You may have been wondering where I have been, yes you have
don’t bloody lie. Anyway, I have been producing a short film these past few
weeks and haven’t really had the time or energy to sit down and write a blog,
but now that I have an idea, it’s not at all film related. Though the
inspiration is. A character in the short discusses his faith and it got me
thinking about my own. So here we go, time for me to get all pretentious and
philosophical about faith and religion.
Religion and God have always been a pretty significant part
of my life. I have been ‘raised’ as a Christian. I use inverted commas because
I wouldn’t call it a strict religious upbringing, more that it was always
something that I was aware of and that my Dad is very solid in his Christian beliefs.
This I think led to my own interest because rather than having religion thrust
upon me I was rather eased into it, which for me is the best way. Having a
belief system forced onto you is never an effective way of building up faith.
And so up until my early 20s I guess you could say that I
held some fairly devout Christian views. God created the heavens and the earth
and sent his only son Jesus Christ to die for our sins, that sort of thing.
However my religious faith took a bit of a kick in the nuts at 18 when my
mother died. Now, at the time of it happening it actually strengthened my
faith. I suppose in some ways I saw it as a test, because although we had
prayed and prayed for her recovery, she eventually succumbed to her illness. I
felt as if I had to stay strong at the time and I used God as a post to prop me
up. But at the time I didn’t realise that my faith had been irreparably damaged.
As I got a little older - and this is going to sound
incredibly cliché – a little wiser I began to question my faith more and more.
This started off with the more basic things like, ‘why do bad things happen to
good people,’ something that those with a strong religious faith almost always
have an answer for, but this time I wasn’t satisfied with just believing God
had a plan. I began to search out for more reasonable answers to life’s
questions. For instance I had always been a strong disbeliever in the theory of evolution,
for no other reason than it conflicted with a belief that God created man in
his own image. However, I then did a bit of reading and realised that evolution
is not a conflicting belief system. It’s not set out to disprove God or mock
those of a religious faith (though people like Richard Dawkins give this a good
go) and instead realised it is scientific fact. I realised that denying
evolution was the same as denying climate change. The evidence is there, you can’t
not believe it, you can ignore it, but all you are doing is displaying ignorance
to fact. This doesn’t have to mean your religious views are wrong, but that
perhaps some of the figures in the equation of life change.
On top of this new found scientific evidence, I began to
question some of the more core beliefs of Christianity. The idea of heaven and
hell has always been a particular interest to me, how to get to the former and
how to avoid the latter. It basically boils down to accepting Jesus Christ as
your saviour and living a good life, which sounds simple and easy. The thing is
that I find this core doctrine of Christianity so incredibly selfish. What I
get from that is you can live the best life possible, you can help others, you
can love and be kind to as many people as possible, but if you don’t accept
Jesus its down to hell with you.
I’m sorry, but I cannot get my head around that. If God
supposedly gave us free will and can see the past present and future then
surely as an all knowing God he knows that some will not accept Jesus and will
instead subscribe to other religious faiths or indeed no faith at all. That
being the case, are all these people going to hell? Will millions of soul’s
burn for all eternity just because they never picked up a bible? What kind of
God would be so cruel as to let that happen? That’s not love, that’s just
vicious and unfair. The idea behind a religion is to have faith that you are
loved and looked after in this life and the next, but to me that just makes God
scary. A kind of judgemental overseer who makes sure you obey the rules or he
will destroy you. Maybe I am being overly dramatic here, but this contradiction
really did knock the lingering faith that I still have.
Much like a character in the film I am currently working on,
I would much rather have faith in myself and those around me. Again going back
to the idea of free will, surely it’s a God given right that I would rather
have faith in people and things I can conceivably see and touch. Surely it’s better for me to live a life that
rewards those around me via my actions. I want to be kind and I want to help
people because it feels good and its makes others feel good. If I am doing that
for some vague belief that I will be rewarded, or worse to avoid punishment by
being sent to hell, then who am I really doing it for? What’s the point of my
life? These questions often go around my head during my more existential moods
and I still don’t have the answer, but right now I just want to do my best at
whatever I do, because really that’s all I can offer.
My faith is not dead, and if I really think about it I do
still believe there is a God, I am not sure whether it’s the Christian idea of
God, but I would like to believe there is something out there. Faith is a hard
thing to maintain, but all I can say is that I have a lot of faith in my fellow
human beings, - even if they do
sometimes think Donald Trump is a good idea as president – because really for
me, the people you meet, love and live with are the real purpose in life and
faith in them is what truly matters.
Can I leave it there? No jokes to speak of again, it was all
very serious wasn’t it? But then again I am a very smart and sophisticated guy
so I guess it’s to be expected. Anyway,
here is a video of a seal screaming like a man - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-yUKS3O66A
