Planet Utah

Latest thoughts on religion (and why I still bother)

Regular readers know this is something I've been struggling with for a long time. I've gone from lapsed Catholic, to strict Catholic, to generic Christian, to theist, to deist, to agnostic-leaning-strongly-toward-atheist.

This transformation has been driven by, and has also driven, a tremendous amount of thought, prayer, reading, writing, and conversation. More than a few people have said, "Why do you put so much effort into this? It's not as if you're ever going to get solid answers. Plus, you don't have to take it all so seriously..."

My response to that is three-fold. First, the question of God's existence is--potentially, anyway, depending on the nature of God, if there is one--the single most important question we can ask and answer in life. Second, I enjoy the intellectual exercise of working my way through these issues. Third, despite what people say, I do believe that I am getting closer to solid answers...not necessarily solid answers for everyone, but for me.

In short, I see a clear return on investment here.

So, where am I now? I start with the fundamental question: how did all of this stuff get here: you know, life, the universe, me, soap-on-a-rope, etc. I look at the answers that science gives, and they don't work for me. In part, that's because they're terribly incomplete. Scientists simply don't know, for example, how life began on this planet. They have some well developed ideas, but at this point, that's what they are: ideas, not answers.

Beyond their incompleteness, many of the ideas lack an intuitive plausibility and simplicity that I need in order to say, "Okay, that makes sense to me." For example, the idea of the universe having its origins in an infinitely dense singularity doesn't help me much. First of all, I can't imagine or understand the concept of "infinitely dense." Second, even if I could imagine and understand "infinitely dense," I would want to know how the singularity got there, how long it had been there, what "there" even means when you don't have the concepts of time and space to work with, and why the singularity violently heaved all of its matter outward 14 billion years ago. I want answers that I can wrap my brain around. They are not forthcoming.

Now, some (many?) would say, "That's just because you're not smart enough to understand the science." Could be. But that doesn't change my situation: science doesn't provide satisfying, intuitively plausible answers to my questions.

You can proceed two ways from this point. On the one hand you can say, "Give science some time. Eventually it will provide the answers you're looking for." On the other hand you can say, "If the answers that attribute all of this--life, the universe, you, your self-awareness--to random chance aren't satisfying to you, then maybe answers that attribute it to some sort of higher intelligence will be satisfying."

Because I'm worried about dying before "eventually" rolls around, I'm going to go with the "other hand" here. (I can always jump back to scientific explanations if good ones turn up before I die.) That gives me two more options: 1) intelligent design; or 2) some sort of organized system of philosophy or religion that assumes (or believes it can prove) the existence of a higher intelligence.

I can't embrace intelligent design for two reasons. First, I don't understand the science well enough to make legitimate judgments about its intellectual merit. Second, many people who do understand the science--even Christians who understand the science--are highly critical of ID as science. So, intelligent design, like the purely materialistic/scientific explanations, doesn't help me much.

That leaves me with non-scientific systems of thought, whether philosophical or theological. They provide answers that do make intuitive sense to me. Again, this may be true simply because my brain isn't large enough for the scientific explanations to make the kind of sense I'm looking for. But I'm stuck with the brain I've got, and the philosophical and religious answers to my big questions are the ones with the most intuitive plausibility. To me. For now.

Okay, so what to do about that? Pick a religious philosophy or an organized religion and follow it. Why? Because it's easier than starting your own. That's the same reason I'm taking Krav Maga classes rather than trying to invent my own method of self-defense. Krav Maga may not be the best system out there, but it's a system into which a lot of people have poured a lot of time, thought, and energy over the years. It will definitely get me where I want to go...maybe not as quickly or efficiently as other methods, but it will get me there.

Religion should work the same way. Why not reap the rewards of someone else's investment? Why not stand on the shoulders of giants (or at least people who shop in the big-'n-tall section)? Why not follow a path that has gotten other people to the place that I want to get?

