On Faith

I've tried to avoid posting things that are too obviously autobiographical, though most of these pieces are oblique references to people and events in my life. This piece will be less veiled, but perhaps no clearer than the others: my thoughts on the matter at hand are far from clear. In this post I turn to (or away from) faith.

I started to think about my faith seriously, like many others, during college. I decided that, if I was to engage my faith in any relevant manner, that I'd best reconcile it with the imperatives of rational, reasoned thought. Once that stage was over, I could move on, I figured. I didn't pick this process arbitrarily. My life and identity have, for as long as I can remember, been intertwined with the church. My grandfather is a minster. My father is also a minister who spent most of his adult life teaching History of Christianity at the United Theological College in Bangalore, where I grew up surrounded by young men and women who wanted to be ministers. No less than 3 uncles, 1 cousin, and 1 grand-uncle are ministers. In some ways, the priesthood is the family business.

But as I grew older, I soon became aware that not only had the church defined a large part of my identity, it had circumscribe my own mental awareness of the church as an institution, and Christianity as a worldview. I knew no other way of approaching the divine. I was so steeped in the church, that 'rethinking' it could only follow thinking about it seriously and critically. This realisation coincided with my slow disillusionment with the church, youth meetings, services, liturgies, the Lord's Prayer, Vacation Bible School, and bible quizzes. I soon attended church less and less, and the 'Evangelical' turn my youth group had taken only made it easier for me to mentally and emotionally disconnect from the church.

This period was very refreshing to me. The pleasure of not having to wake up for Sunday service was coupled with the realisation that, for the first time, I had found some spiritual breathing room. The more I disconnected from the church, the more I was able to think about my faith. Thus, I came to the decision that I could flex the muscles of my reason within the realm of faith. Till then, faith had merely sulked in the back of my head as an entity that was vast in its scope and importance, yet something I was only dimly aware of. In this period, I started to drag my faith out from the shadows into the harsh light of my intellect. The closest analogy I can think of is the scene in The Two Towers where Gandalf reveals Grima Wormtongue to be the snivelling schemer he truly I was. I resented my faith, much like Gandalf did Grima. I resented the circumstances of birth, societal pressures, and plain dumb acceptance that had led me to this state. After all, I wouldn't accept someone's political views without some reasonable justification, why should my faith escape scrutiny? The systems of knowledge that I had been brought up to know, especially the sciences, would scoff at the notion of Newton following his Laws of Motion with the following proof:
Trust me, it's true. God told me so.

It seemed to me that all through my Christianity-soaked childhood, I had lapped up many such proofs for the elements of my faith: praying to an unfeeling, unresponsive ether; thinking about a heaven that included me, and excluded my Muslim best friend; standing up during 'testimony' and spouting how good it had been now that I had 'accepted Jesus Christ as my personal saviour.' Why should I pray, go to heaven, or accept a saviour? I began asking these things, and the answer was, "Trust me, it's true. God told me so." When I asked people who knew better about the rational basis for this faith that they held so dearly, they quoted the Bible. The circularity was both troubling and amusing to me. What's the use of quoting the Word of God to justify God?

And so I now come to the present day; I am agnostic. There. I said it. To clarify, I hold this position because it's inherently impossible to prove the non-existence of God. It's just as indefensible to say "There is no God." as "There is a God." Instead, I am what others have called a 'tooth fairy agnostic.' I think there's as much a chance of God existing as the tooth fairy existing. I am not the kind of agnostic that believes that some amorphous being exists that can account for this world's existence, however far removed from the Judeo-Christian god that entity may be.

Also, this is not a rejection of my Christian heritage, which has had many positive outcomes, but no more than a Muslim, Hindu, or atheistic heritage could have provided. I can no more reject this heritage than I can reject being an Indian, a Malayalee, or a man. Instead, this a rejection of a system of belief that posits as its basis an essentially unknowable, non-falsifiable divine.

A friend of mine commented that it's a difficult time to be a believer nowadays with all the subtle and overt scorn for religion and people of faith. That may be so, but I come from a different realm of difficulty. I was born into a desert of indoctrination that has asked me to take so many things on faith, and has proved nothing to me. Yet it threatens the apostate with hellfire. If that's not scary, I don't know what is. I once saw a TV special about a Methodist who had become an atheist. He described the moment of his rejection of faith as a moment of freedom and liberation. (Interestingly, that sounds like so many people who have 'accepted a personal saviour.') I don't feel the same freedom. My rejection of faith is, perhaps, more furtive. The furtiveness does not stem from uncertainty about my position, but is instead the shadow of the faith I leave behind. That shadow whispers in the background the words of John 3: 18 "Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of God's unique Son." I am comforted by the fact that, like so much of my past faith, that's just plain illogical. I feared its repercussions, but we all get over the monsters under our beds sooner or later.