Why God?

“I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Jesus

At the age of 13 something unimaginably humiliating happened to me in front of my entire military school cadet class. Racing back that night to my empty barrack’s room, certain my life was all but over, my private agony suddenly morphed into an immense rage. This heretofore terminally anxious, deeply insecure child exploded in a hate-filled torrent of vitriol toward the most powerful entity he could imagine: God.

“Fuck you!” I screamed toward the ceiling, that idiotic location in which God is always imagined to be lurking. “I didn’t ask for this, didn’t ask to be born, didn’t ask for this life! Who gave YOU the right to put me here, to force me to go through all this?!” Like a dormant volcano come to life, years of pent-up emotional pain came boiling out of me in an otherworldly howl of anguish that seemed to have no end. I HATED the God (or whatever it was) that had placed me on this planet, hated God for the suffering that seemed to pervade so much of the planet’s inhabitants.

And the more I vented, the more the hatred poured out of me. I hated God for the idiotic rules he’d foisted on us, the often contradictory demands for morality that seemed to say, “You are unworthy of God’s love but if you work really hard maybe he’ll change his mind and let you back into the garden.” I hated the capriciousness of it all, the way one boy could be born into and coddled by a warm and loving family while a girl 5,000 miles away could be sold into sexual slavery before her tenth birthday. I hated the admonishments against suicide, the Western argument that you’d burn in hell, the Eastern provisions for a kind of karmic recall to do it all again. In other words, God tossed you into the ring and warned you not to try and skip out early lest you really learn the meaning of suffering.

But what I hated most of all was God’s absenteeism. Where had God been during so much of the suffering I had personally experienced or witnessed first-hand? Where was God when a child, locked hidden away in a home somewhere, was beaten to death or a woman was raped in front of her children? How many men, women and children had impotently begged for God’s mercy even as the machete fell, the gun fired, the door was kicked in?

For perhaps the first time in my life I was not afraid – not even of God. I wanted God to appear there, in my room, so that I could give him a taste of his own medicine. No such luck. Eventually I collapsed into my bunk from exhaustion and life, as it always does, marched on.

Over the years I’ve looked back on that night and wondered why I’d targeted God with all that wrath. I had never had a particularly religious upbringing. God was simply something ‘out there,’ a mythical believed-in adult figure much the way Santa was to a child. Why hadn’t I targeted my parents? Society?

Even then, I think some part of me recognized that my parents were just as damaged as me and, by extension, so too were their parents and so on. That night I had wanted to get to the source of it all, the entity that had put the whole machine in gear. But God is as elusive a target as they come.

Taking a step back, what if there had been no God to target? What if I’d never been introduced to the concept of God? After all, babies don’t arrive on the scene with thoughts of God bouncing around in their heads. The first word from the mouth of a child isn’t “God” nor is it the fifth or five hundredth word. God may have created the universe but newborns apparently are oblivious to this fact. They must learn of God in the same way they learn of oak trees and algebra: from the adults who came before them.

Why, then, did Jesus and others of his ilk counsel their followers to be again as children lest they miss the big picture? Jesus seemed to be sanctioning a pre-God existence (innocence), hardly the stuff of a “religious” prophet. Not only was God (and other adult concepts) seemingly unnecessary, they were an actual impediment.

So why God? Do we need a God since, in most ways, He/She/It has never really made any kind of appearance sufficient to convince the masses of Its existence? Am I anymore alone in this world today, if God was not to exist, as I was that night so many years ago as a distraught, lonely 13-year-old? Is there really any difference from one day to the next?

Several years ago, when my world was crumbling about me, there was a terrifying moment when, my prayers seemingly unanswered (yet again), the thought occurred, “What if this whole thing really is just an illusion? What if there is no God and this independent little pocket of consciousness in my head really does simply emerge and vanish over a tiny sliver of time? What if I’m really just praying to the ceiling and all these silly little fears of God and hopes for an eternal afterlife are nothing more than hopeful but ultimately baseless platitudes meant to assuage humanity’s fear of its own meaninglessness?”

The revulsion I felt at that moment was so jarring that I immediately shifted to another activity lest those thoughts take root.

What was becoming clear was that far from being based on any belief in God, my ‘faith’ was built on a foundation of fear. Not fear of God, mind you, but even worse, a fear of no God at all. Because if God did not exist, what did that non-existence say about me, God’s supposed creation? Thirty-five years later, the fear and anger of that lonely, despondent kid was demanding to be revisited.

Click here to read Part 2