A Demon Haunted World (or not)

Is a tittle of a book but it is also a world view some people have that I don’t. Some people see the world, literally, as a battle ground between the forces of good and evil, angels and demons. People like this hear demonic voices whispering to them. Everything wrong with everyone is cause by demons. Think Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis.
 

I have a friend who sees the world exactly like that. She sees herself as exceptionally sensitive to the spirit world, maybe she is. I cannot feel what she feels or live in her head. I kind of find this infuriating because this gives power to all the self-deluding charlatans claiming spiritual powers and it is the antithesis of how I live my life.

To me the existence of demons and angels and of this battle is irrelevant. I read a short story once. I cannot remember where or what it was called but it was about a boy who lived in a medieval world and in that world everyone else saw angels singing hallelujah to the Lord as the sun rose and people were healed, curse, helped, by magic spells. This was a disability that set him apart of the rest of the world and was seen as defective. He wondered things like: What makes the sun burn? What is the source of its fuel? The moon and the sun must have different fuel because they have different light? What is the moons fuel? It also turned out he had an advantage over all the others. Sure, he could not see the wonder they saw, he could not be blessed or healed by supernatural means but he was also immune to all spells, curses and supernatural devices.

I feel like him. I don’t see these demonic powers neither can they hurt me. I don’t feel demonic voices in my head. Not that I don’t want to live in this fantastical world full of wonder, I just don’t. I think I know why my friend believes so readily in these powers. She used to be consumed by guilt because thoughts popped in her head that did not go along with the beatitudes. She looked for answers and thought it was just her, defective her, and she was consumed by guilt. Then she realized it was demons and she was absolved of guilt and self-loathing and now she just tells them to be quiet and it works. 

I was just the same, thoughts that I did not want crowded my head, I was besieged by desires and I could not stop them and I was consumed by guilt. Then I realized that Jesus had not been only crucified for my past sins but my current sins and all my future sins. He forgave me so I forgave myself and realized that quilt was not necessary. Repentance did not have to follow intense guilt because forgiveness had already taken place. Acknowledgement and conviction was all that was necessary. My guilt left and so did all those desires and thoughts. My guilt made me obsess and now that was gone and so were uncontrolled thoughts. I was free and so was my mind. She accepted that demons were whispering to her and I accepted that I was forgiven. Both resulted in a feeling of freedom and control. We indeed are very different.

Gifts of the Spirit

Some of you might be wondering if this blog is changing direction, I really don’t know but you could be. Let me assure you it is not. This blog has been about the same thing the whole way through: My spiritual journey and the questions I ask and the problems I have. This new direction on the same journey is me asking is the leading of the Holy Spirit real and useful? What does it look like and what would it look like? Will I speak in tongues and make a complete fool of myself and appear to be a fraud? Will I just gain direction in my life? Perhaps what I will find out is that the whole experiment was useless and nothing came from it. I don’t know, you don’t know but I am hoping me you, my <10 readers, will find out.

So I was thinking what are the gifts of the spirit again, I really cannot remember. I think there is prophecy and praying/speaking in tongues, the others I cannot remember. Up on looking up the possible gifts I could expect, if this whole thing pans out, there are nine. They are located in 1 Corinthians Ch. 12: 

1) Word of Wisdom

2) Word of Knowledge

3) Faith

4) Gifts of Healing

5) Working of Miracles

6) Prophecy

7) Discerning of Spirits

8) Divers (or different) kinds of Tongues

9) Interpretation of (different) Tongues

I think I know what some of them are but I have never seen a convincing case of any of them. I have been going to a Pentecostal church of one sort or another majority of my life. I have heard tongues but I have never been convinced about them (read my post on tongues to find out more). I was wanting to write a post on prophecy called: ”Prophecy: The Most Useless Gift” I think that sums up my attitude on that point. I still may write it as a part of my experiment series of posts.

I do know what some of the others are due to my very Pentecostal background. Word of wisdom is getting an insight about a person and giving them good advice without prior knowledge of the problem. That in my opinion would be an awesome gift to have. I always wanted to be a wise guru or something. Wisdom is actually one of top five qualities I ask for when I pray.