Okay, so which religion or philosophical stance am I going to choose? I don't know. I do know, however, that it will have to have certain characteristics:

• It will have to welcome, even embrace, doubts and questions of the sort that I struggle with.
  
• It will not claim to have a monopoly on truth.
• It will not claim to be the "one true way."
• It will not ask me to believe things for which there is scant or no evidence.
• It will not ask me to believe things about God that make no logical, empirical, scientific, or historical sense.
• It will require some thought and effort.
• It will provide a non-material reward for that thought and effort...in THIS life, not after death.

So, there you have it. If you'd like to nominate your religion, the comment box is open for business.

A word on Mary's behalf

I have a Jewish friend named Mary (for purposes of this post). She sometimes gets frustrated, even angry, with me when I write about Judaism. Mary would never put anything in the comment box, so I want to give her point of view equal time here.

I believe the crux of Mary's anger/argument is this: it's not fair to fault Judaism for failing to be something it doesn't even aspire to be, namely, historical truth. Judaism, Mary says, is a system for connecting people with God. (She wouldn't put it that way, but I lost her most recent email on this, so I'm doing my best.) Whether or not it's historically true/accurate doesn't really matter. What DOES matter is whether it's useful for helping people understand and commune with the divine. Accordingly, the lack of evidence for the historical accuracy of Judaism is not a legitimate grounds for criticism/skepticism.

(Gratuitous sports analogy: imagine we were talking about the Suns, and I said, "Shaq's an okay player, I guess, but he can't hit the three." If you knew anything about basketball, you'd say: "He's not supposed to hit the three, nimrod. He's a center. A big body. He lingers in and around the paint, blocks shots, grabs rebounds, and hits five-footers. He's not even supposed to BE outside the arc, let alone shoot from there. If you want to criticize him for other things, fine. But you can't really criticize him for his three-point shooting.")

My response to Mary? I'll give you another analogy.

You show me a detailed map purporting to give directions to the Fountain of Youth. It requires a lot of decoding, but if we COULD decode it, we'd be young forever.

Awesome...unless there's no Fountain of Youth. If that's the case, what good does the map do us? Now, you might tell me, "The person who drew the map actually saw the fountain with his own two eyes, so I know it exists." Then I would ask, "Really? And how do you know this person actually saw it?" And you would tell me, "Well, among my people, that's the tradition that's been handed down from generation to generation for a few thousand years." Then I would say, "Hmmm...that doesn't sound like that much to go on. I mean, no one who's still alive actually knows if this guy saw the fountain, or if he drew an accurate map, or if the map was copied and recopied accurately over thousands of years, or if the fountain is still there (assuming it ever was)." And then you would say, "Well, you might be right, but the quest for the fountain is the thing that gives my people its identy." And then I would say, "Okay, good for you...but that's probably not something I want to spend my time on."

Judaism's the same way for me. If it can't even help me get over the threshold question of whether God exists, what good does it do me? And even if I'm to assume that God does exist, how do I know that Judaism in any way accurately captures God's essence and man's relation to God? And if I can't have confidence in those things, again, why does Judaism deserve my attention as a legitimate, meaningful system for communing with God?

I suppose Mary's answer would be, "because it works." (Her answer would also be, "It's not just about God. It's also about how we deal with one another.")

I don't doubt that Judaism does work for many people. I just know it wouldn't work for me. The starting point for me has to be a (fairly large) kernel of truth. Otherwise, why would I pay attention?

Yes, I have been reading a lot about Islam recently

Can you tell? Anyway, I need to make another point in that vein.

Imagine that a Jew murdered a homosexual simply for being a homosexual. In the general outrage that followed, the Jew could refer everyone to Leviticus 20 and say, "This is what God demands. If the state refuses to enforce God's law, then God's people must enforce it."

Now, I'm as ignorant as I can be about how modern-day Jews deal with Leviticus 20 and other, similarly antiquated (in my view) parts of the Torah. I'm certain they DO have a way of dealing with them, though, so I don't want a bunch of comments from people saying, "Hey, the Talmud put this issue to bed about 1500 years ago." I don't doubt that. I also know, however, that there are Jews AND Christians who take the Bible text literally. I have personally met people, for example, who think the universe is only 10,000 years old, and who think that homosexuals should be put to death...because that's what the Bible tells them.

