Where Do I Find God - Part I

This is not an argument built with facts and statistics. It’s not an essay to be graded. It’s not even an attempt to point fingers or blame anyone. This is simply my story.

I was brought up in the public education system. My parents are Adventist. I grew up in the church. But at the same time, I kind of didn’t grow up in the church. I realized early on that some kids from church went to a different school, and quite a few of them went to an “academy.” I didn’t think much of it at the time, just that different kids had different lives.

As the years passed, I participated in the things that SDA kids do, like Pathfinders and potluck. But I also led a parallel life away from this once-a-week world. For the rest of the week, I lived in another universe altogether, the world of public high school. In this world, there was no God. Instead there was science, there was atheism, and there were liberal modes of thought (granted, I live in a very liberal area, as I found out later). They taught me in those classrooms that Creationism is pseudoscience, something that conspiracy theorists and old religious fogies dream up, and that Christians are a cultish group that goes knocking door to door threatening people to join their ideology or burn in hell eternally. At first, I was obviously offended by these remarks, because they threatened a part of my identity. Why would they paint such a picture of my people like this? What have we done so wrong?

I learned in history class that Christians started—not just one—but over eight Crusades to the Middle East in some of the bloodiest conflicts in history. Terrible atrocities in history, and over what? Religion? These were some of the questions my classmates had. I certainly echoed them. But my instincts to defend my identity kicked in like a knee-jerk reaction, and I rationalized, well those were Catholics. I’m part of the Seventh-day Adventist group, which has nothing to do with those guys, so I’m safe.
*Just a side note here, many atheists don’t have any inkling about the difference between Catholics and the rest of Christians, so don’t even try to tell them that unless you’re willing to lecture them on the entire history of the Reformation.

Over and over I went through this cycle, slowly learning about the world that attacked my identity and then rationalizing something to defend myself. I learned in those four years that to be Christian meant to be hated. I learned that if you were going to be a believer, you had to swim upstream. You had to push back against what everyone else was saying and risk socially crippling yourself—which was a reality in that place, as I know one guy who was public about being Christian got scornfully labeled as the “Jesus boy.” And then at some point, I started thinking, is it worth it?

Why do I even believe this if everyone will hate me for it?

I grew quiet about things. I stopped pushing back vocally. What if they’re right? What makes Christians better than atheists? We’re responsible for so much bloodshed and ignorance and discrimination and legalistic perfectionism that the world may be better off without us. Everything that Christians can do, non-Christians can also do. Charity? Yup. Volunteer work? Yeah. Support groups? Yep. Living a moral life? Of course. Acting with love? Sometimes better.

I never really let go of the title, but I did let go of all my pride as a Christian. It was around the end of my freshman year. I was still attending church and going through the motions, but I went through the rest of high school with dead faith. I had subconsciously let go of a religious foundation and started actively searching for a different truth. Something beyond “Jesus loves me, this I know,” which never satisfied me because I needed real ideas to deal with real life, with all the grittiness that accompanies it. The church always gave me comfort, but it never gave me depth. And it certainly never addressed any of the questions I grappled with.

Now at this point some of you might be thinking, “Oh no, he’s on the wrong track. This is bad, he’s turning to the dark side. We gotta bring him back.” I can almost guarantee that’s what some reactions are like, because I’ve experienced it myself. Some people just despise honesty, gasp with horror at my questions, react instantly to any comment out of line in the slightest with a corrective attitude–it’s almost like all they want to hear is me blindly professing my love for Big Brother–

In all honesty and realness, I think it’s so incredibly important for everyone of the Christian faith to go through at least some of what I went through. Because coming out the other side, I’ve been refined by fire and my faith is stronger than ever. If you’ve never been tested and had every single one of your preconceptions and beliefs challenged, then how do you even know you’re standing on solid ground? It’s a genuine question.

Anyways, back to the story.

I’ve always been someone who’s dug deeper and been unsatisfied with the surface. So while most people didn’t show much interest when I asked them what they thought the meaning of life was, I was searching vigorously online for all the different types of philosophies out there and how people in our modern age thought. How do we find meaning? And thus began a long and strange journey through nihilism and existentialism and absurdism and all the -isms that have been born out of the last century. I found stoicism from Marcus Aurelius and took from his words a very practical philosophy to let go of what’s out of my control. I found eastern philosophies from Alan Watts and thought them foreign and mind-bending. I found logotherapy from Victor Frankl, and learned I needed meaning in my life to keep me going through any suffering. I found micro-meaning through modern existentialism. Everyone around me seemed to whisper “I don’t need a god to tell me what I’m supposed to do, I make my own meaning.”

I ran into a wall there, though. Absolute imprisonment versus absolute freedom. That was the one dimension by which they saw it. My classmates gave me their opinion of “Sinners at the Hands of an Angry God” with a solid “no thanks” because that was the most popular portrayal of God people saw and reproduced. The other side of the spectrum was *freedom*, which most of us young people loved and eagerly grasped at. It’s a tasty trigger word that Americans love to consume. The freedom to live however you want and make your own life’s meaning out of thin air. Finding value in what you care about, not from some old dusty book from millennia ago. No one wants “weirdos who knock door to door shouting ‘follow Christianity or burn in hell,’” as one of my classmates vividly illustrated in my AP US History class. Too many rules. Outdated. Unproven. Unscientific. The modern advances of science tell us that all we are is simply a complex array of chemical functions. Why need rules when life has no inherent meaning? Suffer in slavery to some nonexistent god or bask in the pleasures of a meaningless life!  This was my impression of what my classmates thought.

But there was another dimension too: An overarching telos versus absolute chaos. I hungered for a telos, a deeper meaning, something with a foundation, and I found it in none of these philosophies. I couldn’t find it in “I make my own meaning,” because how can you make your own macro-meaning? By following that thought, you only end up serving yourself if not something bigger. What is the bigger thing? The rest of humanity? What happens when this generation of humans dies? Did your efforts go in vain? Or are you investing in future generations to make their lives better? But they will all die too, eventually. What, so the purpose is to just make it so everyone in the future has an easier life than you? That’s certainly a noble cause, but wouldn’t the end vision of humanity be a scene out of Wall-E? What is their purpose, now that life couldn’t get easier?

These are just a tiny fraction of the questions I’ve had over my high school years. I’ve written many more in journals that are dark places to live in. And so I, a self-proclaimed Christian and practicing agnostic, graduated high school and went on to the biggest and best Adventist school that I knew: Andrews University.

This is a three-part personal story from an Andrews University student, which will be published over the course of the next two issues. If you’d like your own narrative, creative work, or art piece to be considered for publication, please send it to tjhatra@andrews.edu.