Word of knowledge is similar. It is getting information about a person or a situation without prior knowledge. Like if your dog got hit by a car and I came up to you just hours after not having heard about it and said to you: “I am sorry that your dog died.” that would be an example of word of knowledge.

Faith, hmm, I mean I know what faith is but I am not sure what it means as a gift of the spirit. This confuses me.

The gift of healing is the biggest Christian fool-them-and-take-their-money industry in my opinion. I have never encountered a person who had the ability to heal others. If those people who hold big crusades claim to have it why are they holding big crusades and raking in the money instead going to the children’s cancer ward and touching and healing children until they get kicked out for it?

Working of miracles, I don’t know. I have seen what I deem to be miracles in my own life but none of them were worked by anyone. I have never seen anyone work a miracle. I have always just seen things happen like running out of money and not knowing where the food/money came from, well usually I knew exactly where it came from but it always came. Thank our friends, thank God or thank random chance.

Prophecy, never seen it. I mean I have seen people “prophesy” but it was in distinguishable from them making stuff up. I will continue to be skeptical of this until I hear a specific prophecy and it come true specifically. Not a vague Nostradamus like mess and then try to cobble it to mean a hundred different things it could fit due to its vagueness.

Discerning of spirits basically means the ability to see demons. Like the old monk in The Brothers Karamazov by Tolstoy you see demonic influences everywhere. It could also be paranoia or schizophrenia but I really should not judge.

Divers tongues, well, I suppose that maybe speaking/praying in tongues but from what I have heard they are not diverse at all and all sound the same, not at all like what the Bible describes in Acts. My father says that he has heard non-Italian speaking Finns speak perfect Italian during services and say real coherent things that were relevant, but I have no personal experience with this sort of speaking/ praying in tongues.

Interpretation of tongues is the yin to the speaking in tongues yang. It is the supernatural interpretation of the speaking. I have heard it many times, I do not get it.

So, I am praying to receive some of these gifts now. Maybe I will receive them and then understand them. Never had a single one of them, or seen others have them in a way I could believe that they would be real, so I have no idea if they are real or not and how they feel and work. Let’s see what happens. I believe in God, it is his people that I don’t believe.

I would prefer not to atrophy, I like gains

Today I came across two articles about Christianity that made me think and want to write blog posts. The first one is The Advice the Western Church Never Heeded. While I do not completely disagree with the collection of quotes here, some I find to be absurd like the first one about the scientist dissecting the bird. Unless this scientist is an idiot, very rare in my experience among scientists, he would not be studying the bird by dissection alone but get several and observe their behavior in addition to doing vivisection. As far as I know the point of vivisection is to not have your subject die, but to sew them up afterwards so what happened was an accident especially when searching for the source of its life. I hate when people make metaphors when they do not know what they are talking about. It undermines your aim. Talk about things you understand when making a metaphor. I mean that is a bit of hair splitting on my part but it really annoys me when people do that. Also the ostrich metaphor bothers me too it could not fly no matter how hard it tried, it is just too heavy and, if I remember correctly, lacks the hollow bones of its fellow avians. It simply does not need to fly because it runs any more than I do.

What do I agree with? I suppose the fact that American Christianity is saturated with materialism. Other than that I am not in agreement because the overall tone is anti-intellectual, anti-thought and anti-questioning. To use a metaphor myself, one I hope to execute better than the person being quoted on this blog. Your faith is like a muscle if you never use it, it will not be challenged it will atrophy and disappear. If you lift weights it will get bigger and stronger. Weight lifting is based of challenging and hurting the muscle to break it down in order to build it up better than before. The exercise of questioning your faith will break it down in small ways but it will make it stronger and more apt to take on greater challenges in the future. I for one lift weights. My progress has not been astounding in the past year but there has been a little progress. One year ago I did eight bicep curls with a 5kg weight, now I do 12 bicep curls with a 7.5kg weight. Soon I can move up a weight and will do a significantly lower number of reps with a 10kg weight (I have adjustable weights they do not alter in traditional increments of 1kg). Why do I do this? Well I really hate people falling over laughing when I flex.

