X,
I don’t know why I am writing this to you. Perhaps it was the way you casually brought up your faith, giving me a glimpse of your utter devotion to an idea. I found it to be strange and exhilarating, because it was an emotional expression of which I am incapable.
Emotion is the closest parallel to faith I can think of. Both are to be experienced, both subjective. Like love and terror, faith can be transcendent. While I can’t imagine the way faith feels, I have seen those same eyes in the mirror.
I reject your religion, as I do all the three thousand deities who roam the hearts of Man. The notion of a parental, purposeful and somewhat petulant force shaping our destiny seems coincidental, limited and absurd. We are just specs of stardust. By happenstance we coagulated into a consciousness. In the grand scheme of things, our existence is unfathomably insignificant as is an atom to the blazing Sun. What hubris it is to give voice and reason to the universe and cast ourselves the protagonist in some celestial story.
If I must postulate some concept of a god, it would be infinite, improvident, and impersonal. It is also functionally irrelevant. We can grasp at it, sure, just as an ant could grasp at an understanding of quantum mechanics.
And to attribute moral authority to divinity is more ludicrous. If Jesus did not rise from the dead, if Buddha did not find enlightenment beneath the Bodhi tree, is the message of love and justice rendered null and the search for liberation and serenity futile?
Yet I cannot reject the idea of faith. I sought it all my life, which is unsurprising, really, for what is faith if not hope without reason? I don’t have faith, but I feel its absence, as have all who have reached the depth of utter despair…. I cannot describe this feeling, but I see its antithesis in the eyes of a new-born child, and now in you.
It is interesting how our paths cross. We set out from different sides of the earth to join the same cause. You follow the guidance of your Faith, I strive for the providence of Man. Goodness and kindness seem effortless in you, but for me I must wrestle demons.
I’m sorry for such a long-winded answer to the simple questions of “why are you here”. I think the answer is that I am a conflicted humanist, strenuously striving to be better. I search for hope, not in the Gods, not in the afterlife, not in my own future, but in others, in people like you.
P.
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