blog though, you won't feel that sense of deja vu when I say that love, essentially, is faith (and logically, hate basically is fear).
That brings me back to the, rejected, idea that love hurts. I figured that out (that love doesn't hurt) because I was in love, at first unrequited but ultimately returned and it didn't hurt, not until the break up of the (7+ year) relationship and then only briefly and only because I was afraid, for about a minute, that breaking up meant losing him, and therefore that feeling, completely and forever. Of course it didn't mean either of those things, he's still a good friend and I've had that feeling for at least one other person since, but fear isn't always well founded. The minute that I decided, and make no mistake it was a choice, to let go of that fear and believe that it was for the best it didn't hurt anymore. It was the fear that hurt, not the love, and I was right, it was all for the best, so there was nothing to fear anyway.
Someone I know, put into words this philosophy of mine way better than I ever could, he said that true faith conquers fear. That same guy is fond of saying that faith is a choice and he's absolutely right. It is a choice and when you have a choice that means you have options. What I believe is that when you choose not to be afraid you are choosing faith. Maybe you are putting that faith in God, or maybe in Karma, or maybe just in yourself, but it's faith none the less. I have lots of faith. I'm not always entirely sure what to put my faith in, but it's better than the alternative.
posted by Beth at
4:32 PM
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