I was going to go back and go on and on about "resolutions." But in the meantime, my cynical side has kicked in and I just don't have that much more to say. how can you honor and respect the beliefs of your childhood when technically speaking you don't actually believe them anymore? there are lots of days when that is where I am, and today is one of them. Days when I think, I can't keep going to church, this is ludicrous. But: I would miss it if I didn't go. I love our church. It's complicated. If this were all about logic and figuring things out rationally, it would be so simple. I'd just leave.
But honestly, as I get older, I'm finding that cynicism is less and less helpful to me. And no matter how little it makes sense to my cynical self, the mix of belief and unbelief, of meaning and lack thereof, is actually the way I live. It's what is real for me at the moment. But subject to change at any moment.
AB
How can you honor and respect the beliefs of your childhood? ...
ReplyDelete------One of the distinctions I keep reminding myself of is the distinction between knowledge and belief. I thought I knew as a child - about heaven and hell, God and Satan, right and wrong, good and evil.
I understand now that I didn't know -- that I could not know, that I CANNOT know. I really don't like it that I cannot know. It was much more comfortable knowing.
So, now that I realize that my knowledge about these things was groundless (in a sense, my knowledge was "false"), I have the choice to believe or not.
It is not an easy choice.
thanks for that, cheery-o. There never seem to be dates on the comments, just times, so I'm not sure when you wrote this, but that is helpful. I feel exactly the same way (about the things that we can't know) but I hadn't really applied it to this situation.
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