Thanks Carl. I'm glad you took the time to respond to this. I can see why people on spiritual journeys feel led to speak to you.

I can understand not agreeing. I wonder myself sometimes. But it something I feel deep down. I don't deny the existence of something I can not understand, I deny the inability to find it. I deny faith, I deny believing in the unseen and unexplainable. If that unseen is so vain to want me to believe in it without showing me it, then that's a terrible demand to make on someone.

I second guess myself. I wish all of it was real, but I can't embrace it. As someone once phrased to me, "my god belief was stripped from me against my will by what I had learned." It's like I don't have a choice, I can't go against myself.

I did make a prayer, years ago, that I strongly feel started this process. I prayed to not be allowed to believe in anything I can not substantiate. I prayed it earnestly, and after that started the process. I guess if you remove god from the picture, the prayer was really just a decision.

I'm not settled though, this is just another step!

I think I am also asking God to show him or her self to me. And the "answers" so far seems to be that the showing has been going on all along. It's like optical illusions - we see what we expect to see.

Two books have helped me:

Review on Richard Wurmbrand's Sermons in Solitary Confinement

Wm. Paul Young's The Shack

On the 2nd one, admittedly there are criticisms, but the book affected me in that it offered me a good way to look at the ways that God may be answering my questions (which I am doing quite openly, as I re-learned from Wurmbrand's book); and I LOVE the line about God being "especially fond of" me, you, and each and every one.

Critique of The Shack

To add a little Wurmbrand, to try to preserve his sanity, "talked" to God - basically questioning (actually complaining and griping) everything he had been taught. And as he composed sermons of these questioning sessions and what came to his mind, the chapters of the book show some amazing (to me) conclusions - not necessarily discoveries to everyone, but like personal inspirations.

And a lot of my spiritual growth is of this nature - not a matter of scientific experimentation and testing, but seeing what makes sense to an intelligent reasoning person who is not trying to "win" a place in any person's church or organization, and if I am pleasing God, it is by paying him/her/it the respect of being honest and actually thinking (saying inwardly?) what I really think. If I were God, I think I'd like that.

And I'm not saying that I don't have many blinders, and many illogical ways of looking at things.... I am only a human being.

But it feels good to be on my own quest.

A prayer I made in 1985, after effectively losing my first family by drinking and carousing, was (1) that my family be restored, and (2) that I not become hardened, and become able to love and be loved. My first marriage was not restored, but slowly my relationships with my children has been restored. And as far as the 2nd request, I met my wonderful wife, Marge, and I think that I have been better able to believe God's love of me, and to believe that my feeble (but honest) love of whatever he/she/it might be might just be enough.

I respect everyone's personal experiences. Always have. As I have said in many places, that's how I'd expect anyone to come to know their Creator.

But these personal experiences are no more convincing to another person, than anyone who had a personal experience of elves. Means something to the person who saw it, no-one else.

I can, easily, objectively argue against people's personal experiences, but I do not. I respect them.

It is science in a way. I suppose. Science to oneself. It's not faith, because it's based on their sensory experiences.

If I am to believe, I will have my own experience. Perhaps much different than any others. I don't know. We shall see.

I don't think that any of us do know really ~ not for sure.

You can not know for sure what someone else knows - this is true. And I have never claimed that I know anything for sure. I don't know for sure whether my next breath will come. I don't know for sure that my wife loves me.

It could even be said that I don't know for sure that I love my wife. But I know that I do. Can I prove it to you? No. All I can say is that I do.

All I say is that your path is your own.

I will say this - I am more apt to listen to, and want to check it out for myself, someone whom I respect and admire. When, for example, MBAS400 says that he senses some kind of god-force in the environment and world around him, I think it suggests that I might keep my eyes open and my senses alive and my perspective unbiased. It does not prove that what he senses is real, or true, for me. It does not even prove that it is real, or true, for him.

But it has at least as much weight for me as someone who says that they have never seen any evidence of, nor have they sensed, a higher power.

And that is why I consider myself agnostic.
Because I am aware of possibilities, without knowing for sure one way or the other.
Personally, I think that I would find it hard to be a self-confessed atheist, because I simply don't know ~ either that God exists, or that he doesn't.
But I often sense something amazing in 'life, the universe & everything'.

What convinced me most to be a self-confessed atheist was 'Atheism: The case against God" by George H. Smith. I'll quote in brief.



If there is something beyond us, I do believe we may some day know it. An agnostic by definition describes the impossibility of knowledge in a given area. I believe we can know.

I see where you're coming from. I just don't agree with the way the theism, atheism, and agnosticism is defined.

And that is my real point. Definitions can keep us in a box.

Labels can keep us in a box.

Nothing wrong with where you are and the changes going on in your life (you, Sarah, or any of us). I just invite you to not limit the possibilities.

I also believe we can know. I believe I do know what is important to me right now.