There isn’t a politically correct way to say this, so I’ll just say it: Christians are crazy people.
It’s a generalization, and technically I’m one of them.
I’ve seen some extreme stupidity perpetuated by “Christians,” so I hesitate to identify myself as such. Still, I have to call a spade a spade: I’m a Christian, and we’re crazy.
I think I’m okay with that, though. Faith simply doesn’t sit well in the belly of Western rationality. An invisible deity is a strange cog to place in modern intellectual machinery.
Everybody has beef with God, and many have good reason. Honestly, I’d be concerned if a rational person didn’t have some serious questions after taking a look around our world.
I’m sure you have your doubts.
Well, join the club.
There’s so much that doesn’t make sense to me. Suffering? I could do without it. Disease? I’m over it. And don’t even get me started on the existence of mosquitoes. Really, God?
I’m being facetious, but I’ve got deeper questions that I want answered, and the God of the Bible seemed to come up short when I started asking.
Somewhere along the road, I bought the idea that faith meant brainwashing myself into baseless adherence to a code. This was tantamount to intellectual dishonesty for someone who felt compelled to have all the answers from the God that he couldn’t see.
People weren’t much help.
One person judged me for having doubts, and another advised that I throw the pursuit away entirely.
Eventually, I stopped asking around and resolved to go straight to the source. I started by hitting up the Bible, and supplemented my research with earnest questions aimed directly at the big man.
It was a crazy idea, especially because I had doubts about the Bible (the most popular game of “telephone” the world has ever seen — or so I was told).
I was surprised when further research revealed the Bible was the most thoroughly documented book in all antiquity. If I threw that out, I’d have to throw out every other ancient text to be consistent.
It turns out that God is pretty secure.
He wasn’t threatened by my doubt.
In fact, he welcomed my incessant questioning, because he designed me that way. As I ruminated on the nature of my budding spiritual relationship and compared it to other relationships I’d seen, I was struck by a strange realization.
If two married humans can directly interact and barely understand each other while enjoying the journey, why did I think that I had to have all the answers about a God that I couldn’t see? A lover’s faith is based on his or her experience. What he or she has seen pushes that person to fight through the relational darkness of another shady human.
I realize that this sounds crazy, but I radically encountered God in a way that was relational. The doubts don’t quite nag the way they used to.
I’m not saying that everything makes sense to me.
Take the conundrum of the Trinity, for instance.
God is one, but three? Foolishness!
It registers as a rational impossibility, although some probing of physics and wave-particle duality has recently tweaked my definition of the word impossible.
To paraphrase Billy Graham, I might not see the wind, but I can see its effects. The invisible God is more than just my homeboy, and my soul is forever changed.
We don’t quite match, but we coordinate.
Despite my doubts, I’ve found it difficult to walk away from the journey that I’m on.
Doing so would be crazy.
Ryan Galloway is a religion senior at UF. His column appears on Wednesdays. You can contact him at opinions@alligator.org.
