I have spent most of my life devoted to learning about and finding God. When others have opted to build careers, make money, earn degrees that actually assist one throughout life, and so on, I have spent thousands of hours and tens of thousands of dollars on "theological education" because I have always had this insatiable hunger to know, find, and experience the divine. I do not say this in a self-congratulatory manner. In fact, I've come to the devastating conclusion that these decisions I have made are a monumental waste of time, energy, and resources. Yet because I have invested so very heavily throughout the years in this pursuit, because I have become a cog in the institutional machine that is the church, because I have been unwilling to pay the extremely high social cost of facing any alternative narrative... I have suppressed my questions.
To be sure, they have bubbled to the surface from time to time, but only briefly and only long enough for me to stare at them in agony and then dismiss them because they are too painful. No longer. If Paul Tillich is right in defining religion/God/god as humanity's "ultimate concern," then this has certainly been the case for me. I was once taught -- and quite strongly believed -- that if I really did prioritize this quest, if I really did "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" then the rest would be taken care of. This is why I moved to China for a year, it's why I went to seminary, it's why I not only became a pastor but asked to be appointed to a very difficult, dysfunctional, and impoverished parish, it's why I spent thousands and moved my family across the country to study under some of the world's most brilliant theologians at Duke Divinity School, and it's why I have spent the past four years working to earn a PhD and trying to figure out just what it is that makes this thing called American Christianity tick. In short, I've been obsessed and tireless as I chase my "ultimate concern." For if the story that I inherited is, in fact, not true... if it is a tremendous hoax or what Richard Dawkins refers to as a particularly powerful yet deceptive "meme" that has strangely lived on within our species for millennia, well then not only have I wasted my time, thought, energy, money, and everything else, but something far worse must be faced: We all are, in fact, just a speck of dust floating in an endless expanse of darkness, heading nowhere, and all the things we scurry about doing day after day signifies nothing. The prospect of this horrifying emptiness has for so long filled me with such dread and trepidation that I have been unwilling to stare for more than a few minutes into the abyss. Like Kierkegaard, I have at times simply WILLED myself to believe because I am just not strong enough to face the horrifying alternative: it's just darkness all the way down.
Now surely some committed Christians will say that I am writing this from a deranged mind and they could be right. Even Sigmund Freud claimed that any person who asks about the meaning of life is already psychotic. And I admit that I bring to this long-standing human debate my own baggage -- and plenty of it! I have PTSD, I am severely clinically depressed, I daily bear a suffocating religiously-induced guilt, and so on. More than this, my wife of fifteen years has left me and I am allowed only very brief, supervised encounters with my two precious daughters. So it is certainly true that I may not be thinking clearly. I have never known that such pain was even possible. It is an ocean of pain and I am drowning in it. But there is another possibility here: what if this pain has finally awakened me from a very long slumber and forced me to face my "ultimate concern" on a deep, genuine, existential level that was, prior to this, not even possible for me?
So before I come out of the closet fully, I want to first pose the burning questions that have simultaneously obsessed and frightened the hell out of me for decades. Then I'll make my full, honest, and sincere confession.
--
MY QUESTIONS
1. Why does a supposedly omni-benevolent, omnipotent God allow such horrendous suffering in the world? I'm not just talking about stubbing toes here. I'm talking about irredeemable, unfathomable, and permanent suffering. I'm talking about the suffering of the innocent -- of babies, of animals, of forms of life that bear no personal responsibility or moral culpability at all. Even the suffering of rational and intelligent adults who perhaps bring some suffering upon themselves, even their suffering seems completely disproportionate. Saintly, selfless women and men who die of cancer. Parents whose children suffer and die before their very eyes. Starvation, war, hurricanes, tsunamis, addiction, loneliness, and on and on and on forever and ever, Amen. Why create such a world? If the evolutionists are right (and they obviously are to anyone who has given it even a modicum of thought), then this entire world is founded upon the edifice of millennia of bloodshed. The strong eat the weak and the weak die unavenged and forgotten. If Mark Twain once quipped that there is enough evidence in the joint of his thumb to convince him that there is a God, then I would retort that there is enough evidence in the tooth of a tiger to convince me there is not one.
2. Why, if God is so relational... why if as the Christians claim that the very essential nature of God is perichoretic, trinitarian mutuality... why if this God so loves the world that He sent his Only Son and all that... then why the hell is He so silent and inaccessible? If He is indeed out there, then why do my screams into the night and the screams of millions of others go unanswered day after day, year after year, century after century? If this God is so damned set on relating to me, then why -- after all my genuine, wholehearted searching and yearning and crying and seeking -- is He absolutely nowhere to be found?
