The Cosmic Joker

I’ve often sat and wondered at the marvel of faith.  I’ve gone to church, spoken with pastors and priests, and I grew up in a Catholic and Baptist home of confused teachings.  When I was a teenager, I found a faith rooted in a Christianity based on my grandma.  If ever there was a person I’d call a Christian (as I understand the definition), it’d be her.

However, one righteous person cannot negate the horrors of all others who call themselves by this name that is supposed to be holy.

I’ve since learned that a faith is an easy way out.  If I pray then God will hear me.  If I just do the right thing I will be rewarded.  Maybe if I… and you can fill in the blanks, you’ve done it as much as I have.  And then we fall upon hard times.

When the shit hits the fan, we either run toward God, or we run away from Him.  Then we hear from our fellow “brothers and sisters in Christ” that we should just pray about it, or that we maybe just need to realign our lives within His will, or perhaps we get fed a line of BS about how these things happen sometimes and we just need to keep our faith.  What it all amounts to really, is blah, blah, blah.

There is no doubt that hard times befall us all.  That’s life.  I’m pretty sure no one with a working mind needs to be reminded of that fact.  With that said, stop trying to make me feel better about a bad situation.  Similarly, what is God’s will?  According to the bible, the only thing that I can be sure is God’s will is that “none should perish but all should come to the saving knowledge of Christ.”  And as for prayer, since when has that actually accomplished anything?

Here’s what prayer is:  it is a means of doing nothing in anticipation of something good happening to us because we are faithful.  Guess what?  The simple fact is that what happens now was already going to happen because of events that were set into motion long before we ever uttered a word.  In other words, our prayers are meaningless tropes that are good for a pick me up and little else.  In the grand scheme, they accomplish nothing.

I have fought with myself as I move beyond faith and into something more spiritually based.  I believe in a spirit, a soul.  And I believe that this spirit is eternal, that they are continuously being birthed and bring with them the experiences of all those before us, should we only figure out how to tap into it.

I believe our spirits travel from death to new life from generation to generation.  Some of us have souls as old as time itself.  We know things we can’t explain.  We carry memories that are not our own.  And to those memories we add a new lifetime of experiences.  I can see what is wrong with our world so clearly, because it’s all happened before.  And I’m not alone in this.

The Ten Commandments were meant as a beacon of civilization within an uncivilized world.  We failed.  Our biggest failure isn’t sin, however; it’s failing to realize that without understanding our humanity, we cannot fathom a higher form of being.

We think we need a God because sin entered the world, but what we really need is to realize that we were broken from the start.  And if we were created, the Creator knew we were going to fail and created us anyway.  If, indeed, the God of the bible exists, then we’re just playing our part on this step of our journey toward the unknown.  I never made a choice.  And those that wronged me in life were supposed to, because they had no choice.  It was already done long before we were born.

And so, in turn, the anger I felt and the hatred I carried within me was also beyond me, just as it was that I would eventually give all that up.  Because someone else wrote my story before I could decide how it would play out.

The idea is self-defeating.  And I have to admit that I agree with Nietszche on this…God is dead.