Faith
(Before you begin, here is something old that I never finished.)
It used to be my job to find places for various things. One day, I was looking for a place to store some block-and-tackles. I realized that an ideal spot would be to hang them on a nearby wall, so in order to confirm this proposition, I placed them exactly where I thought they should go. I watched in disappointment as they dropped in a heap on the floor. An onlooker said that at that moment, he lost all faith in “faith.” For there were no hooks of any kind on this wall. I had simply placed them up against the wall and let go, hoping that they would defy gravity of their own accord. My friend claims never before to have seen anyone act with so much confidence in something that so obviously was not true.
As the preacher says, it is not faith that saves you, but faith in the truth.
There is far too much in the world for anyone to take it all in. We have no choice but to be selective. We filter, and thus create our own individual “realities.” I get that. But I still contend that there is a greater reality outside of each of our individual realities. I “believe” that there is universal truth that effects all of us, whether we choose to believe it or not. If “truth” and “reality” are only in our heads, then no one would ever get in a car accident. Or, as one speaker put it, “Truth is what you believe. Reality is what you run into when you’re wrong.”
Some of my readers seem to suggest that I would do well to find my own place in the world, and then find a concept of god that suits me. I reject this outright. If I was simply looking for a “god” as a way to make me feel better, I like to think that I might look for something that actually made me feel better.
I want to know if there is a god that exists outside of my reality and outside of your reality. A god that simply IS, not subject to individual perception or perspective. Is such a thing possible? I do not know, but it seems reasonable to assume that if God exists, and that if He was willing and capable of revealing Himself to mankind in a way that they could comprehend, then He would have done so by now. That if the truth about God can be known, then someone already knows it. I happen to think that such issues of whether or not I actually LIKE God, or whether or not I think that He likes me, are fairly irrelevant to the question of His existence.