Anyway, enough about my puny arms. I think the biggest problem in Christianity is the lack of questioning and encouragement to really figure out your own faith. If you rely on others to tell you what to believe unquestioningly in the best case scenario you miss the point of Jesus dying for us and giving us a direct line to God, in the worst case scenario you end up drinking some Kool-Aid with some outwardly happy people in matching track suits and die. Think about what you believe in and if a pastor says something you don’t understand, ask him or her, or look it up in the Bible yourself but most of all think about it yourself and pray about it. God gave you brain and he is not above answering your questions. If you don’t understand something in the Bible the same principle applies.

Jehovah's Witnesses Revisited

In my post What to do About those Jehovah’s Witnesses I expressed a sentiment that the name of God is not all that important to me. It happens to be very important to the Witnesses so it was the first thing they asked: Does God have a name? What is it? You know, I knew what they meant. They showed me passages in the Bible etc. I mean they are Jehovah's Witnesses.

I had an anonymous commenter disagree and point to some parts of the Bible where this matter was discussed (Lords prayer and the ten commandments). I felt like he assumed that I did not know the Bible very well, I am sure that is not what he meant but I had not missed these passages. I said as much in my reply. In light of this I feel like I need to explain that point.

It is not that I do not believe in a specific God with specific attributes. It is very clear to me what my God is like and if I were to call him a proper name I would rather use the name Jesus than Yahweh. Three in one trinity and all that jazz.

Why is it that I don't see it as important, unlike the missionaries and the commenter. Well, let's use an analogy the ladies who came to my door used. What they said was: If there was a group of men and one of them was her husband if she just called out “man!” they would all turn, but if she called her husband by name only he would turn (well, perhaps another would turn too if there was more than one man with the same name but she did not include this in her analogy). My version of this is: My husband is not only a man he is my husband by virtue of our relationship and if I see a group of men and my husband is in it and I call out “Husband, get over here and get me my dinner!” ('cause I am a jerk). All the men that are husbands might turn around but only my husband would trot on over because we have a special relationship that requires him to do that. The other husbands would not recognize me as their wife so they would get back to what they were doing.

I see calling out to God in prayer to be the same way. Only my God would recognize me and come to me. My husband would not be offended if I were never to call him by his proper name again. I could just call him sweetie or honey or other saccharine things. He knows I mean him.

Also there is the assumption that there are other gods. The Jehovah's Witnesses are monotheistic but this analogy does kind of assume more than one entity listening to the prayer. I do not personally believe there are other entities out there to listen to my prayer and only the God I believe in.

So I am a little confused as to why it is a big deal especially since most translations of the Bible do not say Yahveh on these instances. My New Jerusalem Bible does. It is not usually used by evangelicals. We usually use the NIV. The Lords prayer does not use the name Yahveh even in the NJB. It just says “Father in heaven”. How ever His name is to be kept holy but does not mention what that name is so it is not really any proof for the Yahveh side of the argument. Hope that clears up my personal position on the point.

Älä alistu!/Don't submit!

So, I found this video because it has caused quite a bit of controversy in Finland and caused 500 resignations from the Lutheran Church the day it was released. It was not put together by the Evangelical Lutheran Church but it was done with their money.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfPjTvTx5-U

Campaign official pages: http://www.nuotta.com/kampanja

If you do not speak Finnish here is the over long and tedious video in a nutshell. "Anni's Story" is the title it is from the "Don't Submit" video campaign. Anni was a bisexual girl. She realized in high school and became quite involved with gay rights and dated a girl in the ninth grade and then they broke up. During this time she was having some problems and met a girl who wanted to just help her with them. One day this girl asked to pray with her and Anni saw the holy spirit. She went to a religious youth camp and became saved. She prayed hard to leave her unholy desires behind and God heard her and she stopped dating girls nor did she really want to. She has been engaged to a man for a year now, she is twenty. She said that being with a woman never really made her feel like a woman, because one had to take the man's role etc.

