This is a very strange time for me, I have so much on my mind and yet I’m feeling totally blocked - I haven’t been able to write any of it down anywhere; I’ve barely been able to talk to Liz about it (though I have, in bits).
This blog was started as part of an ongoing journey in self-discovery (and an exercise in much-needed self-censorship), but I have to say I think I’ve let myself down in that respect. I’ve kept part of my bargain - there are some meaningful entries here, but in the long term I think I could have done more. And I intend to, I certainly read blogs constantly, every day, from the personal to the political to everything inbetween.
I think my problem is, I don’t know how to start this one.
Here’s the thing - this might be one of the hardest journeys/admissions/confessions I’ve ever made in my life, it’s not something that happened overnight (see this post I wrote three years ago which I have unlocked over at my livejournal), but it’s something that cuts right into the heart of who I am - what I believe, how I view the world, how I interact with it, how I process it - and, I fear, how others will interact with me.
As I was trying to explain it to Liz a couple of nights ago, she came up with a (somewhat) apt metaphor: faith is, essentially, making a bet - having faith in something doesn’t mean you know there’s a God or that your church is correct, but you’re betting it is, and that’s the nature of faith - you’ve basically got your money on the idea that this path will lead you where you want to go.
And I guess, to make a long story short, after years and years of repeating the same questions to myself over and over and over again - I can’t honestly do anything else but withdraw my bet, and choose to bet on myself instead.
If you read that post from three years ago, you can see that already, I believed more strongly in human power than in any form of divine power - it seems to me that God is only some being onto whom we have projected the parts of ourselves of which we are most afraid, so as to withdraw our own responsibility and accountability: the powers of creation and destruction - ultimately, those most hallowed powers of heavenly beings - are deeply human acts at their core. What we fear in ourselves, we give to an uncontrollable, unfathomable entity and in doing so absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our lives, our environment, our world, our universe.
I was raised Jewish - in varying degrees - and this has been a difficult road for me, asking myself again and again, whether or not I can honestly say I believe in God.
So finally, when the answer came back, a quiet but firm ‘no,’ - I realized that my own ‘religion’ had been taking shape for years behind me in place of what I had been calling a faith. I don’t know if there is or is not a God - in this sense, semantically, I suppose you could call me agnostic (because, literally, I do not know) - but I do not ascribe to any religion or any faith, I do not believe in the colonization of the mind by another, without the free choice (which I did not have) of the individual.
In the overarching sense, I believe that we have sold our souls to the wrong magicians - that the man behind the curtain, so to speak, is nobody but our own tremendous power as human individuals, with free thought and free will. And despite what some in the religious community might have us believe, I do believe in moral absolutes - my morality is codified in legal norms which I do not believe came from God but like so many other things came from us, and when, confronted by the profound accomplishments we had made, we cowered and ascribed them to a higher being.
If you have to ask me what I believe in, I finally am ready to admit, that the answer is: myself.
