RE: Why are you a Theist?
April 2, 2013 at 4:51 am
(This post was last modified: April 2, 2013 at 4:53 am by Angrboda.)
I considered this thread, and to be blunt, was rather underwhelmed by the idea of explaining the history of my faith in answer to this question. Part of that is that my practice and my beliefs are rather private and personal, and the thought of opening up that part of me to others, and being vulnerable in that way, simply makes me recoil. And I would certainly be lying if I tried to say that there isn't a certain amount of defensiveness involved in avoiding the topic on an atheist forum like this. There's every reason to be suspicious and wary in an atmosphere like this. But I gave it a little thought, not planning to share my story, but more simply exploring what the nature of my reluctance towards doing so was.
I didn't really come to any conclusions regarding that, but something else occurred to me as I was thinking. If I were to attempt to explain the origins and development of my theism, I'm pretty sure it would follow a standard, stereotyped pattern. I would turn my gaze inward, searching for memorable events and thoughts related to my history as a believer, and take the salient ones and string them together with a narrative designed to make sense of that history, like stringing beads along a piece of string. But I know, both from my knowledge of psychology and personally, that this is a very flawed procedure....
As a person with chronic mental illness, and particularly one who had many different doctors and therapists over the course of my treatment, I'm intimately familiar with that process in unexpected ways. Every time you start as a new client with someone, the first few sessions are devoted almost exclusively to retelling your history. You spend several hours of therapy time just explaining how you got from where your symptoms and their causes began, all the way up to the present day. But the thing I found through that experience is, that at least for me, that process is fraught with a tendency toward confabulation, or, in plain speech, "just making shit up." I would be in the middle of telling my history to someone, and it would hit me how what I had been saying for the past hour was not actually what had happened. It was a mixture of fact and fiction. I didn't imagine or make up events per se, but how I connected up the events, how I theorized that one event or symptom led to another experience or development, those "connections" between events tended to be thoroughly ad hoc, and driven less by what actually happened or why it happened than it was by "the demands of the story."
So in addition to other reasons for being reluctant to share my story, some of which may be more or less admirable, or more or less defensible, I now have new reasons. It occurs to me that, even if I were to attempt to explain my history, it would inevitably have a tendency to be deeply infected by bullshit, because that is how we, typically, as humans, develop our "belief stories," and, I imagine this is no less true for an atheist explaining why they came to nonbelief as it would be for a theist to explain why they came to belief. And to be sure, I can't say I really know or fully understand how I got here from there. And that doesn't bother me. Tolerance of ambiguity, even in deeply important matters, is to me, a strength, and not a weakness. But even beyond that, if I truly wanted to answer these questions, it would, at minimum, entail an intense and protracted spiritual journey, in order to find out the answer, for myself, and not just to make up some cutesy and defensible mythological story about how I came to be. And even then, given the intensely private nature of the results of such a journey, I likely would be thoroughly uninterested in sharing those details with people on a forum, largely because they matter to me a lot more than what they might mean to someone else matters to me. So if you're looking for my story, it isn't here. Nor is it likely to be any time soon.
For what it's worth.
![[Image: singmo%20protector%20in%20rakshasa%20visage.jpg]](https://images.weserv.nl/?url=dl.dropbox.com%2Fu%2F52566856%2FRatz%2F2012%2520July%2520%252B%2Fsingmo%2520protector%2520in%2520rakshasa%2520visage.jpg)
![[Image: extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg]](https://i.postimg.cc/zf86M5L7/extraordinarywoo-sig.jpg)