Previous: Journey into belief
After that trip, I couldn’t really recall everything that has happened afterwards to my Christian identity. It wasn’t like flipping a switch one day where I just dropped all my old beliefs and prayers; I tried to talk with other Christians and share my doubts, hoping they could uncover some of my faulty reasonings and help me to find a way back to the same God. I was able to have a few debates, but mostly the conversations were saturated by my monologues and they kindly listened. I would walk away from them afterwards feeling horrible, for being a filibuster yet again and a drag to them with problems that I can’t understand myself. But eventually over the course of my own struggle, I nevertheless ended up losing much of the same theological structure defining God; a lot of which is not really due to any of the intellectual problems but more emotional baggage. Perhaps a big (and common) one was just the sheer extent of suffering I began to find out more and more that has gone on in the world. I was always more or less aware that my life has been a privileged one for the family and circumstances I was born into, and there are many others who do not get to share the same kind of luxury. As I headed into college and have more time to read, the world’s cruelty was unravelled more to me in the tragedies of Furuta, Holocaust survivers, the horror of slave camps and even factory farming practices. I started to find that the belief of an eternal afterlife hell is not only lousily defined by also an incredibly cruel one, when this world has already been a living hell for many. I tried searching and reading through some of the theodicy responses to understand why an all-loving, all-powerful God would just let those sort of things happen without any sort of intervention, such as the free will, soul saving, possible-world defenses; it’s not that those arguments are extremely contentious, with the oppositions often going down towards a rabbit hole in choosing and defining terminologies (like almost every debates in philosophy), but those “solutions” to me were also coming off as simply patches sealing off a leaking box in many corners; one response simply does not explain the myriad ways of why and how sentient creatures do suffer, despite the very high level abstractions being postulated from the perspective of God to cover all the grounds. Because seriously, in what possible world is getting gang raped for days, having burned cigarrates inserted into your vagina, and dying alone in despair any bit necessary and soul saving, for her. I just couldn’t deny deep down that what I was doing was only for a very cheap purpose of maintaining a superficial consistency to my Christian beliefs, formulated distances away at a cushy armchair, when suffering meant much, much more than those petty word games. Gradually, I just stopped trying to find every reason to vindicate God, because really what suffering ultimately calls for is what to do in response; what really can be done in response. There’s just an infinite distance in between beliefs and actions, and perfecting the former often does very little to help with the latter.
”Do you believe in God, doctor?” Again the question was put in an ordinary tone. But this time Rieux took longer to find his answer. “No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I’ve long ceased finding that original.” “Isn’t that it, the gulf between Paneloux and you?” “I doubt it. Paneloux is a man of learning, a scholar. He hasn’t come in contact with death; that’s why he can speak with such assurance of the truth, with a capital T. But every country priest who visits his parishioners and has heard a man gasping for breath on his deathbed thinks as I do. He’d try to relieve human suffering before trying to point out its excellence.” - The Plague
Perhaps the other, most personal one was how I came to view my relationship with my girlfriend. Growing up in the evangelical subculture, Christian dating is an inescapable topic, and the perfect material often brought up is the verse of the unequal yoke. This verse comes from the King James translation of 2 Corinthians 6:14-15:
“Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers: for what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? And what concord hath Christ with Belial? or what part hath he that believeth with an infidel?”
For context, a yoke is a wooden beam that is carried between two oxens to pull together a load. For the dating sermon, the beam is interpreted as the relationship and the believer and non-believer as the partner oxens trying to work together. This relationship is one doomed to fail as the individuals have unequal footing resulting from their differing worldviews. To proceed in this kind of relationship will eventually come down towards a matter of choice between your partner and God. If one chooses the beliefs of your secular partner is to side with darkness (note the slight juxtaposition of unbeliever with the literal Devil). As the sermon often then goes, such is the danger of engaging in a secular relationship; a Christian one on the other hand is fundamentally different. Not only a Christian partner has to be a given, but the relationship ought to put God before the partner, because the ultimate goal of Christian dating is to bring forth honor and glory to God. Given all this, I subconsciously viewed my girlfriend as a conversion target at the beginning of our relationship, despite never explicitly voicing it. I was to love my girlfriend with the fundamental condition to convert her, with being a believer of Jesus as the very basic categorizer of who she is. God, or more precisely the Southern Baptist teachings tied to the notion of God, was brought up a lot in our conversations for political topics like abortion and LGBTQ rights, and I would iterate through the apologetic arguments that I was trained with. However, I gradually stopped doing this because as I was presenting them, I too had just as many unanswered questions that were compounded by the other personal problems going on inside my life. Later on when I started heading down towards a path of deconstruction, I was terribly insecure, hysterical at a point almost, envisioning myself as the token prodigal son to be sharing my testimony when returning into a future church within a God orchestrated fate, while in reality fully aware of the very real possibility of losing my old beliefs and holding onto an ever thinning thread for a potential silver lining. During those turbulent phases, there were also some very big tensions in our relationship. We broke up for some time, because I just couldn’t stand myself then for all of my pent up anger, confusion, anxiety, sadness, and I secretly blamed her for being the source of all this, for the half-assed piece of shit that I was becoming.