It occurs to me that this is really all that radical Muslims are...people who take the Quran and the related "Tradition" literally.

And why wouldn't you take the word of God literally, if indeed it is the word of God? If you had a radical Muslim sitting before you, and you couldn't persuade him that the Quran and Tradition were NOT the word of God, what argument would you make about why radical Muslims should not act on Quranic dictates and mandates? If God demands it, who are you to tell the radical Muslim that God is wrong?

I'm not trying to rationalize radical Muslim behavior here, nor am I engaging in an act of cultural relativism. I'm saying that while their behavior is crazy and abhorrent, I have no idea how to stop them from engaging in it without also getting them to abandon their religion.

That makes this a very difficult, and different, war. In the Cold War, when the eastern bloc finally abandoned communism, it was abandoning a secular ideology invented by men. If the radical Muslims are going to abandon Islam, that means abandoning what they consider the literal, unerring word of God.

Making that happen is a pretty tall mountain for the non-Muslim world to climb.

Footnote: I'm sure some readers will note other options -- killing all of the radical Muslims, or getting them to abandon their tactics without abandoning their religion. But I'm not sure how we do either of those things, either.

Christianity: Best of the Big Three (UPDATED)

I don't consider myself a Christian any more. These days, I'm more of a striver. I believe there's something out there bigger than I, but: a) I'm not sure what it is, and b) I don't think it's captured by Christianity, Islam, or Judaism. If I had to choose one of the Big Three, though, I'd choose Christianity. Even though I often write and talk about the lack of evidence for the basic Christian story, it's miles ahead of the other two.

The sine qua non of Judaism, for example, is the covenant between God and Israel. You won't find evidence for the existence of such a covenant anywhere outside of the Torah, which was anonymously authored by assorted members of...the tribe of Israel. I'm not saying that these authors had a vested interest in creating a heroic historical tradition for their people...okay, I guess I am saying that. Furthermore, they didn't commit any of this stuff to paper until hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years after the events they describe. Personally, I can't remember what I had for breakfast yesterday. And again, if you're looking for anybody ELSE in human history to provide independent evidence for the basic story in the Torah, you're out of luck.

(I know the historical truth of the Torah doesn't matter to some Jews, but it matters to me.)

As for Islam, it too has a few big strikes against it that Christianity does not. First off, no one started putting stylus to clay tablet (or whatever) until a couple of hundred years after Muhammad was gone. (The earliest Gospel, on the other hand, was written 35 to 40 years after the fact.) I have a feeling that a few things may have been exaggerated, lost, made up, etc., in the process. Second, unlike the individuals chiefly responsible for spreading the Jewish and Christian stories, Muhammad (like Joseph Smith many centuries later) was the "prophet" of a religion that very conveniently made him rich, famous, powerful, and worthy of multiple wives. With the stamp of approval from God, he became a quasi-deity on earth. Nice work, if you can get it -- or at least fake it. (That logic, by the way, applies to Arabs generally. Islam considers Arabs to be God's favored people, just as Judaism does with Jews. I think Muhammad would have had a lot more credibility if he had said, "I've got a revelation from Allah that his favored people are...South Dakotans! As for Arabs, turns out we're in a tie for fifth with the Dutch. I know you're disappointed, but it could have been worse. Just be glad we're not Inuit Eskimos." That would have been what lawyers call an admission against interest.) Third, Islam expresses respect for Jews and Christians as "people of the book," affirms the divine calling of the prophets of these two religions...and then goes on to preach things that are not just inconsistent with much of Christian and Jewish belief, but are downright repulsive. How do you square that circle? (Islamic answer: "Have you no humility? Such things are known only to the great and powerful Oz! Oopsie, I meant Allah. Missed my morning coffee...")

