Why not start here?

I was raised Catholic in a small community of mostly Catholics. Just like anybody who was raised in a specific way and in a specific place, my background skewed my perception in certain ways.

I had a classic problem: the things I had been taught about God didn’t square with my perceived reality and any answers available to my questions seemed insufficient. At the same time, I felt pressured to make a full and absolute commitment to the faith. The pressure showed up in many forms, from social pressure to eternal damnation.

I gave in to the pressure and carried what I would describe as a pathological belief in God. It was entirely learned and inauthentic. I thought of it like an insurance policy: just enough coverage to superstitiously fend off the .002% chance that the eternal hellfire actually exists. At the same time, I didn’t actually believe in any of it. I chose to live life believing in conflicting ideas, and I was too scared to consciously acknowledge the incongruity. This went on for some time and caused a considerable amount of mental distress.

In response to the cognitive dissonance, I cultivated an illustrious career of suppressing my thoughts and emotions. Despite my unmatched suppression ability, I eventually became unable to avoid the thought I’d been dodging for years, the thought that I didn’t actually believe in God. I finally gave up the fight, stopped resisting the thought, and accepted the potential consequences I assumed came along with it (hell, etc.). I believed that simply having the thought made me an atheist. In my mind at the time, God was basically synonymous with the church, so if I didn’t believe in one I also didn’t believe in the other. It had to be Catholicism or atheism, there were no other options.

My first response was to study philosophy. I got a lot out of what I was exposed to, and I’m sure I’ll never be done reading philosophy. However, I always assumed that there would be some smoking gun argument that proved the nonexistence of God. To my disappointment, I did not find it. One argument for the nonexistence of God (among many) goes like this:

1. If God exists, then God is omnipotent, omniscient, and morally perfect.
2. If God is omnipotent, then God has the power to eliminate all evil.
3. If God is omniscient, then God knows when evil exists.
4. If God is morally perfect, then God has the desire to eliminate all evil.
5. Evil exists.
6. If evil exists and God exists, then either God doesn’t have the power to eliminate all evil, or doesn’t know when evil exists, or doesn’t have the desire to eliminate all evil.
7. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.

For me, the problem with this argument starts at the top. To conclude that God doesn’t exist, you must define God in some way. Defining God in any way and in any language would require putting boundaries on the infinite. Because of this, arguing against the existence of what has been defined as “God” is pointless. The definition has split the whole of the infinite into “God” and “not God” and in the process has ceased talking about what people mean when they talk about God. Interestingly enough, this gets back to my original misgivings about God. On some level I was aware from a young age that the “God” I was praying to was just a thought or image in my head, which is no closer to being God than any definition that could be used to disprove God.

Because it appears impossible to talk about God, I have accepted that I’m never going to get an answer to the question of the existence or non-existence of God from the physical world, a book, or logical reasoning. Even if this sounds agnostic, I’m not agnostic. Taking a stance that there is no justifiable stance to take is just too ironic for my taste. So what am I talking about? No stance, no specific belief, and therefore, no conflict. Just a blank space where a belief used to be. As it turns out, my need to have a belief, an identity, an answer for anything, was always and will always be a problem that ceases to exist if I let it go.