To cut the long story short, at the end I couldn’t lie to myself any longer from recognizing who she actually is, who I always have known before putting on the colored lenses of my beliefs, before we started dating, before we were just friends in highschool.
She is an incredibly kind person, despite arriving so from a non-religious upbringing. Though she is stupidly stubborn and a pain to argue with sometimes, she is one of the very few people I know who are both deeply committed to her beliefs and truthful with her actions, without being driven by the need to force them onto others. She teaches me everyday how to be kinder, more patient to myself and to the others around me, more than I could ever do so on my own.
She is the bestest friend I got to have.
I eventually let go of some of my prejudices built up from the tall fences and stigmatization towards secularism, humanism, etc; from my learnings I came to see those elected enemies from the conservative side of the culture war as first and foremost different ways to view the world, with each belief being interconnected with a mesh of other beliefs that all have a story to be told. Yet still, I never fully let go of this notion of God, because there was something real about my experience with it/him/her/they that was both deeply primitive and innate. The root for my intellectual motives was to find a place of certainty to understand what it amounts to and to make sense of this longing, but there was also a growing detachment to it as I continued with the intellectual exercise. Ironically, it came first when I was deep into the apologetics swamp trying to defend it, as I was parsing through the obscure premises and logical moves connecting each as unbiased as I could. It made me realize that my childhood belief of God was never to be found as the conclusion of any such arguments, by the logical shuffling and organization of belief propositions; clearly, I did not nor had the capacity to think through and validate the implication of each specific belief as I was acquiring them. Nevertheless, I still trekked through my studies analytically for the most part to cater my appetite for theorizing, and for a brief period of an atheistic swing, I experimented with using a different set of vocabulary to explain this motion in terms of evolutionary psychology. However, those too quickly escaped my mind after I put down the books, perhaps because the subject was outside of my expertise and the concepts were many layers of abstractions away. It was not until after my dad’s death when I had a chance to converse with my mom about faith that sparked a re-thinking. We came back to the states after his funeral, and that was our first reunion for a long period of time. We talked about a lot of things, family, immigration to the US, their youth, the Bible, and of course, God. She told me the time she first heard of the Gospel and received her first Bible from a campus missionary. She told me about the period of loss and depression that she went through after arriving in the states, being a stranger inside a foreign world without status and working illegally at a Chinese restaurant for income. She told me about the woman fellowship she joined that helped heal her scars from the years of emotional neglect and guided her walk with God. She told me how God is the warm, comforting presence to her in the hope of the morning sunlight as well as in the depth of her anguish. Those talks in the summer night walks were the first in a very long time where I was only a listener, and they rekindled a deep string of memory long forgotten by me for what God originally meant to me, when I was also first being parachuted into America; it brought me back to the morning car rides to school, when I read and prayed over the verses of Psalm and Proverbs, asking God to lead me as with David; it brought me back to the crowded cafeteria, when I wonder where is the inconspicuous corner to sit for today to offset my overbrewing self-consciousness; it brought me back to the after school gym floor, when I sat waiting for the tryout to begin but eventually ran away from my fear and anxiety. Most of anything that had to do with school was nothing pleasant. Conversations ended mostly in my awkward fake smiles and nods, when I couldn’t comprehend from my literal understanding of all the cultural references and the coded “boys” talks. My attempt to blend in by going off another guy’s joke during track practice got my face shoved into the mud side. Chatting in Chinese with an international deskmate was interrupted to “shut up Chink”. Requesting my English teacher to repeat his verbal feedback on my Junior paper was met with his frustration and passive aggressive request for another walking into the room to speak “Asian” to me. Those were the most visible times I was reminded of the deep shame that was attached to my language and ethnicity, but for most other times, I was practically invisible. The prayer to God, this inner altar, was the place of honesty and vulnerability that I returned back to daily after school to mend the grueling dual existence. Part of this experience with God was also what drove my desire to know God, the inception to my later apologetics obsession. To fill the blanks from my childhood ignorance regarding the Bible, every Sunday I eagerly jotted down all the bullet-pointed notes from the sermon slides and cherished them all to be the intellectual revelations of God. After the sermons, from the kindness of others that first reached out to me, I began participating in the Chinese