My Questions

I have had a few people ask me to mention the questions I had whilst on my journey of discovery. The questions that I asked of the religious leaders with whom I spoke, and which I had no satisfactory answer until I posed them to a 15-year-old Mormon girl, Donna Anderson.  In my posts I have tried to avoid sounding too critical of any particular religion or sect, so I was somewhat reluctant to put them out there, since I was afraid I would sound like I was judging these groups.  To be clear, I do judge their doctrines, as presented to me, as being inadequate at giving me an explanation of the divine that I could accept.  I do not judge anyone for believing such doctrines or tenets.  I would invite any who find these ideas and questions thought-provoking to contact me or some other faithful Latter-day Saint for further discussion.

The questions I discuss here are not exhaustive of my original list, nor are they presented in the order I discovered them.  The order herein is merely that of my memories, and I have categorized several of my original questions under the following over-arching groups.  The order is probably how important I view them from my perspective now, but it may not accurately reflect that either.

1) Am I an eternal being?  As mentioned in a previous post, if the answer given by a particular religion is no, then that religion or philosophy is of absolutely no use to me.  The obvious result is that my actions make no real difference, since this will all pass like the dust.  I am free to end my suffering or obtain my pleasure in any manner I choose.  Any moral framework built upon this philosophy is of less value than dung.  At least dung can be used to promote plant growth.

In this assessment, I am not saying that believers in a philosophy such as this are bad people.  On the contrary, they can be very good.  It's just that this philosophy cannot have any real power to help a person become better.  The goodness of an adherent will either be self-motivated or motivated on artificial constructs.  When I was searching for answers, I was in great pain, so such a belief system was too hollow for any practical purpose.  From my current perspective, I need a faith that can motivate me to becoming better than I can be by mere self-encouragement.

2) What is the nature of God?  Many of the religions and philosophies I studied taught of a "universal force" or a "collective will".  Once again, for my purposes, this is about as useless as you can get.  Such a belief cannot teach me how to be a better me.  I have no way of understanding what such an artificial deity would want of me.  Its constructs are as artificial as those of the philosophies that teach that I exist for a limited time.

Closely related is the God preached by many of the Christian religions: a God who is omnipresent, ineffable, or otherwise beyond any human comprehension.  While I believe that God's thoughts and motives are far beyond mine, I cannot relate to a God that I cannot understand in any way.  Teaching such a God is, in a practical sense, the same as teaching that God does not exist.  How can I follow or obey a being I can't understand?  How can I have faith that the course of action I am undertaking is in accordance with His will?  The canned answer to this is that He has given us His word in the form of scripture.  There are several problems with this that I may address in a future post, but suffice it to say that this explanation actually introduces far more problems than it resolves.

3) Why did God create the world?  I know that this question assumes that God did create the world.  Once again, any God that can be worshiped must be the source of all that is around everywhere.  If God somehow just came into control, there is always the possibility that someone or something could wrest that control away and my future is as bleak as if there is no God.  That settled to my satisfaction, the question still remains: why? To what end?

Every one of the priests, pastors, preachers, rabbis, and imams that I talked to were unable to give a satisfactory answer to this question.  To some, it was either "No one knows", "For His own mysterious purposes", or "To have beings to praise Him".  The first two are equivalent and equivalently useless.  The third is ridiculous.  Why would a perfect being need to create others just to praise Him?  That intrinsically demonstrates that He was imperfect, since He had a need to be filled in this act of creation.  Even if we accept that this ridiculousness occurred, that opens my fourth category.

4) From whence do people come?  As I mentioned in my earlier blog posts, the Roman Catholic Church taught me that God is intimately involved with the conception of each human being, and that such a conception results in the creation of a from thence immortal soul.  Most other Abrahamic religions teach something similar, varying mostly in the timing of said creation.  Some with fetal viability, others with baby's first breath, yet others as late as weaning.  No matter the timing, they all suffer from what is to me an unacceptable result: most of the souls so created will not ever be in the realms of glory.  For a while the Catholics invented the non-scriptural "limbo" to address the horror of billions of babies in hell, but that has since been declared by recent popes to be no longer Catholic dogma.  Other churches have tried to say that the ordinances mentioned in their scriptures are not really required, but that left me with the feeling that any God who did not have a consistency in His ordinances can not be worshiped in faith.  Changing the rules without a way to know how or in what way they are changing results in a capriciousness that destroys confidence.

5) How does God relate to man today?  It seems clear to me that the world has changed enough that I need to know what God, if He exists, wants me to do in today's world.  Some religions have a centralized authority, but since I demonstrated to myself that those religions have dogmatic problems, I cannot accept the pope or archbishop of any city to be a source for knowledge of God's will.  On the other hand, protestant churches reject the only claimed authority on the earth at the time of their organization and almost universally went to "sola scriptura"as their authority, since they could not rightly claim any other.  As mentioned in a previous blog post, and one that I have hinted I might write in the future, the very fact of so many different interpretations of all scriptures out there, along with the variations that are out there in the Christian Bibles, this basis of authority is patently lacking in any merit.

There were other categories of questions, but I am all blogged out.  I hope to get back to this soon.