Coming Out - Evolving Beliefs

Continued from Part 1.

When we moved to the East Coast, I still fervently believed in God.  I had abandoned weekly church attendance and formal religion, but I still believed in Jesus, the cross, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and all that business.  It had all become very personal to me.  And that’s what they say you need, right?  A personal relationship with Jesus?

Where I was having a problem with formal religion was the concept of a “just” God.  An infinite, omniscient, loving being cannot, pretty much by definition in my opinion, be unjust.  If you understand everything a person thinks, if you can empathize with them, if you actually *created* them knowing they would feel and think the way they do, then you cannot treat them unjustly unless you’re a psychopath.  And a loving God cannot be a psychopath.  But then what about Hell, a central concept of Christianity?

So there’s a huge contradiction in Christendom; the loving god as an instrument of eternal torture.  It made no sense to me that God would punish finite sin with infinite punishment.  It made no sense to me that God would create homosexuals, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists, just to condemn them to eternal torture.  What kind of sick mind could do that? 

Ask yourself this: if my neighbor stole my car, would I want him punished?  “Yes” is a reasonable answer.  Personally, I would want him to restore my car to me, pay any damages, and possibly I’d want him locked up for a time.  Would I want my neighbor tortured for stealing my car?  No way.  Would I want him tortured for all eternity?  Of course not.  That would be ridiculously unfair.  So why would someone (God) who is much smarter and wiser and “loving” than me want that for him?

And saying that “everyone has a choice” about being eternally punished is just sticking your head in the sand.  Most people don’t have a choice; they are born into a religion.  Yes, people can change religion but that’s not a realistic option in some societies.  Why should Muslims have to convert in order to achieve heaven while Christians get a free ride just by the accident of where they were born?  It’s not a just system.  And therein was the problem.

I solved the problem by rejecting the idea that God has favorites.  By accepting that the actual God (as opposed to the religious archetype) could only be loving and just and that therefore everyone had an equal chance for heaven, religion (or sexual orientation) aside.  In fact, the whole concept of hell was so obscene, so unfair, that I rejected it utterly.  A loving, just God would have no need of a “hell”.  Hell was just a man-made idea to scare believers.  (It's interesting to note that Carol has never believed in Hell, a fact that drove me nuts when I was in high school when I was more of a true believer.)

Having neatly reconciled these elements in my mind, I was a pretty strong believer.  Some people would say I wasn’t really a Christian, but that didn’t matter to me.  I had come up with a better theology because it actually made some sense.  I believed in the good parts of Christianity (and, incidentally, the other Abrahamic religions) and had rejected the ridiculous, hateful parts unworthy of a supposed ultimate being.  I went on for a long time, happily believing in God and Jesus and getting all the warm fuzzies from feeling protected, loved, and knowing that there was a plan for my life.  But gradually that began to change.

So what changed?

Continued in part 3.