Meditation 143
Why?
by Brent Morgan
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A couple of weeks ago, a group of my friends were questioning me about my religious beliefs and attempting to understand what it means to be an agnostic. All of my friends are Christian with the exception of one Jew, and my beliefs seem to preoccupy the mind of one of my Christian friends. She tried to attack my beliefs by discussing the nonsense of evolution. I coolly replied that I did not treat evolution as fact, just as a mere possibility, just like I do God. She then tried to attack my beliefs as if I was an atheist. Again, I replied that I never said I definitively believe there is no God. She then asked me what I did believe and I told her that I believed anything was possible except for knowledge of God’s existence. I asked her why she believed in God. Her first reply was faith.
I never understood why faith is a reason for believing in God, why faith equaled evidence. As Clarence Darrow put it Why I Am Agnostic, faith comes from beliefs which comes from ideas and you cannot have an idea without some sort of evidence. But none of my Christian friends have an proof other than they are really, really sure (or hope) God exists. Faith, as I tell them, is just a cop out. It is simply a Christian admitting that they don’t know either.
My friend then told me that when she was in 7th or 8th grade she decided to make a decision on whether to believe in God or not. She felt that her life was better with God than without him. My question then becomes, if God is love and forgiveness, why would he turn his back on those that question his existence? Why would God make a person miserable simply because he chose to use reason instead of an outdated belief system? What kind of God would make his love for us dependent on a belief in him without ever showing himself? And why would I want to worship that?