church more. That’s where I realized that speaking Chinese was not a thing to be ashamed of, and being the weird breed of half-ABC actually has its advantages: parents would find it interesting for a kid to talk to them in fluent Chinese and befriend me, and I can still hang along with their kids. Besides the international students from school, the church family was the first closest stable group of friends I had since moving. The summers of my youth then became dedicated to the church, going to retreats and hikes, being part of worship bands, leading small groups and Sunday school, teaching Chinese, “balling”, etc. For the first time, that was when I didn’t feel so alone inside the suburban nowhere, when I got to escape the curse of the fragmented relationships through my nomadic upbringing, when I felt love inside a loveless world.
This dual existence still accompanied me throughout highschool, despite being accepted into the church, and it was the shadow that lurked quietly beneath. To be honest, I didn’t need much fleshed out theology for the law and salvation to codify what about me is sinful, because I already wanted practically nothing to do with myself. This motion of self-denial and shame was how Jesus made sense for me and for which gave birth to his unbounded love; singing the worship songs was when I yielded fully of it all: I am wretched, yet God has gone before me and has carried my burdens. And through worship was how I came to view and wrestle with my very own existence, to mediate myself past my language, my friends, my family: before there was me, there was God. Before I could have made sense of myself, there was God who made sense of me.
This relationship with God was first established more clearly through the years in the small Chinese evangelical community I belonged to. And in a way, being within a religious community is to also be attached to a set of propositional statements about God and what faithful followers to him ought to believe and do (codified in dogmas or denominational statements). And perhaps that was what made the process all the more excruciating, because I firmly believed in a lot of those things nevertheless, things about the Bible and ways to interact with the world that I thought were wholly context independent in absolutely every way summed into “the Truth”. I attach love to those beliefs, and to the people who hold those beliefs, and the detachment to them means that I’ll lose all that love. And for a long time before reuniting with my mom, I feared losing the same love from her, as I always felt that to her, God and Bible was the knot that tied our disjointed family together.
As I come back to the present now as a young adult to understand my attitude towards God and religion in general, I still find it extremely difficult to coherently put those thoughts down together on paper, because of the countless senses that God has come to encompass in all the different arenas of human thoughts, and also because I still change my mind on many specifics rather frequently. However, from reflecting on my journey after the dust has settled from the turbulent years, I found within me a dual mode that tries to make sense of all the God/god/gods talk: one of belief and one of spirituality. The former is manifested by my apologetic/counter-apologetic persona. For bit of the philosophy jargon to pave the ground, belief is the mental attitude that expresses the acceptance of a proposition, and a proposition is a sentence expressing a statement that bears truth/falsity (rather than an emotive expression such as “ouch, that hurts”), and a sentence is a conglomeration of words tied together with a grammatical structure, and words are symbols that the human mind assigns meaning to and forms concepts with. Propositions come in all shapes and forms that have different (accepted) ways of evaluating them; the goal is to first formulate them as specific and as unambiguously as possible in accordance to reality, which are the target of the different fields in math, science, philosophy, history, etc. Spirituality, on the other hand, is something less propositional and more experiential, psychological, and existential. It is hard for me to provide a singular, exhaustive definition that captures all the way I think in this mode, because it isn’t a logical mental exercise/ battle of beliefs that fixates on the perfect correspondence between the symbols and their external referent, for which rules and definition can be given; it is rather stemmed from an innermost, subconscious feeling and internal reciprocation towards the world. I find myself constantly fluctuating between those two modes that are often in competition with each other. Indeed, the spiritual is not in any way something that is divorced from the belief, because I don’t think anyone can completely live apart from what they believe to be true (without committing a double-think); there’s a reason lies tend to be so corrosive to relationship; however, I came to resist the temptation to treat the belief as the only way to speak of the world and more important than the spiritual (as my apologetic/counter-apologetic persona would say), because I find them to be sufficiently different ways of the mind to resolve and react to symbols that command the subsequent focus in thoughts; the belief is anchored on “whatever is out there” for the mind to track (and recursively able to put itself as one such external thing for scrutiny), whereas the spiritual is anchored by whatever is within the phenomenal experience with all its subjectivity.
