Thoughts Leading to Belief - Part 2

December 31, 2005

These are thoughts excepted from a letter I wrote to a friend a while back.

The question I have to ask myself is, "Do I believe that conscious existence ends with the death of the physical body?" My answer to that, although I could certainly be wrong, is at this moment a resounding NO! While there is no "smoking gun" and proof of an afterlife, there is a great deal of circumstantial evidence that I find credible, not just NDEs and OBEs and stuff like that, but my own life experiences.

I KNOW that an unseen spiritual world does exist. I have had encounters with it since a very early age. I've had a lot of unusual things happen to me. Some of the "paranormal" activity I have experienced happened in my mother's office building. She owned a travel agency and the building it was located in for about 20 years. That building was haunted. Neither my sister or I was comfortable being there alone at night. It just didn't feel right from the moment we entered the building even during the day! The odd occurrences that stick out for me are the fact that when nobody else was in the building, I could hear "work" going on in the front office - papers being shuffled, an occasional voice, etc. The phone would ring repeatedly, but when I answered, nobody was there. This was an ongoing very annoying and very creepy problem. I was a Christian at the time, so one night I tried an experiment. I prayed about the situation and did the necessary spiritual warfare that I knew how to do, and to my AMAZEMENT, the phone stopped ringing. PERIOD. Coincidence? Answered prayer?

My room at the house we lived in when I was a teenager was haunted as well. I was dabbling in the occult at the time and flirting with Satanism, so that hardly is surprising in retrospect. I used to hear knocks on the walls when I was in that "not asleep but not awake" stage of drifting off, and I also could see an apparition of a 19th Century British Naval captain on my wall. His lips would move, but there was no sound when he spoke. I don't know how I knew his rank or recognized the uniform, but I did. I also used to frequently feel something walking on my bed when I was trying to go to sleep. That really freaked me out! This was going on not terribly long before I got saved in 1985. I became good friends with the music minister of the local Baptist church pretty quickly. I told him what was going on in my room, and he came over and we prayed, and the activity stopped! Coincidence? Answered prayer?

There's just so many things that I have dismissed and chosen not to think about because I was SO ANGRY and SO BITTER for so long. I blamed the Christian Church for a long time for the intensity of my bipolar problems, but that blame I think was misplaced. Nobody ever offended me in church. I had a lot of great friends and acquaintances. Everybody cared for me and was interested in me, or at least was civil to me if we really didn't know each other. False teachings DID do a lot of damage to me!

I have been a skeptic for the last four years or so. I spent a lot of that time VERY ANGRY and BITTER. I have NOT been a happy person. I thought I would find happiness free from religion, but I was wrong. I have NOT been happy trying to embrace an atheistic worldview that I find absolutely empty and hopeless despite my many posts on my site to the contrary. I tried to convince myself that my naturalistic beliefs could work for me and that I could live without a spiritual life and without God, but I was wrong. The heart cannot rejoice in what the mind cannot accept. I can't accept Atheism, and even if I could, there would be nothing worth rejoicing over. One of my skeptical friends, the Mighty AtheiStar as he calls himself, talks about the "Good News" of Atheism. My thought is, "Are you actually serious?" I don't consider the notion that this life is IT and that death means nonexistence to be "Good News"! That sounds like very depressing BAD NEWS to me!

I have been taking a really hard look at myself and at other "professional" skeptics who make their skepticism very public as I have. They do have facts and skeptical research that can be very hard to counter from the Christian viewpoint on their side, BUT many of them are very hateful towards the Christian God and religion just as I have been, and they belittle Christian believers just as I have done. I'm not sure that I am proud of my site or of my behavior. I'm actually sure that I'm NOT proud of my site. My immediate family knows about it, but few other people that I personally know do. It's not something that I share. I don't swell with pride when I contemplate telling people that I run a site called "Religion is Bullshit", and maybe that should tell me something!

I still have a lot of doubts, but something Jeri said also is sticking with me. She said that questions were fine and normal and that I should seek answers, but that I could also get "stuck in a rut" and never have peace. I haven't had PEACE in so long! I haven't felt JOY in so long! I understand the "why" factors of my journey from Christianity to skepticism, but the end result has not been what I expected. I turned my back on a Loving God because I was very ill at the time and because I found so much information that seemed to prove Christianity to be nothing but a myth. I'm all for critical thinking and reason and rational thought, but I must have faith in God as well. For me, I think that faith is Christian.

Although I have studied other religions and tried a few other religious beliefs (particularly that fundy Hindu cult), I keep coming back to Christianity. I think that must be because deep down I still strongly believe it to be true despite all of the skeptical knowledge I have gained over the last few years.