First semester at college we had to read Bertrand Russell's "Why I'm Not a Christian" -- “I do not pretend to be able to prove that there is no God. I equally cannot prove that Satan is a fiction. The Christian god may exist; so may the gods of Olympus, or of ancient Egypt, or of Babylon. But no one of these hypotheses is more probable than any other: they lie outside the region of even probable knowledge, and therefore there is no reason to consider any of them.”
The philosophy professor stated with a demeaning finger-waving 'shame on you' tone of voice "Believing in god is like believing in Santa Claus" as if you had any sense, you'd have to agree with him.
That lead to many self-doubting years of agnosticism, even though before that I had organic beliefs of the spirit inhabiting the material. So many years of intellectual pacing, restless, unable able to sit down.
From age 5 or younger I remembered seeing out of my mom's eyes while I was in her womb. My organic understanding of reality, ideas I felt I'd learned from experience since before I was born, were that I was reincarnated, chose my parents and my life before I was born; that life (spirit) moves in and out of, or throughout, material dimensions.
Then Ex, thank you Ex, finally offered me a place to relax into by talking of pagan ideas of reincarnation, and revering life. But then Ex wandering away by having affairs with other women and I sought solace and healing by seeking pagan ideas about metaphysics. That is when I opened myself up to everything, and experienced things I interpreted as supernatural.
It still feels like an injury, as if I was tricked by that philosophy professor who took god away from me for too many years. And yet . . . now, that doubt has become my center of balance when measuring science with metaphysics.
I was walking in the park in autumn and seeing oak leaves on the ground I wondered how in spring those leaves budded from the tree and how life was given to them from the sap within the tree and I wondered if the sap giving life to the leaves allowed the leaves to share the knowledge of the tree. And I wondered where the tree got life and I realized it was from the soil and the rain and the air. And I wondered if the soil and rain and air shared their knowledge with the tree. And I wondered how like we are to the leaves that had fallen to the ground, back to the soil and the rain and the air.
I finally have my god back, and it is very reassuring to rest in god's hands. Not because I think god will save me anymore than god saves the deer from the hunter, but because now I feel a kinship with the deer and the tree and soil and rain and the air.
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