A Search for Faith

The Author's Personal Search for Faith"

The Context: My given name is Robert. I'm also commonly known as Robin. I was raised in a fairly traditional Roman Catholic, American household and in the presence of friends, family and neighbors that adhered rather strictly to the Roman Catholic religion. On numerous occasions, I heard talk about loosing one's faith:

If you listen to that person, they'll tell you about _____ and you could lose your faith and end up in hell. If you do _________ you could lose your faith... If you read about Darwin and evolution, you could... If you have sex before marriage... If you date that girl, she's Jewish, you know, and you could... Stop asking all those questions... Etc. etc.

Questions? The biggest sin was asking tough questions. As a gullible child, I believed the stories I was told, so at a very young age, I stopped asking questions.

The Fall: I clearly remember several incidences all of which occurred at about age four or five that profoundly affected my outlook on life. In the first incident, my complete sense of confidence (that I could do anything my older brothers could do) was denied by my parents. The second, left me with a understanding that heaven is not a place. It's a state of mind. The third involved watching my aunt wearing a green dress at her wedding in a Catholic church. Something was very wrong. The green dress was profoundly significant to everybody at the wedding, but I was too young to understand its meaning.

The fourth produced a sense of being abandoned by my family and being filled me with fear of being turned over to big men in black uniforms who carried guns. They were called, the police. One day, when I was about four years old, my pet dog, Buddy, disappeared without a trace and without a word. (It wasn't until I was about eighteen that I found out what happened to him.)

The fifth was the day I came to the conclusion that "This family sucks! I want out of here." (Those weren't the exact words, but they clearly describe my memory of that incident) Since I was trapped and could not leave, I simply withdrew. I retreated into isolation.

This is not to blame parents. They were loving and well intended. They were simply, like most people, dysfunctional. And like most children of Catholic parents, my self image was severely trampled upon by heavy doses of "original sin," but unlike my parents, I just couldn't buy the Catholic story line. It was too full on holes, conflicts, and hypocrisy. To answer the unanswerable questions: "What am I?" and "What am I doing here on Earth?", I concluded that I must have done something terrible. Why else would I have been banished to the crust of the Earth and stuck in a family of misfits. It took years for me to break out of my self-imposed prison. It took even more years for me to start asking those long suppressed questions.

The Rise Again: My search began with a return to Catholicism. I found that most of those I encountered seemed to be good, Sunday morning Catholics. They were, kind and loving people. On the surface they professed to believe but when it came to church doctrine, they definitely did not toe the Catholic line. I began examining other denominations and then other religions until I'd looked everything I could easily find. Remember, in those days (early 1960's) there were no computers, no Internet, and TVs, for those who had one were still black and white. Finding no answers to my questions, I simple set the quest for religion issue aside and focused on other things.

Years went by, and at about age thirty, I was struck by a possibility that, for years, had sat before my eyes, unnoticed. God is not "out there" someplace. God is within my own being. I remembered my childhood incident that produced the knowing that heaven is not a place; it's a state of mind. Since then, questions have been an integral part of my life.

Faith - Can I Lose It ...

Questions and Losing Faith: Questioning the words and the teachings of "the people who sell God for a living"** has definitely not caused me to lose my faith. To the contrary, it has both expanded my knowledge of life on Earth and given me a far greater respect and appreciation for whatever that source is which we commonly refer to as God. Living in a world full of questions has allowed me to reach into my heart and asked and answer the life-altering question: "Do You Believe In God?" ^°

** Among the millions who devote their lives to God,
there is a small minority that "Sell God for a Living"

My questions have actually strengthened my faith. The responses to my questions have helped me to chip away at the carved-in-stone dogmas surrounding the truth. The truths I found, rather than reducing faith, have expanded the scope, the size and the mystery about "What God is" and "What life is." Each new discovery has shown me how little I actually know. Einstein, in his usual masterful way, said it brilliantly: "I now know that I know nothing."

Each time I hear about a new discovery, it shows me how dangerous and dysfunctional it is to make absolute claims about reality. It has also shown me that those who claim to know, actually don’t. They are peddling beliefs as if they were reality. And as you certainly know and may choose to ignore, religious leaders are the long-practiced masters at peddling beliefs about reality^° as if they were reality.

My personal, bottom-line conclusion is that I don’t know with provable certainty what's real and what isn't. I can only guess. Perhaps you know. If you do know, consider this possibility: Is it possible that you might be wrong.^° And if you were wrong, how would you know you were wrong?

