Sometimes I wake up not believing

I’ve been heavily involved in church for several years and have studied religion for over a decade but, honestly, there are some mornings I wake up not believing anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in a Creator, it’s just that sometimes I get really skeptical about our traditional religious ideas. Sometimes my first thought is, is all of this religious stuff real? Sometimes it all seems ridiculous. What’s the point? Is religion just something humans invented to help us cope with the inevitability of suffering and death? Is “the will of God” just something our creative human minds imagined so we could function with a sense of purpose, hope and meaning? Is prayer really just a form of wishful thinking or a grown-up way to say that we are talking to our “imaginary friend”? What makes us think we can capture the idea of God in human language anyway?

How do we know if God is pleased with us? How do we know if God has been merciful to us? How would we know if God has forgiven us? What evidence could we point to? Do we believe this because we’re still alive when we could have been dead? Do we believe this because something worked out in our favor when it could have failed? Do we believe this because we weren’t involved in a fatal accident? What about those who have died in such accidents? Was God no longer showing mercy to them? Was God not pleased with them? Did their lives no longer have any purpose?

We religious people accept most of these ideas off of faith alone. But it seems to me that we could come up with a lot of other reasons to explain our earthly circumstances and situations.

I often hear people talk about what they believe God is telling them or calling them to do. Is this use of God’s name just a technique to justify what we plan to do anyway? I mean really. Although I have said such things in the past, I really try to avoid making such claims because I know how easy it is to deceive ourselves.

I also hear people quote scriptures and utter pious statements that say God is more concerned with our eternal souls than our earthly lives. In my opinion, such reasoning enables people to justify their apathy and tolerate severe injustice and destruction of life. I don’t believe in that kind of God. I hear people declare with tears that those who don’t have the “right” beliefs are going to Hell. I’ve heard people, upon hearing that someone died, say things like, “Man, I sure hope they were Christians.” When these individuals hear that a non-Christian has died, you may hear things like, “Man, too bad they are going to Hell.” I don’t believe in this kind of God. And what business do humans have making calls as to another human's eternal destination? I struggle with the idea that our earthly life just a testing ground to screen the faithful from the wicked so that we can all go on to an afterlife to collect either our rewards or our punishments.

I also despise the fact that some people are so committed to the exclusive claims of their religious traditions that they are willing to persecute, discriminate against or kill people of other faiths and cultures in order to prove their beliefs and customs are the only ones that are pleasing to God. I don’t believe in a God that would be pleased with that. I also don't believe in a tribal and territorial God who takes sides in human conflicts and calls for the destruction or killing of any human. I can't help but think that many of our traditional ideas about God and God's requirements of persons have been shaped more by our cultural prejudices than by divine encounter.

I realize that I, like many others, possess my own mental image of what God is like. Yet, in the back of my mind, I retain the belief that God is beyond our understanding. Because of this, I remain suspicious of any human attempts to totally grasp God’s will or predict God’s activities. But I often I wonder where this leaves me as an aspiring follower of Jesus' way of living. Some may judge my views as being either “wishy-washy” or “foolish” but I’d like to believe that mine is an attempt to be humble when it comes to ideas about God, one that remains open to different understandings and willing to acknowledge that we could be wrong about all of this.

Yes. Some mornings I wake up not believing. Then those mornings pass by and I muster up enough faith to keep going until the next morning comes.