Thoughts of a Doubting Christian ✓

A Peek Into My Diary

*gasp* I know, letting you guys into my personal thoughts?! I must be insane! However, I think it might help you guys to understand my doubting better if you see my thoughts written out in something that wasn't meant for any other audience except for my doubting, confused self.

As a reminder, I'm sharing very personal stuff with you guys in this chapter, so please be respectful! Of course, I always want you to be respectful in my works' comment sections, but this is a particularly special case. "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all," as the saying goes.

So, without further ado, here is a glimpse at some of the spiritual turmoil I experienced during my first year of college, straight from my diary:

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I have been having a spiritual crisis off and on since the beginning of last semester, which is extremely frustrating, to say the least. At first, my spiritual questions pushed me to learn more, pray more, and read the Bible more. However, I realized tonight after some thought that I don't identify completely as a Christian any longer. I use the term "Christian" for lack of a better word, but I have too many problems with Christian doctrine to be Christian in the way most people think of when they think of Christianity. For example:

♦️ I don't believe in the Holy Trinity; I believe that there's just God and nothing else. The Holy Trinity is a completely wacky and confusing idea that doesn't make any sense, and the Bible barely mentions it. (I mean, come on — does anyone know what the heck the Holy Spirit is, or are we all just pretending?) I just don't get it. How can Christianity be a monotheistic religion when it claims that one must believe in something as tritheistic as the Trinity?

♦️ Jesus had the right idea with (most of) his teachings, but I doubt that he was somehow fully human and fully divine at the same time. . . . Jesus was seen on several occasions in the Bible praying or questioning God's will; why would he have to do that if he was God in human form? This ties into my doubting of the Holy Trinity; it just doesn't make any sense! And don't even get me started on the virgin birth idea. . . .

♦️ For lack of a better pronoun to use, I still call God a "He," but if you think about it, why would an all-encompassing deity have a specific gender pronoun or identity? He's not human. Why put a gender to Him at all?

♦️ What's up with original sin? Why would God punish all of humanity for one instance of disobedience? Does "original sin" imply that children are sinful, too? Where did this sin even come from in the first place, if God is good and cannot do anything evil? Why does Judaism reject original sin when this doctrine supposedly comes from the Old Testament?

♦️ Isn't anybody else bothered by all of the atrocities that God commits in the Old Testament? You know, like the mass genocide of the Canaanites? I'm horrified every time I hear Christians trying to justify this somehow. STOP. GENOCIDE IS NEVER OKAY. EVER.

♦️ Sola fide is a terrible idea. Are you telling me that if a shitty person believes in Jesus, then they'll go to heaven just because they believed the right thing, while a wonderful person of another religion (or no religion at all) will go to hell simply because they believed the wrong thing? I call bullshit.

♦️ There are SO MANY CONTRADICTIONS, not just in the Bible, but also in Christianity's doctrine, practices, and behavior. If the Bible was truly God's word, and if Christianity was truly the way to go, wouldn't the Bible be more consistent, and wouldn't the doctrine make more sense?

These bullet points aren't even all of the reasons why I've strayed from Christianity, but they hopefully give you a good idea of what kind of fundamental problems have arisen in my mind as I have pondered my spirituality. With these problems came an even bigger problem — if God isn't Christian, is He another religion's god, or does He even care about religion? Heck, how can we argue that He cares about us at all? We're just little specks on a tiny planet in an average solar system, orbiting an average star, in an average galaxy in the middle of nowhere. As the great Richard Feynman once said:

❝It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil — which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama.❞ 

I completely agree. There's absolutely no reason why God would create this entire universe solely for us. Humans are far too self-centered. At most, we're a side effect of God's greater plan. I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, of exoplanets out there that are currently supporting life just like Earth. We're not special. The universe makes that very clear!

Then it's very easy to jump from "God is apathetic" to "God doesn't exist at all." However, there is a decent amount of scientific evidence that points towards the existence of some form of Higher Being. For example, why does the natural world obey the laws of mathematics? We have no clue why — it just does. And what about human consciousness? We don't know where consciousness comes from, or how the brain creates thoughts, or if the chemicals in our brain really constitute what we call consciousness.

Or how about the crazy fact that subatomic particles come together to create atoms and eventually things as complex as living, breathing organisms? How can billions of inanimate objects come together to form something alive? How do we explain how humans developed languages and religions at about the same time, even though they had no contact with each other and came upon these concepts separately? Everything around us is so complex that I am extremely skeptical that it could happen merely by chance.

So, what now? There's a God or some Higher Being, but He's apathetic to our suffering and petty problems? What use is that? That isn't comforting at all; in fact, it is almost more comforting to believe that there isn't a God than it is to believe in a God that doesn't care about you.

Ah, well. It's past two o'clock in the morning now, so I need to go to bed. This isn't a problem that can be solved in one night, anyway.

God, if You're out there . . . please take care of us, alright? We're just pathetic little specks of stardust, walking around and thinking we're hot stuff, but we're nothing in the grand scheme of things. The thought of You being apathetic towards human beings and life in general crushes my heart. Please, take care of us.

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A snippet from my personal diary, winter 2017-18