Second thoughts on free will

Back when I was a believer, I would sometimes find myself explaining free will to others. "Imagine," I would say, "that you were in love with someone that was not in love with you. And imagine that you happened upon a powder that you could stir into their drink, which powder would make them fall for you like a ton of bricks. Would you do it?"

Most people would answer "no." They wanted the object of their affection to love them for the right reasons, not to be tricked into it. I would tell them that God is the same way. He gives us free will because he wants us to come to him of our own volition, or not come at all.

This used to strike me as somewhat unsatisfying, though, for a couple of reasons. First of all, God being God, what does he need us for? He's God. He's self-contained. He doesn't even take a magazine when he's having dinner alone. Why would he need or want all of us miserable humans?

But let's say that I just don't understand God's true nature. Let's say that God really does want and need our love. And let's say that he wants it to be given freely. Why would he not leave us free to choose or not choose him, but constrain our choices in other matters? If you were God, for example, you could say, "I'm not going to allow human beings to molest children. That will not be an option for them. It simply won't occur to them, in the way that it wouldn't occur to them to try to ride a unicycle to the moon. But they'll still be free to accept or reject me."

That would make sense, wouldn't it?

Here, though, is a more recent realization on my part: for many years, I was setting up the love-me powder analogy incorrectly. Here's how it should go: "Imagine that you were in love with someone that was not in love with you. And imagine that you happened upon a powder that you could stir into their drink, which powder would make them fall for you like a ton of bricks. And imagine, too, that in falling for you, they would be blissfully happy -- happier than they ever imagined they could be. Would you do it?"

Answer: hell yes. It's win-win! The one that I love is now in love with me, and we are both blissfully happy. What's the downside?

Playing devil's advocate, you might say, "But could you REALLY be happy knowing that she wouldn't be in love with you were it not for the special powder you had?"

Answer: hell yes, again. Bottom line, she's in love with me, and she's never been happier. I don't care how she got there. It would be one thing if I were an unlovable dirtbag. But I'm a good guy, I'm a catch, I love her, I will treat her well, and she will be happy forever. I'm exactly the kind of guy she SHOULD HAVE fallen in love with on her own. She didn't. Everybody who knows me said, "her loss," and they meant it. But it doesn't have to be her loss. That's the beauty of the powder! Now she sees what she was missing, we're in a relationship, and she's soooooo happy.

So, why doesn't God take this approach? Why doesn't God say, "You know, I know what would make my children blissfully happy: perfect communion with me. So, I'm just going to build their brains that way, so that they're hard-wired to seek and find that kind of communion. I will enjoy their affection, and I will enjoy their obvious happiness and delight in their relationship with me."

But maybe God is different from me. Maybe God really couldn't enjoy the relationship with his creation, knowing that he had rigged the game in his favor. So, he lets everyone choose, and when someone does choose him, God experiences true, genuine delight.

You see what that means, however. God is selfish -- no, he's ghoulish. He grants us free will, knowing that it will result in untold billions of us making the wrong choice, and burning eternally in the fires of hell. The other side of that coin, though, is that some people make the right choice, and that makes God happy. God thinks the price of his happiness (the eternal suffering of billions) is worth it.

But isn't this the very opposite of the Christian god? A god who suffered for our good, not a god who let us suffer for his good? If any Christian readers want to try to square that circle for me, give it a go.


 

Concluding thoughts on religion

I'll tell you now where I think I'm going to end up, or come down, when all of my reading, thinking, talking, and praying is done.

Obviously, each of the three monotheistic faiths begins with a deity. Let's call that deity God. The concept of God has its roots in some basic human beliefs, desires, and questions: all of this couldn't just have gotten here by accident; every creation has a creator; why did that bad thing happen to a good person?; why did that good thing happen to a bad person?; how did I get here, and what am I supposed to do now that I'm here?; what will happen to me when I'm no longer here?; what's the appropriate way to live my life?; who can I turn to for solace when I'm grieving, for relief when I'm suffering, for comfort when I am afraid, for companionship when I feel all alone?; who is responsible for all of my blessings? who is responsible for all of my suffering?

