No more excuses

It was when I began taking God seriously that I suddenly found myself on the road that would eventually lead to my becoming an atheist. The American actress and comedian Julia Sweeney was onto something when she said, speaking to an imaginary God, “It’s because I take you so seriously that I can’t bring myself to believe in you.” Her one sentence perfectly encapsulates why I don’t believe in God today, why I felt I had no choice but to reject my supernatural belief system.

Someone reading the above paragraph could conclude that I was never an ardent believer – not until the moment I decided to take God seriously – but such an observation would be very far from the actual truth. My religiosity had always been sincere and earnest, anything less would denote a significant flaw in my character, and such could only mean that I was foolishly trying to get one over on a being who supposedly knows the condition of one’s heart and mind.

I think the seriousness that turned me into an atheist was of the type that refused to make any more excuses for God’s behaviour, whereas before I was always conjuring up explanations for what I couldn’t understand, probably in order to boost my faith. Which faith was nothing more than an excuse to believe in the absence of a valid reason.

It’s difficult to bring out in writing a very significant time that caused me to move away from a complete belief in a personal God. Having found myself backed into a corner by God’s apparent apathy to, what I thought were, sincere pleas for help and consequential questions that sought to understand why he was responding to my supplications with complete silence, I decided to reject him on the grounds that I had insufficient reason to continue to accept him as a viable reality. Faith had become an inadequate “get out of jail free” card. Whereas I had used it often in the past as an excuse to shelve difficult questions which I felt had the propensity to damage faith if entertained for too long, it had become defunct by my need for something greater.

I had reached a point when I became excruciatingly sick to death of living my life based upon self-imposed suppositions that had no more foundation than a flying spaghetti monster. I was somebody who sincerely thought that I had experienced God and for a time that brought me a lot of joy, but as I faced my cognitive dissonance I realised that everything was mere assumption on my part. And this realisation irritated me without end, because I wanted so much to believe in a deity.

I felt insulted by God’s silence. I was sincere and seriously believed in him, so completely that I thought I could bring him out of his hiding place by obedience to his word. I tried to bring verses of scripture to fruition by conforming my life accordingly. “Ask and ye shall receive” should bloody well mean what it says. And that goes for any other scriptural promises.

Quite frankly, I had had enough of asking God questions. As far as I was concerned, the onus was now on him. If he truly wanted me to know him, then he had better get his act together and stop expecting me to put my life on hold until he deigned to reveal himself in a way that would be unmistakable. I had no time for playing a childish game of hide and seek. I had a life to be getting on with.

There comes a time when the exercise of faith becomes unreasonable, in my book.

Curmudgeonly Yours