Flash Back, Flash Forward

So a lot of stuff happened when I was gone. And I watched the news. Flashing back…

The Democrats stormed both houses of Congress thanks to rising anti-Iraq sentiments and Republican scandals. And those ever progressive Dems selected a woman Speaker. Who then passed over the obvious number two for her own choice, who was summarily rejected.

Hillary Clinton declared her candidacy. Barack Obama became more African than black. And the Republicans are a mess.

There was a scary amount of coverage on the death of Anna Nicole Smith.

The Cardinals won a World Series. Peyton Manning won a Super Bowl. Four sophomores eschewed the NBA draft and became repeat champs.

An army hospital came under fire for subpar health care. Some crazy astronaut lady drove nonstop wearing an adult diaper just to attack her love rival.

Youtube rose to soaring heights, being gobbled up by the Google monster. Ah, but the drawbacks of being so big are that people will try to take a bite of you through lawsuits. Alas, one of the main draws of Youtube was precisely that copyrighted material.

A new show about superheroes called “Heroes” becomes a smash hit. Masi Oka comes from nowhere to become a breakout star, along with the blond cheerleader who played the coach’s daughter in Remember the Titans. A guy named Sanjaya Malakar threatens to take out the American Idol machine.

The only major thing to come to mind to remain the same is that we’re still on a righteous war against terror. And, if we were to flash forward, we’d find out we are still headed towards the same tragic result as before.

Why I am an agnostic now

So, recently I’ve changed my religious views on my facebook to “Agnostic.” Dictionary.com defines an agnostic as:

1. a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience.
2. a person who denies or doubts the possibility of ultimate knowledge in some area of study.

To put it more plainly, I believe in God but I simply cannot acknowledge that Jesus is the only way to know him because I don't believe knowing God is exclusive to Christianity.

Then there must be a question that arises. Why, if I believed in Christianity before, would I be willing to switch to agnosticism now?

Well, it has to do with my time off. I meditated and I realized something heinous about myself. I was one of those people who had faith that the good Lord would take care of anything and everything in my life. All I had to do is sit and wait.

But the more I thought about it, the more irrational it seemed to me. I mean, I’d always wanted to study history but my parents wanted me to be a doctor. Even when I did switch I could never feel their full support. It seemed to me that if I fully pursued my wishes to teach history, I’d fail to meet their expectations. But if I went back to being a doctor, I’d fail at meeting my own expectations.

This is what you call a vicious circle. Or, as one of my electrical engineering professors said, it’s a circuit that just keeps the room warm (before it burns out).

The rational play for me is to resolve this cognitive dissonance. But, to do that, I would have to do the one thing that I thought I would never do. And that would be to become an apostate of something I held very dear.

I had to renounce my faith.

If I came back to Christianity now, I would return to my former state. If I am to quit blaming God for everything that goes wrong in my life, then I have to put that responsibility on myself.

Now, I know many of those who I worked in ministry with might say that is not much different from their faith. Fair enough.

But then if you put a gun to my head and asked me if I believed that claiming Jesus Christ was the Son of God and the only way to heaven, I would say no. I would deny the exclusivity of Christianity (or any religion for that matter).

But…Jesus died for our sins, didn’t he? We’re all the children of God. We can’t store up so many good deeds and commit crimes to balance the ledger. Salvation is a gift, it can only be given, not earned.

And yet, I think about all the terrible things that happen in the world today. God does a lot of good in this world, and yet he allows a lot of evil.

And in that lies the fearful power of Jesus. I mean, my goodness, if people didn’t believe in Jesus then how could so many good things happen in the first place?

Then again, plenty of other religions allow people to cope with reality. What makes Christianity different?

Jesus died for you.

That’s the first thing you have to admit if you are going to be a true believer in Christ. My problem is that I had it backwards.

In other words, Jesus already died for me. I still had to die for him.

In the Baptist Church, believer’s baptism signifies one’s death to be reborn. I had it wrong. I thought that one baptized one’s self to die, but the truth is that you’re already dead before you become baptized.

The belief is that “once saved, always saved.” Then the answer in my case was that I was never saved in the first place. Rather, I claimed to be and followed the outward forms of being saved, but inwardly I had no such intention.

That’s what Christians talk about what they talk about denying themselves. No, they’re not going to starve themselves to death. It’s a denial of who they are, and it’s not a one time thing. Nope, they’ve got pick up their cross and carry it daily.

Or to sum it up more tidily, the exclusive nature of Christianity is irrational to me. I remember Jesus saying that one should be cold or hot because he would spit out the lukewarm people first.

If I am to be a true believer, I can’t just believe in the parts of Christianity that make sense to me. I also have to believe in the parts that make little sense to me.

In that case, the rational thing to do is to reject it in its entirety.

Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that I’m a rather irrational person.