What really stood out to me is that it is so simple to be rid of lustful impulses. Just admit what you are and give it to God, he will heal you. I would like to say, I do believe that God can heal everything from gout to cancer and it is very much in his power to change a person's sexual orientation or to curb lustful impulses. That being said, lets talk about the practical implications for a young person who hears this. I bet any God believing young person who has this or similar problems has prayed for them. Asking God to change a perceived flaw in you is nothing new. I cannot count the hours I prayed as a teenager begging God to change me, to cure me from this or that affliction. Lustful thoughts were very much featured in those prayers, as was my laziness and other assorted general "badness". God did not cure me, at least not then, of one single one of my flaws. I felt like crap. I felt like a failure. I felt like a bad Christian. I prayed everyday for God to take me to heaven so I could stop constantly failing and sinning. I was tired, I was desperate. What would have Anni's message of easy, reachable fixing have meant to me? It would have meant an ever compounding sense of guilt. It would have isolated my lust for women as an even more heinous crime than my lust for men. Here I had been beating myself up for both indiscriminately.

I call this a suicide inducing flick. Say, it is wrong! It is Sinful! Älä alistu! Don't submit! It can all be made better. God is waiting for you to give your burden to Him and heal you! All that can hold you back now, sinner, is your own lack of faith! Only one you have to blame is yourself. Maybe Anni has more willpower, maybe she has more faith, maybe her prayers are special. Maybe I am failing at this like I fail at everything else because I am too damn lazy to change. Way to rip old wounds open and make me feel like that girl again.

As an end note, God did heal me, but not in the way I expected. He healed me by giving me perspective, understanding and self acceptance, flaws and all. I was good enough for him to die on Calvary for my sins when I was at my worst. Not because I was special or good but because he was and he loved me. He cleansed me when I accepted his cleansing. It does not matter that I am lustful. It does not matter that I am lazy. I am exactly as he created me. This does not mean I need to whore around and not do any work because that is not how he intended me to behave. He intends me to strive for a healthy balanced life. My flaws are really the other side of my virtues. I am lazy because I am laid back. I am content to contemplate and not worry too much about having a spotless house there are more important things in life. I am lusty, but I love my husband and it can be a very positive quality in a marriage when channeled properly and understood for what it is. Now that God has healed me from my low self esteem and depression I can no longer really care about my flaws and can really give them to God, and you know what, stopping the demonization of that part of me has allowed me to not be trapped by lustful thought. When they are no longer forbidden or wrong they take a backseat to more important and interesting thoughts. I am no longer paralyzed by fear and anxiety due to my laziness and am actually able to break the inertia and do what really matters and needs to get done.

Self-acceptance is a wonderful thing. Do not submit to thoughts of self loathing and accept that if you do seek help from God for your problems, which I do recommend, he may not give you the quick fix you want but will allow you to walk down a longer, harder path that will make you a better person and accept yourself, and in the long run that beats a quick fix.

Worst Ways to Evangelize

1. Yelling at random people on a street corner calling them whores and whore mongers.

2. Trying to outsmart them by using clever turns of phrase which really do not make your case, just make your opponent unable to answer.

3. Quoting scripture. What is scripture to someone who does not believe in the Bible? Also scripture quoting is usually employed in a barrage to show off and to try and remove any possible personal discussion from the witnessing.

4. Using "Science". God cannot be proven via the scientific method, the other good news is that he cannot be disproven either. Here you think: Wait, I am sure she meant to say "but the good news is". No I believe that not being able to prove the existance of God is a good thing because the second we prove him belief is no longer neccesary defeating the whole point of seeking Him.

5. Handing out tracks. If a person is supposed to be brought to a personal knowledge of Christ you need something personal there. Come on, would be Apostles, get your hands dirty. Get down there with the sinners like Jesus did. Open up. Give of yourself in order to give God.

Witnessing is a personal act that requires you to care about the person on a personal individual level. I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God. When people figure out it is just about winning souls they will became jaded with Christians and what a person thinks about Christians they start thinking about Christ.