2b. Personal example: On the 30th of April I stood on the top of a tower in Dallas and looked over the edge for about three hours, deeply longing to throw myself off. I had lost absolutely everything I had ever cared about in my thirty-six years of life and I wanted nothing -- NOTHING! -- more than to die and enter the everlasting rest of blackness. But a small sliver of hope convinced me that before jumping I should perhaps cry out to this Supremely Relational One whom I had been taught is out there. In my darkest, worst moment, in this moment of absolute surrender to death, I stood on that tower and pleaded and begged and sobbed and pounded my fist into the cinder blocks, screaming, "ARE YOU THERE? DO YOU SEE ME? DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ME? BECAUSE IF YOU ARE THERE, NOW IS THE TIME TO SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING! I HAVE NEVER NEEDED YOU MORE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE ALONE! I HAVE SOUGHT YOU BUT I HAVE NOT FOUND! So speak to me NOW for I am about to die!" For three whole hours I screamed and pleaded with the void. Know what I heard? Nothing. I heard silence. I heard the wind beating against the cold building. Think about this, my dear reader: If I wanted to relate to you in some way, I could drive to see you or call you on the phone or hug you or chat with you late into the night. There are any number of ways in which you and I could relate to one another. But this GOD, this "all-relational-one," would not give me even the slightest hint or whisper or feeling or sight or evidence or ANY GODDAMNED THING to me. All was silence and all was suffering. I needed God and He abandoned me. I searched, but He was nowhere to be found.
There is only one reasons that I did not jump that day... only one: I, as a father, did not want to abandon my own children and cause them to suffer. Does that make me a better father than God is?
--
Those are my two big questions. They are related to one another and they certainly are not novel. These are questions that are as old as humanity itself. The oldest book of the Hebrew Bible -- the book of Job -- asks the same ones (and doesn't really provide any answer other than "you aren't God." Thanks a lot, Book of Job. Duh.)
Now for my confession. I am coming out of the closet. I believe there is one absolutely clear and perfect explanation for the two questions I have posed above. If we want to look for a simple and elegant and powerful solution to these questions, it is staring us in the face. We just have to have the balls to accept it. There is no God. He's just not there. It answers my questions perfectly and unapologetically.
AND SO...
Marx is right: God is an opiate for weak people like myself who cannot bear the pain of real life.
Feuerbach is right: God is just a projection of humankind's desires.
Dawkins is right: belief in God is a powerful "meme," an evolutionary trick of the mind that assists us in propagating our species.
Nietzsche is right: all that exists is man's Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
Camus is right: It's just all suffering all the way down.
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
To be sure, they have bubbled to the surface from time to time, but only briefly and only long enough for me to stare at them in agony and then dismiss them because they are too painful. No longer. If Paul Tillich is right in defining religion/God/god as humanity's "ultimate concern," then this has certainly been the case for me. I was once taught -- and quite strongly believed -- that if I really did prioritize this quest, if I really did "seek first his kingdom and his righteousness" then the rest would be taken care of. This is why I moved to China for a year, it's why I went to seminary, it's why I not only became a pastor but asked to be appointed to a very difficult, dysfunctional, and impoverished parish, it's why I spent thousands and moved my family across the country to study under some of the world's most brilliant theologians at Duke Divinity School, and it's why I have spent the past four years working to earn a PhD and trying to figure out just what it is that makes this thing called American Christianity tick. In short, I've been obsessed and tireless as I chase my "ultimate concern." For if the story that I inherited is, in fact, not true... if it is a tremendous hoax or what Richard Dawkins refers to as a particularly powerful yet deceptive "meme" that has strangely lived on within our species for millennia, well then not only have I wasted my time, thought, energy, money, and everything else, but something far worse must be faced: We all are, in fact, just a speck of dust floating in an endless expanse of darkness, heading nowhere, and all the things we scurry about doing day after day signifies nothing. The prospect of this horrifying emptiness has for so long filled me with such dread and trepidation that I have been unwilling to stare for more than a few minutes into the abyss. Like Kierkegaard, I have at times simply WILLED myself to believe because I am just not strong enough to face the horrifying alternative: it's just darkness all the way down.
Now surely some committed Christians will say that I am writing this from a deranged mind and they could be right. Even Sigmund Freud claimed that any person who asks about the meaning of life is already psychotic. And I admit that I bring to this long-standing human debate my own baggage -- and plenty of it! I have PTSD, I am severely clinically depressed, I daily bear a suffocating religiously-induced guilt, and so on. More than this, my wife of fifteen years has left me and I am allowed only very brief, supervised encounters with my two precious daughters. So it is certainly true that I may not be thinking clearly. I have never known that such pain was even possible. It is an ocean of pain and I am drowning in it. But there is another possibility here: what if this pain has finally awakened me from a very long slumber and forced me to face my "ultimate concern" on a deep, genuine, existential level that was, prior to this, not even possible for me?
So before I come out of the closet fully, I want to first pose the burning questions that have simultaneously obsessed and frightened the hell out of me for decades. Then I'll make my full, honest, and sincere confession.