In the belief sense, I would probably no longer identify myself as a believing Christian. I don’t want to get into all the specific details here, but if I were to articulate briefly my principal reason/belief, I just don’t think humans (and particularly myself) are capable of truly representing God, both in the conceptual sense and in the judicial sense, despite having a word for it wielded by functional roles developed to serve the purpose (i.e. pastor, rabbi, priesthood, shaman, etc.). Just tracing back to the inception of modern science, humans have only begun to conceptually represent the natural world that is paved in many ways with us being wrong in the untested assumptions. And even in everyday ordinary lives, humans hardly represent each other correctly. Supposing there is to be a personal, creator God, why should one inflate the faulty agency with confidence about everything of it, an (umbrella) concept that would contain the literal totality to all, the Alpha and Omega? I just find Christianity or any rigid religious systems with the tribes’ own self-view elevated to the cosmic center to be a limiting surrogate, especially if used to judge others in place of God.
For a long time, I had a lot of hesitation and fear with truly owning up these thoughts as my own belief, swimming against the spokesman for the powerful tradition I was brought up in and worrying about the ways I could be wrong, because most definitely I am and have been wrong in many things (as the one thing I learn in college and work). But I have more or less come to terms with this better now, specifically with my propensity for wanting to be right, for being right with the exact reasoning about things is itself a luxury with the time and access to material that comes with the corner of the world I am born into.
But despite not identifying as a practicing Christian in its many senses, I still think about Christianity and religions very often and spend time studying them, but more so now from a more spiritual perspective aside from the rational formality. I still very much believe there to be a transcendent God of the universe, if not more abstractly a transcendent sense of order beyond human comprehension, despite not being as sure as I was before for its nature. I still retained my reverence towards its sense of divinity and sacredness as echoed throughout the poems in the Bible. But this comes more so from being within nature than from words.
Sometimes when I look up into the depth and mystery of the night sky, I would feel an incredible sense of unity, of tranquility, of insignificance, and of awe, yet in the simultaneous amazement that for whatever reason, I am still here. On those nights, I would think back to my dad, who is the piece of the genesis of me that is now gone. I would remember the meaningful times I was fortunate to spend together with him during highschool, the night for which I saw him through the glimpse of the door, him lying on the bed with his iPad. When I came in, he would show me the NASA app that he’s looking at, and he would point his fingers onto the screen and share with me, so excitedly, all the different stars and the unimaginable immensity of the universe, like a child who came to see it all for the first time.
I owe everything for who I am to my dad, despite vehemently hating him as part of my misdirected anger during the deconstruction and for feeling like an orphan; and really, I wrote this out of confession for this sin. He was this larger than life father to me who unabashedly lived his life with enthusiasm and a child-like curiosity. Even I feel though the father role to him has been this basic responsibility he had to get it out of the way before having fun (kind of like Ging in HxH), he was my first teacher that showed me the freedom of curiosity and spirituality through the freedom he approached his life with. He was who tied my name with the cosmos, and I carry this spiritual journey with his memory everyday, a journey for which I only begun, through the work of Tillich, Jung, William James, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, etc, as well as the list of non-Western/Christian works and philosophy that I am slowly making my way through like Buddhism, Stoicism, Sufism, etc. This spiritual journey, perhaps to borrow Tillich’s nomenclature of faith, is the ultimate concern of life, and to tread in life is to tread with doubt of this concern, not only for what is truly there, for what will happen in the future, but for what is meaningful.