On Those Who Want to Believe but Cannot

A personal rant on faith

Photo by Adam Gonzales on Unsplash

I am currently not practicing any religion despite believing in the existence of God—just not exactly as God is commonly portrayed to be. I was raised in a family of Anglican Christians so I’m speaking on my personal observation.

I understand the importance of religion as a medium within the randomness of life used to facilitate a stable relationship with God, a being beyond all of us. However, the binds of religion are (or can be) constraining in such a suppressive way that you become less of a person and more of a mechanical vessel.

Religion is comforting, you settle inside it and refer to it for guidance on how to live your life. You simply have to surrender. That's the way I see it, mostly for people who never really question their faith and merely inherit it. They don't need to know more, they don't need to debate, they only need to regurgitate and spread the word.

I do intend to understand who or what God is, only not according to a fixed or rigid pathway. I'm not debunking the credibility of religion, rather I seek to actively engage with it to see if it is right for me.

But that's not what this article is about.

This is about the people who exist outside of religion but tried so desperately to be inside it e.g me.

I remember lots of times when I would pray in my heart or mind as a kid. Sometimes I would very randomly ask for something, anything. A toy, yoghurt, a new friend.

One day I asked God for a sign, a sign that they existed and that I wasn’t just thinking to myself, just silently hoping for an answer to a wish no one will ever hear.

I asked for themto show me they were listening to me. Sadly I cannot remember if I ever did get that sign but I probably would be religious if I did.

The truth is not everyone can feel this "presence of God" that many Christians take joy in preaching. They tell you that they felt it and you wonder if you were doing something wrong, that the spirit of the Lord came down on them and they found themselves speaking in tongues. Maybe God just doesn’t like you. You wonder why, you wonder what you could have possibly done.

It’s like being on ¹Father Christmas’s naughty list. You’re young, so you believe. You’re sad because of this belief. You’re afraid that you won’t end up in the book of life one day, you start to walk on eggshells, being a good kid, all so you don’t end up thrown in flames, cursed with eternal damnation.

You keep hearing that the rapture is coming, you don't want to live to see it. You're afraid of something no one knows when it's coming.

You get tired of not feeling this presence of God, reading the Bible and praying turns to a routine, you're tired of being afraid, of being incapable of believing so one day, a very random day, you stop but you don't yet notice you've stopped until much later.

You’re in church again and you take in the sight before you, you listen to the sermon and you want to believe; you cannot.

Some Christians tend to be perplexed when they meet someone who was raised as a Christian but doesn’t practice the religion. When you openly reject or don’t adhere to it they wonder how you could have seen the splendour of God and chosen to turn away from it.

My point is that the essence of religion is to connect the physical with the spiritual. Man needs an anchor to live, because man fears being boundless. Being a conscious, sentient being is overwhelming in ways we all feel but cannot fully describe. Without anchors, our lives would be like floating through outer space, no clear knowledge of a beginning or end, just floating. Maybe, possibly.

We are existence beholding itself, all of it too magnificent for comprehension after all, we are made in the image, the likeness of God, no?

¹Tf is Santa? His name is Father Christmas