I've spent the last thirty or so years, seeking the truth and have found so many versions of the truth that I now think that they are all probably true and at the same time they are all false. True in the sense that each has a portion of the truth and false in the sense that each portion of the truth is incomplete.^°

My personal experience and my observations in the world lead me to the conclusion that it's not the truth that causes human problems, it's the incompleteness that makes partial truths dangerous -- dangerous in the sense that the conclusion drawn from fractional truths can be very misleading and can, and often do, lead to false conclusion, which in turn, can lead us down some very ugly paths.

Faith: All I can say for certain about "God" is that whatever it is, it has a profound affect upon me. I can; however, make some "best guesses" based upon my studies and my personal experiences. Here are a few of them:

1) Trying to stick God into a single religion is like trying to fit the universe into a shoe box.

2) Faith is, by definition, a belief in something unprovable. Even atheism has to be accepted on faith. The basic core of human survival is based on faith. Everything we do and everything we are is based on faith.

For example, do you take a vitamin pill because you know what's in it? No you trust (have faith) that it is a vitamin pill. When the traffic light is green, you have faith that cross-traffic is stopped and it's safe to drive through the intersection.

My faith certainly didn't get lost by examining my beliefs about God. My mind simply changed it's point of focus. Losing faith, in the Christian sense, usually means shifting away from their particular belief system. Beliefs about the consequences of doing that, must also be taken on faith.

3) Of the three basic theories/assumptions of life,^° Christian one-life-ism, reincarnation, and atheism, reincarnation^° is almost certainly the correct assumption. This in no way denigrates Christianity. It actually enhances the teaching of Jesus and gives His words expanded meanings.

Readers are invited to distinguish between the unrealistic and dogmatic, literal interpretation of the Christian Bible and a figurative, symbolic interpretation. Here's a figurative and symbolic interpretation: Consider these possibilities:

1) that Jesus was not an exclusive and only son of God; -- that he was a fellow human, a highly evolved master teacher who came to Earth to teach us about who and what we really are and how we can each do as he did: "Anything I can do, you can do and more."^°

2) That you and I are not separate from an "Out-there-somewhere-God."--

3) That Finding God is an internal, personal, and experiential.

If these possibilities represent reality, and the evidence indicates that they do, then Christianity takes on a whole new context. Readers are directed to the Section titled: The Quintessential Jesus.^°

4)   Abortion is a religious freedom issue because:
           We don’t know What life Is,°
              We don’t know   What a Human Being Actually Is,°
                  We don’t know When an Independent Human Life Begins,°
                      And we have no way to find out.

5) A very large percentage of what we believe to be true is simply not backed up by any physical evidence. Here are some examples, religious and otherwise:

Because I'm right, everybody else must be wrong.

If I'm to have what I want, others must go without.

My religion is the only true religion.°

Life sucks and then you die.

Violence solves problems.

I am my physical body.°

It's inevitable.

It's impossible.

It can't be any other way.

I'm an innocent victim of... .°

I only live once.

Original sin is real.

God's conception magic act is true.°

Humans are separate from God.

The Roman Catholic Pope is infallible.°

I can trust people who work for the government.

I can trust my religious leaders to tell the truth.°

Catholics have the only true religion.

Muslims have the only true religion.

Fundamentalist Christians have the only true religion.

Etc. etc.

If you think about these things for a moment, they soon seem ridiculous. For example, most people think that corporations should pay taxes, but how many ask, "Where do the corporations get the money to pay those taxes?" Are corporations really paying taxes or are they simply acting as undercover agents for the IRS? Are they simply collecting taxes from you for the government. Is that tax hidden in the price you pay for the product. And, at the time of your purchase, are you paying a tax on the hidden tax. Here it is as a specific example:

Suppose you purchase a product from a corporation that pays a 10% tax to the government. Without the tax, the corporation would sell you a product for $90. With the tax, they must sell the same product for $100. When you pay $100 for the product, $10 goes to the government as tax and, at the time of the purchase, you pay the government a sales tax on that ten-dollar, hidden tax. To bottom-line this: (For simplicity, we'll say you pay 10% sales tax.) With no corporate tax, you pay $90 plus $9 sales tax = $99. With corporate tax, you pay $100 plus $10 sales tax = $110.

6) My Beliefs, thoughts and attitudes° are the major controlling factors in my life, and it appears that this same principle applies to all other humans, as well.

And the bottom line: For me, "Faith" is whatever I believe it to be. I am faith. I live, move, and have my being in faith. The evidence tells us that there really isn't anything else.