And so on. A fully-developed God story speaks to all of those strands of thought in a satisfying way that no purely secular philosophy can match.

Parts of any particular God story may be true. In fact, when I'm confronted with the fact of something where there could be nothing--that is, when I'm confronted with a universe where there need not be a universe--and when I'm confronted with the emergence of life from inanimate matter, it's not  hard for me to believe that God or something like God was responsible. I recognize that 10 or 50 or 100 years from now, scientists may be able to explain what happened before the Big Bang, and how life emerged on Earth, and do so without making reference to God. But for now, it doesn't seem absurd to me to throw God into the mix. Sometimes, in fact, it seems absurd NOT to. (Maybe, though, my brain is just too small to comprehend purely materialistic possibilities that are duck soup for a guy like Steven Hawking.)

The evidence for the existence of God is pretty weak. That's surprising. Given the purported centrality of God to the universe, to Earth, and to our lives, you'd think we'd have more concrete evidence for his existence than, say, the existence of Napoleon, or Julius Caesar, or Pontius Pilate, or Genghis Khan, or Hannibal. The truth, though, is just the opposite -- we can prove that these men existed beyond any reasonable doubt. We can't say the same of God.

If you're going to believe in God, then, it's going to take a lot of faith -- belief in the absence of proof. You have to accept that.

The same is not true, though, for most of the details of the three monotheistic faiths -- Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. When it comes to their claims, you don't have to have faith. You can subject their claims to normal standards of evidence, and of logic, and of reason. That is because their claims take place in our world, many in recent times, in specific places, and among specific people. Many of those claims, therefore, are effectively testable.

By any reasonable standard of proof, the claims fail. If you are to believe the basic Christian story, for example, you have to believe the Gospels. Should you believe the Gospels? Possibly. But before believing them, you'd want to know who wrote them, whether or not they were credible authorities, what information they relied upon, how accurate that information was, and whether there was any corroboration for the Gospels outside of the Gospels themselves. If you did a little digging, you would find that we don't know who wrote the Gospels; we don't know what information they relied upon (though we know in some cases they relied on each other, and in some cases they relied on oral tradition); we don't know how accurate that information was; and we know that there is no corroboration for the vast majority of the Gospel accounts (including the single most important piece, the resurrection) outside of the Gospels themselves.

As I said, by any reasonable standard of proof, you would have to reject the Gospels as a true, valid, reliable part of the God story. The same goes for the basic documents and doctrines of Judaism and Islam.

Even so, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all reflect good-faith efforts to work out a system whereby man can understand his place in the world vis-a-vis God, and his duties and responsibilities to God and his fellow man. Even though these systems are purely human inventions, they represent three of our best attempts to imagine what God might be like, and what he might want from us.

Accordingly, if you believe in God, pick one of the big three traditions that makes sense in terms of the way YOU think about God. There's no danger of picking the wrong tradition, because they are all wrong -- that is, none of them is "true." But they are all good in that they attempt to connect us with the thing we call God, if indeed God is out there. And if God is out there, we should WANT to connect with him. He's worth the effort.

Why not in this life?

As I may or may not have mentioned, I've been reading Dinesh D'Souza's book, What's So Great About Christianity. It really is absolute crap. It's poorly reasoned and poorly written. It's the weakest work of Christian apologetics I've ever read. In fact, I've come away thinking that the atheists have an even stronger case than I thought before.

Somewhere along the way, D'Souza got the idea that without any real credentials, and without investing any significant time in researching the subjects he's writing about, he could turn out books worth reading. Well, he got the wrong idea.

Anyway, D'Souza spends a lot of time in the book talking about how the rewards for Christian virtue, and accountability for un-Christian behavior, come primarily in the next life. That was no surprise to me (or anyone else, I imagine), but it did get me thinking: why should that be? Why wouldn't God provide rewards and punishment in the here and now?

