Transition from Fundamentalism to Agnosticism, part three

This is a continuation of insights that I wrote in my daily journal back in 2005, as I tried to navigate a transition from doctrinal Christianity to a Christian-spirituality-agnosticism.

But if God is in me, as in all creation, he is experiencing creation. He is in me in a way he is not in a rock, because in me he experiences consciousness. As I continued on 24 January 2005, if God pervades all of nature, “occasionally tendrils of the holy come together, coalesce, react, sprout into phenomena that deny explanation…All I know is that music and color and science are all more beautiful than we have any right to expect.” The next month I wrote, God pervades everything but does not actually cause anything in the Newtonian sense.

At the same time, I admitted the truth of agnosticism: “All of conservative Christianity is a scab that hides true religion and, in order to prevent the scab itself from being shed, doctrinal Christianity prevents healing.” It keeps you scratching at the wound. It keeps you going to church, instead of healing your mind and returning to clear and happy thought. “Religion is the great fester on the sick body of humanity.

“There is both senseless chaos and blessed order in the world. There is frightful chaos that is not God’s will…Each day we must reaffirm whether we concentrate on the beauty or on the terror. I have several reasons for choosing the beautiful. First, if I cannot be sure there is no God, then I assume there is. Second, our evolution has made us religious, and the mind requires some kind of religion just as the body requires vitamin C, so I might as well choose a healthy religion. Third, it is deeply, not intermittently, pleasurable to have a good religion. Just as our eyes and mind create a model of the world, with things such as color that are not really there, so our minds create religious order.

“…I swim through a reality of God’s thick presence. Thick light, the antithesis of Thick Darkness. [I am not sure what this means. But I just like the imagery. It helps me live. The Bible in several places used the imagery of thick darkness, the kind of foggy darkness through which you cannot even see a ray of distant light. I wrote a series of novels with this name. Thick light is the kind of light in which you cannot see the light source, but it is all around you.]

“Religion is a coping mechanism. We can face disasters but not chaos. The question Can I trust the world requires a religious, rather than a scientific, answer…We must simultaneously admit suffering yet affirm the good in the world. The mother telling the child everything will be all right, and religion telling us the same thing: both are equally truth or lie. No one would think of censuring the consoling mother.

“…the pursuit of goodness and love is worth it, even if no one ever hears a heavenly voice saying, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”