Edit: I noticed a typing error which changed the meaning of what I was trying to say. Originally I had said "I mean, you must care about him as a person, as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." What I had intended to say was, "I mean, you must care about him as a person, not just as a potential soul you can help usher into the kindom of God." It has been corrected in the post to reflect my sentiments. 09:46, 25.8.11

The Holy Spirit

"Same river different parts." Is what my husband says when talking about the way his Quaker beliefs see the holy spirit and the way my Pentecostal back ground sees it. Pentecostals focus on the strong events of encountering of the holy spirit, and from what I have seen the Quakers focus more on the quiet gentle, still small voice of daily guidance the holy spirit offers. We are swimming in the gently quiet shallows of the spiritual river basking in the love of God. The Pentecostals are in the rapids in their canoes wearing crash helmets and seem to be having a whole lot of crazy fun, WOOHOO!

I like the rapids, I do. I like strong tearing up shaking encounters with the spirit, I just cannot be sustained from day to day on them. I had a few good encounters like that as a child with God, when I was saved and when I received the holy spirit a different time some years later. These were wonderful experiences of closeness with God that probably resembled, in a small way what Moses felt when he saw the Lord pass by.

The danger of these experiences is sometimes you wish to "feel the presence of God" and forget that he is always present. He never leaves, you can always feel him, talk to him and listen to him with out crying screaming and begging for that next strong hit of the holy spirit, like a heroin addict begging for credit from his dealer. Christians, at least in America, often like to compare God to drugs. There is a song by a Christian alternative group, either Skillet or Thousand Foot Crutch, I forget which that is called "Better than Drugs". This is a cute, if over played metaphor many American Christians like to use but when Christians start acting like drug addicts it is no longer cute, it is alarming. It is alarming when a Christian cannot get by with out having a "profound spiritual experience" complete with crying, gnashing of teeth, writhing on the floor, passing out and spewing nonsense. I am not saying these things are somehow not true manifestations of the baptism in the holy spirit but what I am saying is that they are darn exhausting and alarming to the uninitiated, and even those who know what is going on and often indistinguishable from a classically demon possessed person. There is so much wrong when that high is all you are chasing and attaining it is about begging and pleading with God, like you are still a sinner, to come to you. What is wrong with shutting the frack up and listening for a change?

It works for me and when I stopped chasing that high and just listened and relaxed I started to feel and appreciate the daily presence of God more and I no longer felt unworthy because I had no apparent gifts. What God taught me in the silence is that I am good enough for him to love the way I am and there is no need to worry about any special gifts, just living my life for him is good enough. If I fail to enjoy his presence today, I can still do it tomorrow. He is always there for me and more like a warm cup of tea, a blanket and a hug from a loved one than a syringe full of whatever or a noseful of cocaine. Maybe I am just getting old and just no fun spiritually.

Heaven and Hell

I was just thinking about the concepts of Heaven and Hell and life after death. It is remarkable how differently people see it. I personally know people who believe in reincarnation, ghosts, Heaven, but not Hell. I also know Atheists that believe in no after life at all except in the one in the memories of our loved ones or in progeny. I also have a pagan friend who believes that if he lives a good and honorable life, he will go to Valhalla. I respect all their beliefs and believe they feel the same way about them as do I. I laugh at none of the concepts, except the ghost one, but I am working on that. As I have said before, you can not believe just because you want to just like you cannot stop believing just because you want to.

What do I believe? Well, I like to use the Bible as a general guide for all my beliefs, that and my own conscience. I believe in Heaven and Hell, but not exactly as western cultural tradition portrays them. The Bible describes Hell as a separation from God and Heaven as a connection with him and other believers that have passed on. The Bible also describes them as realms beyond out imagining, where our existence is nothing like Earth. It does say that Hell is a place of fire and brimstone but if it is a non-physical realm that means very little and must be a metaphor. It also says that we have spiritual bodies in Heaven, but what are spiritual bodies? I have no idea, I am sure they would be something nice. I also believe that up on entering Heaven we will know what God knows. You know,answer to life, the universe and everything, and I bet it will not be 42.