If you believe the Bible--and if you don't, I'm not sure on what basis you call yourself a Christian--God has no problem dispensing rewards and punishments in this life. In fact, that's a good bit of the story of the Old Testament. When the Jews as a people, and certain Jews as individuals, follow the law, God bestows blessings on them. When they don't follow the law, God punishes them. (And then there's the story of Job, in which God reserves the right to punish you even when you ARE following the law. But in the end, Job gets his reward for good behavior not in the afterlife, but in the here and now.)

The standard answer to why God does not give out gum drops and spankings in this life is that doing so might interfere with free will. If, for example, an evil man wants to kidnap and torture the family of a righteous man, God can only stop that by interfering with the free will of the former. God wouldn't do that, because free will is the one thing He won't disturb.

Again, though, if you read the Old Testament, God interferes with THAT kind of free will all the time. For one thing, he often stops the enemies of Israel, or enemies of individual members of the tribe of Israel, from carrying out their nefarious designs. Remember how Pharaoh's army was chasing after Moses and his crew as they fled Egypt? And remember how God brought the Red Sea down on Pharaoh's head to end the pursuit? And before any of that happened, remember how God hardened Pharaoh's heart so that Pharaoh would continue to resist Moses' pleas, so that in turn the plagues would continue, so that God could demonstrate his power and the wages of resisting Him and His people?

See, God doesn't have a big issue interfering with man's exercise of free will. The only place He WON'T mess with free will, so far as I know, is in our decisions about whether or not to accept and worship Him. That is, I can think of no Biblical example in which God effectively makes the decision for someone either to love Him or to close their heart to Him.

But let's say that God for some reason has changed His mind on the free will question, and He really won't stop the evil man from kidnapping and torturing the righteous man's family. Why not, before that ever happens, bestow massive blessings on the righteous man, consistent with his righteousness? Then everyone would look and say, "Wow, God really blessed that guy for his righteousness. Too bad the evil guy had to mess it all up." But then, after the evil guy messed it up, why couldn't God inflict a savage punishment on him? Then everyone would look and say, "Ooph -- that is not pretty. See what happens when you mess with a righteous man? God does NOT put up with that kind of behavior."

This would make perfect sense, wouldn't it?

Once again, I can't help but think how strange all of this is. God wants a relationship with us. God wants loyalty from us. He wants our whole heart, our whole mind, our whole soul. If we don't meet His expectations, we risk eternal perdition. And yet, despite these desires, despite these demands and requirements, and despite being all-powerful, God walks away from every chance to make himself clearly known to us.

Yet, by showing Himself just enough to give us confidence in Him and His plan--by, say, blessing the righteous and punishing the wicked in this life--He could have so much more of what He says He wants. He'd have closer relationships with us. He'd see more Godly behavior. We, His creation, would be more content. We, His creation, would see ourselves in proper relation to Him, and to each other.

How wonderful this would be, for us and for God!

But He does none of this. Instead, He informs us that everything gets made right and makes sense in another life. Not the one in which we're living now, the only one we can have any awareness of, and therefore the one in which it would be really handy if everything got made right and made sense. No, the life God is talking about doesn't take place until after this one. It's a life for which there is no  evidence. It's a life that no one you can talk to has ever experienced. It's a life that God could show you a little peak of if He wanted to...but He doesn't want to.

God is so adorably coy that way!

Is it screamingly obvious to anyone aside from me that so ridiculous a system of theology could never have been created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, loving God, but could only have been invented in the profoundly limited minds of men?

Shocking

Warren Jeffs admits that he is not, in fact, God's appointed prophet on earth. I've been saying that for about five years now. I always knew that William E. Jessop was really the prophet. It feels good to be vindicated.