--
MY QUESTIONS
1. Why does a supposedly omni-benevolent, omnipotent God allow such horrendous suffering in the world? I'm not just talking about stubbing toes here. I'm talking about irredeemable, unfathomable, and permanent suffering. I'm talking about the suffering of the innocent -- of babies, of animals, of forms of life that bear no personal responsibility or moral culpability at all. Even the suffering of rational and intelligent adults who perhaps bring some suffering upon themselves, even their suffering seems completely disproportionate. Saintly, selfless women and men who die of cancer. Parents whose children suffer and die before their very eyes. Starvation, war, hurricanes, tsunamis, addiction, loneliness, and on and on and on forever and ever, Amen. Why create such a world? If the evolutionists are right (and they obviously are to anyone who has given it even a modicum of thought), then this entire world is founded upon the edifice of millennia of bloodshed. The strong eat the weak and the weak die unavenged and forgotten. If Mark Twain once quipped that there is enough evidence in the joint of his thumb to convince him that there is a God, then I would retort that there is enough evidence in the tooth of a tiger to convince me there is not one.
2. Why, if God is so relational... why if as the Christians claim that the very essential nature of God is perichoretic, trinitarian mutuality... why if this God so loves the world that He sent his Only Son and all that... then why the hell is He so silent and inaccessible? If He is indeed out there, then why do my screams into the night and the screams of millions of others go unanswered day after day, year after year, century after century? If this God is so damned set on relating to me, then why -- after all my genuine, wholehearted searching and yearning and crying and seeking -- is He absolutely nowhere to be found?
2b. Personal example: On the 30th of April I stood on the top of a tower in Dallas and looked over the edge for about three hours, deeply longing to throw myself off. I had lost absolutely everything I had ever cared about in my thirty-six years of life and I wanted nothing -- NOTHING! -- more than to die and enter the everlasting rest of blackness. But a small sliver of hope convinced me that before jumping I should perhaps cry out to this Supremely Relational One whom I had been taught is out there. In my darkest, worst moment, in this moment of absolute surrender to death, I stood on that tower and pleaded and begged and sobbed and pounded my fist into the cinder blocks, screaming, "ARE YOU THERE? DO YOU SEE ME? DO YOU GIVE A SHIT ABOUT ME? BECAUSE IF YOU ARE THERE, NOW IS THE TIME TO SAY SOMETHING, ANYTHING! I HAVE NEVER NEEDED YOU MORE. I HAVE NEVER BEEN MORE ALONE! I HAVE SOUGHT YOU BUT I HAVE NOT FOUND! So speak to me NOW for I am about to die!" For three whole hours I screamed and pleaded with the void. Know what I heard? Nothing. I heard silence. I heard the wind beating against the cold building. Think about this, my dear reader: If I wanted to relate to you in some way, I could drive to see you or call you on the phone or hug you or chat with you late into the night. There are any number of ways in which you and I could relate to one another. But this GOD, this "all-relational-one," would not give me even the slightest hint or whisper or feeling or sight or evidence or ANY GODDAMNED THING to me. All was silence and all was suffering. I needed God and He abandoned me. I searched, but He was nowhere to be found.
There is only one reasons that I did not jump that day... only one: I, as a father, did not want to abandon my own children and cause them to suffer. Does that make me a better father than God is?
--
Those are my two big questions. They are related to one another and they certainly are not novel. These are questions that are as old as humanity itself. The oldest book of the Hebrew Bible -- the book of Job -- asks the same ones (and doesn't really provide any answer other than "you aren't God." Thanks a lot, Book of Job. Duh.)
Now for my confession. I am coming out of the closet. I believe there is one absolutely clear and perfect explanation for the two questions I have posed above. If we want to look for a simple and elegant and powerful solution to these questions, it is staring us in the face. We just have to have the balls to accept it. There is no God. He's just not there. It answers my questions perfectly and unapologetically.
AND SO...
Marx is right: God is an opiate for weak people like myself who cannot bear the pain of real life.
 |
| Ludwig Feuerbach |
Feuerbach is right: God is just a projection of humankind's desires.
Dawkins is right: belief in God is a powerful "meme," an evolutionary trick of the mind that assists us in propagating our species.
Nietzsche is right: all that exists is man's Will to Power and the Eternal Recurrence of the Same.
Camus is right: It's just all suffering all the way down.
Epicurus is right: “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”
Macbeth is right:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stageAnd then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
The sheer simplicity and brilliance of these conclusions can no longer be ignored by my inquiring brain. It's time I stop living within the Matrix and see things for what they really are. God is not. I hope I am wrong, but I doubt it.
UPDATE: I don't delete past published posts lest I forget where I've been, but this post came at the lowest of my low moments. I am no longer there. I now actually believe that God WAS there with me on my cross/tower on April 30. But I will have to blog about that another time perhaps.
UPDATE: I don't delete past published posts lest I forget where I've been, but this post came at the lowest of my low moments. I am no longer there. I now actually believe that God WAS there with me on my cross/tower on April 30. But I will have to blog about that another time perhaps.
