A Message to My Children: Choose Faith
When I was 16 years old, between my junior and senior years of high school, I spent six weeks at a sort of intellectual summer camp at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. As a very naive Mormon teenager I was completely bowled over by culture shock. It was my first experience with an Ivy League university-level seminar (existentialist lyric poetry and a great deal of big-word-dropping), and my first experience with “liberated” American teenagers (smoking, drinking, casual sex).
One of our university student “mentors” was a philosophy major who took the common juvenile undergraduate delight in logically deconstructing everything I said, especially about my faith. I came home depressed and shaken. For the first time I realized that my spiritual experiences could never “prove” the truth of what I believed in.
After some months of thinking things over, I came to understand two important truths, and then made the most important decision of my life. Here are the truths:
- You can’t prove God exists, and you can’t prove He doesn’t exist, either. You choose to believe or not by choosing which of your experiences you will accept, how you interpret them, and which people you believe. Faith in God is a choice, a premise upon which you build your world view.
- I wanted to believe. Faith in a personal, loving God looked to me like choosing light, goodness, and joy over cynicism and emptiness. I wanted to base my life on the richness of all my experiences, including not just the evidence of my senses but also my intuitions, emotions, and transcendental spiritual moments.
So then I made my decision. I chose faith. In choosing faith, I chose also to nurture it through prayer, study, church attendance, and service to others. I chose to interpret my experiences through a spiritual lens. I chose to see the wonder of creation as evidence of a vast intelligence manipulating the universe, not just chance. I chose to distinguish between how something happens (temporal lobe visions, anyone? Evolution?) and why it happens, what it means. I chose light, goodness, and joy. As life went on I gradually discovered that I have also chosen peace, love, and a life-line in troubled times.
Terryl and Fiona Givens have written a short book, “The God Who Weeps,” that details the attributes of the God I believe in. In their preface they explain the choice to believe much better than I can. They also describe the story of a donkey who starved to death because, presented with two identically enticing and accessible piles of hay, was unable to choose one over the other.
Choose, my children. Recognize that faith is a choice. Read the preface to “The God Who Weeps”--give faith equal time (you can borrow the book from me). Consider carefully the consequences you can see in the lives of those who have chosen one way or the other. Understand that your choice will affect everyone who loves you, especially the generations of your children after you.
“O, be wise; what can I say more?” (Jacob 6:12, from The Book of Mormon)
Especially as this article is directed toward us, I hope you don't mind me answering honestly.
ReplyDeleteI agree that faith is a choice. Choosing to live without faith is also a choice, and in many ways the more difficult one. It has been very difficult for me to give up the idea of a God that intervenes in our lives, the idea of an afterlife where we will see our loved ones again, the idea that everything will eventually be made right. I have hope for some of these things, but not faith.
The biggest thing I wanted to say in response to this is that "cynicism and emptiness" is not the only other option than faith. I may not have much faith in God, or much use for spiritualism, but that doesn't mean I feel like life is empty. On the contrary, I have found life MORE rich and filled with meaning since I chose to stop trying to make myself believe.
If life is focused too much on what comes after, it leads to treating life like a "flyover state" - something you have to get through, but preferably at 30,000 feet. I know that in many ways this was how I viewed life. If our eternal state is dependent on this life, then the best thing we can do in this life is be as obedient as possible - regardless of how that makes us feel about our time on earth. I was depressed, frustrated, and miserable, but that was OK, because it would pay off in the next life.
Now that I have given up on the certainty of an afterlife, I find myself focused on THIS one - on making it as meaningful, joyful, rich, and wonderful as a I possibly can. Please don't confuse this with short-term pleasure seeking - I am very aware that true happiness is not the same thing as immediate reward. But I am focused on the here, on the now, and I have found so much more meaning in my life since I have changed that.
Lastly, I want you to know that I DO believe. I DO have faith - just not in God or a church. I believe in science. I believe in my fellow man. I believe in my own goodness and potential. I believe in my family and the love I have for them. I believe in the natural order of the universe. I believe in the joy found in reaching outside ourselves to help others, to connect and join in communities, and in trying to improve the overall human condition. I have hope and excitement for the future - for my future, for my children's future, and for the future of the human race. I feel that I have gained rather than lost.
Realizing that I didn't believe in the church or its teachings, and that that was ok, doesn't mean I have chosen nihilism. I feel the same way about my new faith and understanding as you do about yours - it is my way of "choosing light, goodness, and joy..."
Hi mom, thanks for sharing! Ryan thanks for responding. I agree with what you said.
ReplyDeleteThere are quite a few subtle points I look forward to talking about in person. I'll say a few words, but I *really* want to talk in person.
First, I totally agree with Ryan. You don't trade religious belief for nihilism, you trade it for faith in humanity. I was thinking the other day about how so many people say "Well, I don't know about all that history stuff, but I stay in the church because it is good". But I realized that religion doesn't give us the good in our lives, we give the good in our lives to religion. When you leave religion you are free to share that good with the people around you, without worrying about doing the wrong thing, and that so many people around you have good to share. The world is FULL of light!
I'm not advocating atheism here. Instead let's talk about skepticism as it relates to the Church. I've heard multiple times the idea that in the end you have an equivalent choice to either believe what you've been told, or not to believe, as if there were a 50% chance of either one (the donkey). This is because we mistakenly look for "proof".
Proof is a mathemetical term, and it implies perfect equality. Like, if 2+2=4, and 1+1=2, then 1+1+1+1=4. That's proof. We don't use proof when choosing our beliefs, because it covers too little ground. Instead, what we need is a model based on the best evidence we have.
Models are cool, because they don't have to be "true" in the "proof" sense to be useful. A great example is newtonian physics. We can use the model to predict how a ball will travel with great success. But the model isn't "true". It's just a good approximation.
This is how we should adopt beliefs about the world around us. We can't prove anything, so we should look at the evidence and pick the model that most closely matches reality.
So, when you look at the church, you can take lots of evidence, stack it up, and say: "hypothesis: church is true", and see how closely it matches reality. It doesn't have to be falsifiable. We just have to consider the evidence we have and say "which is more likely? The church being true, or the church being false?"
That's it. That's having a model in a nutshell. Pick the best one you can find and go for it. It even allows for being wrong! You can just change models when new evidence calls for it. It's not a personal thing, and there's no right one.
Anyway, let's talk in person soon. I love this article because it brings up so many great things we need to talk about to get on the same page before we can even start getting to the bottom of everything.
Love you mom, thanks again for sharing!