Listening to the thunderstorm and thinking...

I think it’s about time I write down some thoughts on my own spirituality. For years I have been saying that I am agnostic, that I am of the opinion that nothing is certain and therefore nothing is worth believing. I’m not sure if I ever put it in those words, but that’s essentially what I’ve tried to convince myself of. I suppose I am still agnostic in some respects: I don’t presume to know what will happen to me once I die nor do I presume to know the reason for my existence. I still believe that little is certain, but I am becoming more certain of aspects of my own spirituality.

First of all, I have become convinced of the existence of a higher power and my connection to it. As one might expect, no one event brought me to this conclusion, but rather a series of occurrences and a lot of sporadic contemplation of these occurrences. I simply cannot take the ineffably beautiful life that I have been given to be a cosmic accident. Many aspects of spirituality defy logic, but it also defies logic to think that the complex wonder of the human mind came from a random alignment of chemicals.

I believe that religion sprang out of the human mind when it became capable of contemplating its own existence. There is nothing less discoverable than human origin and human destination, and yet humanity has spent its entire existence trying to obtain a definitive answer. I propose a blissful neutrality. If every person on earth would accept that they do not know the meaning of life and will not ever know the meaning of life then we as a human race could get down to the aspects of the human condition that we can control. If I were to affirm my faith in a higher power, the first point of my affirmation would be that none of our beliefs about our purpose on this earth have any more substance to them than anyone else’s. The next point would be that the only way humans will achieve the spiritual peace that we all seek is to accept that life is too beautiful to be explained.


So I suppose that if I am waging a religious war, then my enemy is spiritual certainty. The human mind is not designed to find the truth and then stay put forever. The human mind is designed to walk around the edge of truth, look at it from different angles, different distances, and at different times of day to see how the shadows hit it. Just when you think you know what it's all about, that is the time when your mind should tell you that stagnation is the enemy. Think again. The people who are absolutely certain of things that cannot be proven in this world are the people I can't seem to get anywhere with. Ironically, I feel that I am simply not open-minded enough to accept "blind faith" as justification for action. When it comes to organized religion, most faith is blind. Don't kid yourself and don't tell me to play along. I can open my mind to a lot of things, but indoctrinated closed-mindedness is not one of them.

The bottom line is that I do not live in a Christian country. I live in a country where the state is separate from the church and the people are free to think what they want as long as they do not infringe upon the freedom of others. Right?