Coming Soon
The Abandonment of Cruelty
56 pgs. Collecting the abandoned Oh Christ project from 2003-2004
Dear Mother,
Yes, I was a vehement believer (at least, in a God) until my late teens, and only slowly started to let go of various trappings, finally failing to sustain belief even in a detached, extra- Biblical Supreme Being sometime around 2001. As you know, in my youth I put a lot of time into researching, studying, investigating, and all-around trying to understand Scripture. Part of why I started writing to Dave Sim (creator of the comic book, Cerebus) about religion was because I could see him making various simple mistakes of scholarship that I thought I could steer him away from. Of course, Dave will not be steered. (The fact that he's come to some of those same conclusions about various traditions on his own is presumably not evidence that I was right back when he didn't yet agree with me).
As I grew older and read more widely and studied history, it became impossible for me to maintain a belief in the veracity of Scripture. From there, it was a short step to acknowledging that the only source of information about God is Scripture. Ergo, what was it exactly that I was believing in? Some God that is not the God of the Bible, but whose only source of evidence is in the very Bible he is not the God of?
It just didn't hold up.
I tried to keep believing in God. You know I did.
Of course, to people like Dave, and you, this is just evidence of my failure of Will. What you and he refuse to understand is that I spent my entire life believing in a being that I had absolutely no reason to believe in. Sure, I had questioned the text of the Scripture, the practices of the church, etc. from quite a young age -- much to the consternation of you and the officials of various local churches -- but it literally never occurred to me that without all of those flawed vessels, all of this human exegesis, there was literally no source of information about the deity. Without those sources, no one would ever have known it existed.
To me, that was a problem.
Why was there no direct experience of this God, who was presumed to still take an active hand in our daily lives? Why was the only path to knowledge about God moderated by the judgment and creative faculties of other human beings?
To me, that put the question of the existence of God on a par with speculations that fictional characters such as Spider-Man or the Smurfs might actually exist. There was a wall there between direct knowledge and received knowledge. (Perhaps interestingly, I also used to believe in the Smurfs; you might recall my throwing a crying, screaming tantrum once when uncle Daryl brought home that huge mushroom from the woods, because I thought he had actually poached a Smurf house.) Perhaps the intricacies of these man-made constructs was entertaining as a diversion, a speculative exercise, but they hardly still seemed applicable to the demands of everyday life.
And, that was it for me.
I'm not saying it wasn't difficult to suddenly experience a sea change in my view of the world. I'm not saying it was a simple switch from zero to one. I'm just saying that I could no longer deny the apparent logic, correctness, of my new position. There is no compelling reason to presume a God exists.
In any case, I hope your own continuing faith has been a positive element in your life. I resent that the ongoing societal debate about religion insists upon it being an either/or proposition. I tend to side more with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that religion was a private matter, and that properly argued, secular ideas need not reveal a religious (or non- religious) bias.
This comic book story was originally intended as my answer to your e-mails of 2002-2003, wherein you challenged me to state and defend my evolving religious views. As time has gone by I've realized that there is simply no reason to engender animosity by discussing the topic with you. We have interacted profitably and gracefully in social situations during this interim period, for which I am sincerely grateful. I am willing to let the matter of religion drop if you are, in the interests of familial peace.
To that end, I will not be sending you this letter, and I will not be sending you this comic book. At the same time, I hope you will understand my reticence to enter into debate with you on religious and/or political matters.
I remain, though you might wish it otherwise,
Your Only Begotten Son