I am happy to answer, and do not consider it prying. I am curious about how the universe and things in it behave, how they got to be here in the first place, and all manner of things like that. I seek explanations of those things. I would have simply left the subject of religion out of my life, were it not for the fact that religion purports to offer insight into these things, and so I was always curious to see what insight it offered. After a good deal of time which might have been spent reading something more useful, I have come to the conclusion that religion does not, in fact, offer insights into these things, and that, in fact, the evidence for Christian belief is not of a kind, character or quantity that would suffice to convict a serial jaywalker of jaywalking.
I do not consider my conclusions about this to be “choices,” in any meaningful sense. I know people who quite explicitly choose what to believe, and those people are invariably the sorts whose judgment is highly questionable. I try very hard not to “choose” what to believe because my choices can’t affect what’s real; instead, I choose to take in information about things and I choose to evaluate it as best I can.
When it comes to religion, I suppose that I continue to hold out the tentative possibility that there is something I’ve never heard of that will be enormously convincing, and that when I encounter it I’ll become a Sufi, or a Buddhist, or some such thing. I even hold out the possibility that there is evidence for Christian faith which is unknown to me, though I find that difficult to believe as I have tried – this religion being, after all, the dominant religion of my culture – to ascertain what the evidence for it is, where at least I can say that my investigations of Jainism or Baha’i-ism have been much more cursory and so it’s likely that I do not know the whole case that a believer in those things would make.
But choice, where belief is concerned, is in my view a grave error. It is hard enough to be objective, especially where everything in my culture prejudices me in favor of the Christian religion; why toss the effort at objectivity out the window and “choose”?
I am not concerned about the consequences of belief or non-belief in the “hereafter” sense. This is partly because I am inclined to think that there is no hereafter to worry about, but it is also partly because the manner of presentation of Christian faith is so often couched in terms of a threat of some sort of horrid consequence. I regard this as job-security for priests, and unlikely to be true.
Take, for example, Matthew 25:35 to 40 (if you don’t have a reference handy, this is the “I was hungry and you fed me” bit.). I regard this passage as a beautiful ethical statement of the highest sort: regardless of whether one believes in a god or not, the surprising identification of the divine with the weak and needy, rather than with the mighty, and the suggestion that all people are called to aid others and relieve suffering, is profound, and by the time I finish reading it I am practically choked up with the deep sentiment of it.
But then we get to the next bit, starting at verse 41: the cursing and the committing to the fires of those who did not feed the hungry, et cetera. And that spoils it. It ruins the point, it ruins the mood, it takes this high ethical statement and it renders it as a threat of divine whupping. I cannot read things like that without thinking that this can only be the work of priests in need of job security, and far from finding it persuasive, I find it so detestable that it is impossible for me to imagine having respect for a god that was responsible for its issuance.
What to believe? Not what to “choose” to believe, but what to believe? I am convinced that nothing but evidence of the most compelling character can justify belief in paranormal forces and beings. I find none of that on offer. What I do find are texts like this, which bear the stamp of their lowly origin. If the texts were quite perfect, they could do nothing to establish the facts of which they speak; but they are, in my view, so very much less than that.
I am glad not to believe in the god of the OT, or even its slightly-reformed NT version. I do not think I would worship it if it did exist, but I certainly would live in fear over the prospect of some sort of eternal fiery disemboweling session. I think that my father, who was very much raised to believe in this harsh and punitive demon-god, died still trembling at the prospect – though he had spent his life “seeking” supernatural truth – that this was, after all, the god he would meet and that the nasty Lutheran church of his childhood would turn out to have been right, after all.
But, choice? I reject it. I cannot choose what persuades me. I spent a lot of time as an advocate, choosing HOW to persuade others, but in that role one learns how very important it is not to persuade oneself too thoroughly. My object is not to find something to believe; my object is to get it right.