Some people do not believe in Hell on the philosophical principle that it is unfair and that a loving God would never punish anyone. Well, I think the opposite, it would be unfair for God to force someone who wanted nothing to do with Him in life be be with constant communion in the here after. I think this would be a good time to answer the question of: Do I think Hell is a place of suffering? Yes, I don't know, maybe. Is the short answer. The long answer would be: Yes, it would be suffering for me to be separated from the presence of God forever. I don't know if it would be suffering for those who never knew him and since I do not know the extend which you can have contact with others sent to Hell, I guess it could be suffering for others too.

Now lets talk about the elephant on the page, well Elephant if you are an Evangelical Christian or someone who reads the Bible. Revelations. I believe that it has a really detailed account of how heaven looks with gold and gems and God being the source of light or something. I have read Revelations, it makes no sense to me and Bible scholars debated strongly weather it should be included in the Bible. Is it legitimately inspired by God or just the hallucinations of a man? I do not know, not until I go to Heaven and get all the answers. I have had no special revelation on Revelations from God. It just does not fit in with the rest of new testament and makes precious little sense to me. I honestly do not care what overly elaborate metaphorical, ope to interpretation way the world as we know it will come to an end. Even if it is legitimate it does next to no good in the way I live my life. It is a fear mongering book the skews the way people live their life. It (or rather its popular interpretation) makes people think they will be raptured any moment or it males them waste time looking for the signs of the end times which have been here since the resurrection because we have been living in the "end times" since then. Well, my views on Revelations would best be explored in another post.

I think there is a Heaven and a Hell. I also think that the boundaries between Heaven and Hell and the world of living are immutable so, sorry, I do not believe in ghosts. Neither do I believe that we linger in the world of the living after death. As soon as the brain dies, we are off to Heaven, or Hell and no turning back. That is what I believe about this. You are welcome to share what you think.

Backsliding

I was reading http://blog.beliefnet.com/stuffchristianculturelikes/2010/05/154-the-word-backsliding.html

It reminded me of my teenage years. When we moved to the US we started attending an Assembly of God church. This was the worst thing that happened to me. I am not saying Assemblies of God churches are bad or that any churches we attended were bad either but for me and my development as a Christian and a person it was terrible. As a teenager I was just starting to define the specifics of my faith. I slowly started to realize that what I believed and knew to be true did not match up with what my church believed and this opened me up to some criticism. I did not understand why their opinion could be so different in these matters. That was because my brain was not completely developed yet. There was also something else wrong with my brain; I started to think. I had trouble spending time reading the Bible and concentrating on prayer. I knew that is what I had to do in order to maintain a good relationship with God. This started to worry me to the point that backsliding became a worry to me. What I did not realize is that having trouble remembering to spend time reading the Bible and praying was not the reason for my feeling of disconnect with God. I believe what really caused me to perceive a distance was my dissatisfaction with my self, my disappointment with myself and the stress caused by this. I think some of the reason I had trouble concentrating might have been a manageable form of ADHD combined with unrealistic expectations of what spending time with God meant. This disconnect set me up with increasingly lower self-esteem that spiraled off to depression.

So I started to feel bad about myself right on time to start going to youth services at my very large church. The emphasis on very regimented disciplined time spent with God continued added to it was the pressure to witness. It is not that you had to earn your salvation or anything, it was just that if one was truly saved one would naturally and eagerly do these thing. Having low self-esteem was also a sin but I was not able to love myself or even accept the love of God because I did not think I deserved it because I was not a good Christian. I asked God to help me be better, to change me, make me something else because I was not good. I felt flawed somehow, defective and even that I must have been the only mistake God ever made. God did not answer these prayers because there was nothing wrong with me. I was the way I was supposed to be. No one told me this. They just said I had to give my sins up, to nail them on the cross. I had to relinquish my sins to God, give up my low self-esteem and lustful thoughts. Did I say lustful thoughts? Girls don't have those, right, only boys. Wrong, I did and felt like no other girl did. This made me feel even worse. My pastor told us to take our sinful thoughts and pluck them out of our heads. We were told to imagine that it was a mouse or a rat and pluck it up right by the tail and toss it out of our minds. I tried it (never pluck up a real rodent by the tail) and it did not work. It was useless, stupid and ineffective. Still I kept on doing it because it was the only thing I knew to do.