Footnote: The truly pathetic thing here is that all of the poor lost souls in the FLDS will say, "Well, if the prophet says that he's not the prophet, that he's never been the prophet, and that the REAL prophet is Brother Jessop, then Brother Jessop must really be the prophet. All hail Brother Jessop!" In other words, the truly pathetic thing is that not a single member of the FLDS church will say, "Oh, so you mean this whole thing was bullshit? You mean it's been bullshit all along? It was just about guys in Wal-Mart suits trying to have sex with young girls -- guys who otherwise couldn't get laid in a Bangkok whorehouse with a suitcase full of Baht? In that case, I think I'll move down to Phoenix, start wearing normal clothes, stop worshiping crackpot AV dweebs, get a job as a bank teller, and maybe read Quackwatch and Snopes a little more often."

Anklenote: did you notice how many different ways I tried to end the clause, "guys who otherwise couldn't get laid..."? I'm still not sure I like what I came up with, but I'll leave it for now.

Spot-on

Here's a sentence I liked from a Franciosi post: "Jesus was forgiving, not accepting nor non-judgmental."

Exactly right. Many years ago I wrote a post entitled "Jesus was a hard-ass." He was, too. He was an exceptionally conservative Jew for his day. Jesus said that if your hand caused you to sin, you should cut it off. No, don't take a warm bath in essential oils and give yourself a forgiving hug --- cut your damn hand off. Better to enter the kingdom of heaven with one hand than to spend eternity in hell with both.

That's not the kumbayah hippie-Jesus that so many "Jesus-is-love" types would have you believe in. That's the take-no-prisoners, I'm-not-trying- to-win-a-popularity-contest-here Jesus. The REAL Jesus.

TMI post on religion

Here's where I am on religion these days -- non-believer in the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions, and a skeptic on the question of whether or not there is a God, though leaning against.

Lots of people who argue about the existence of God make arguments along these lines: "If there is a God, why does he/doesn't he...", e.g., "If there is a God, why does he allow suffering?" That sort of thing.

Here's mine. I have had problems with depression for seven or eight years now. These are occasionally punctuated by severe depressive episodes in which I am plagued by unrelenting thoughts of suicide, and a sense of utter emptiness, loneliness, worthlessness, and hopelessness. Often, this is accompanied by physical pain that I can only describe as a burning feeling in my heart and head. When I go through this, it's not only the worst I have ever felt, it's the worst I can ever imagine feeling.

During one of these episodes, having tried everything else I could think of to ease the pain--medication, therapy, alcohol, exercise, reading, funny movies, talking with friends--I finally gave up and surrendered myself to God. Literally. Alone in my room, I dropped to my knees, in tears, and asked God to save me -- not just from the bout of depression I was suffering at the time, but from the mess I had made of my life. I came to God as a broken man. I admitted that my designs for my own life had been a disaster. I acknowledged that I had been a poor steward of the body, the mind, and the life that God had given me. I told God that I would suspend my own will and be the instrument of his will from now on, if only he would give me the necessary guidance.

You've probably heard stories like mine before. Someone bottoms out, they dedicate (or rededicate) themselves to God, and their life turns around.

Well, mine didn't. I received nothing that I could recognize as an answer...no acknowledgment of my pleas or my prayers. I utterly humbled myself, begged God for help, and the answer from God was...silence.

Typically, when you communicate a story like this, people will often say things like, "Maybe you weren't listening closely enough," or "Maybe God's answer was that you needed to suffer for a while longer," or "Maybe you thought you were sincere in your heart, but God recognized that you weren't REALLY sincere."

These are all plausible explanations.

So is this: there is no God.

Footnote: again, from experience I can tell you that people also respond to this sort of thing by saying, "But wait -- let me tell you about a time when I really DID feel the presence and power of God." I don't deny the legitimacy of those experiences. But, just as you ask me to consider alternatives to the possibility that there is no God, I would ask you to consider alternatives to the possibility that what you experienced really WAS God. (And by the way, before I became a skeptic, I had several of those experiences--the God-affirming ones--myself.)

Ankletnote: it's worth adding that the experience I described above had nothing to do with my "conversion" from belief to skepticism. That experience occurred several years ago, while the rupture in my faith--which was quite abrupt--happened earlier this year.