Soon I began to believe I was constantly backsliding. I would spent countless teary hours crying out to God believing I had lost my salvation and was going to hell. Every worship experience was an agonizing climb up to God, I knew God could never leave me so it had been me who left so I climbed and climbed. I did not know that all this self hatred and stress had build a wall that I could never climb. We were told to seek God and become cleansed like the newly fallen snow but we were never told that we were good enough for Him just as we were. We had to do nothing but accept the love and quit stressing. It was always an effort toward holiness. My Christian walk as a teenager was hell.

It has been a slow progress but now I know that while I am far from perfect God loves and understands me. I am exactly as he intended me to be and I no longer worry about it. That is so strange that something so seemingly good as a Christian community can be something so hurtful.

In Which I Talk About My Religious Beliefs

So, today during open worship I was pondering the same thing as I usually do during open worship, my lack of faithfulness. By this I do not mean a lack of faith, just of faithfulness. You see, I do not believe I can help believing in God and Jesus and the whole shebang (shibang, shuebang I have never written that word before and have no idea how to spell it). I believe in God just as much as I always have. I am just lazy and never really practice my faith. This is very strange because it still colours everything I do. I still consider it one of the most important things about me but I never do the common practices of faith. I never really read the Bible, I pray maybe once a week outside of church. I have struggled with this issue my entire life. I just attribute it to sloth and hedonism, watching TV is just more immediate fun, as is writing a blog.

I guess some people might think I am about to say something like I am fine with this, I won't. I am not fine with this, I never have been. I am used to this. I believe because I cannot unbelieve but I gain none of the real benefits of faith. Sure I enjoy my assurance at an eventual afterlife in paradise but I am a melancholy person and I usually benefit greatly from sustaining a relationship with God. It makes me feel more upbeat, hopeful, purposeful and productive. I don't go to bed at night feeling an emptiness in my day like something is missing and my day is not complete. I feel empty because of this and suffer from insomnia because I would rather not lay my head on the pillow in the dark and feel like it seeps in my heart and makes me feel so dark because there is nothing to do but think.

Why don't I just chat with God or, if you don't believe in Him, talk to myself if it makes me feel so much better? I am not sure. I have been wondering about this for a long time and cannot find a real answer. I think it has to do with the laziness and the procrastination and all that but that really explains nothing because I am able to maintain a fairly regular schedule of exercise and I am capable of brushing and flossing my teeth every night without fail. This whole thing is fairly disheartening and used to make me downright depressed when I was younger. Then I grew up and realized that it is not the end of the world if I fail at it today, or if I failed at it for the past six days and even then just told God how sorry I was about the silence between us. There is always tomorrow, and better yet, there is still today and I can try today and still get a better night sleep even if I can't sustain the habit. Just relax, my God forgives me, maybe I should forgive myself too. God would not want me to beat myself up about it.

What is this all about

If you came to this looking for a skeptical female blogger you are in the right place but I mostly deal with matters of faith. If you are looking for scientific skepticism written by women may I recommend Skepchick? If you are just interested in skepticism in general my favourite podcasts are The Skeptics Guide to the Universe and Skeptoid.

I really love questioning things before I accept them but I don't really fit into the skeptic community because not only am I theist but I am a Christian a very devout one but the stuff I beleave is a little off so I really do not fit in with other Christians either. That is because I am an old earth creationist meaning I accept the scientific evidence for how we got here but I beleave there was a benevolent deity behind all that. Also I am not so sure about a lot of the established details of Biblical interpritation. I reject your theology and substitute my own.

I do like to think I am a very tolerant person. I know other people feel just like me about their particular beleif systems. Once you realize that it is a lot easier to understand other people.

I guess my heroic mission here is to use my superpower of being skeptical of my own beliefs to help aleviate some of the self deception many people are under from never stopping to think and never asking who and what they are and who and what they beleave in. Asking these questions does not always yeld the answers you want but it can help you live a more honest life.

This state of self deception traps Cristians in the cave of shadows, as in Platos allegory of the cave. They are too complacent to climb out and look at the world as it truly is. A faith unquestioned is a faith not worth having and a faith so weak examining it would break is worthless and you might as well not have it.