Journey To Faith

I am a Christian and my journey to faith can be broken down into several steps consisting of various realizations and insights.

1) MY BEGINNING OF FAITH

Someone once said that Jesus got himself crucified because he had "turned everything upside down". The realization came to me one day that Jesus hadn't actually turned everything upside down. The values of the world were upside down to begin with, Jesus had turned them right-side up. But the religious authorities didn't understand that, they saw him as a threat to their authority.

Some people seemed to think that someone who lived a religious life was "old-fashioned", while someone who was secular was "modern". But I saw that this was simply not true. People have been living godless and sinful lives since ancient times.

Another realization that came to me was that intelligence and goodness have absolutely nothing to do with each other. This shows the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of God. If there is a single most important thing about understanding God, it is to understand that the ways of the world and the ways of God are polar opposites. The further we are from God, the more similar his ways seem to be to the ways of the world. God seems like just another authority figure. If someone commits a crime, someone with a worldly way of thinking might say something like "That wasn't a very smart thing to do". While that is true, a person thinking along the lines of God might see it as "sinful" rather than "not smart". The truth is that a person can be very smart and diabolically evil at the same time.

Criminals are not necessarily evil people. It's just that they do what their impulses tell them to without thinking of the consequences. A criminal "lives in the moment". A criminal will see money left unattended and take it without thinking of the consequences. A non-criminal will see the money but will not take it because of the potential consequences. But this doesn't make the non-criminal morally superior to the criminal. A moral person will see the money, know that he can get away with taking it, but not take it because it would be wrong. That is why harsh punishment, including capital punishment, does little to deter crime. To deter crime it would require a criminal to stop and think carefully about the possible consequences of his actions before he did something. But if a criminal were in the habit of thinking carefully about the possible consequences of his actions, he probably wouldn't be a criminal in the first place.

Our natural impulses are supposedly the products of our evolution. But then why is it that doing whatever our impulses tell us to do is the way to live the worst kind of life. While overcoming our natural impulses is the way to live the best kind of life. It doesn't make sense. It makes it seem as if we are here as some kind of test.

I used to think that people who did bad things were just bad people. While I still think that, now I also believe that society is a major part of the problem. The more difficult a society makes it to live by the rules, the more people there will be who don't live by the rules.

How sad that someone has to spend their life crippled in a wheelchair. But the realization came to me one day that we are all in wheelchairs. We are really spiritual beings confined down here in these human bodies as a test. We are constrained by the matter limitations and requirements of our bodies. The best athletes and the fittest people have some really awesome wheelchairs, but they are still wheelchairs.

Life is not always easy and it doesn't always make sense. But it is a test. If it was always easy and always made sense then it wouldn't be a test.

It would be nice if life was always easy. But how capable of a person would you be? When we get through something difficult, we are more capable than we were before. Life has a lot in common with exercise, difficult and challenging times are "life exercises".

Christianity is not about being good, it is about being perfect. If God is a perfect being then that means he cannot accept anything or anyone that is less than perfect. Even if you have only ever committed a minor sin, you are less than perfect. Being good is not good enough. But if Jesus pays the price for your sins then God can see you as perfect.

The Bible foretells the Apocalypse. What that means, plainly and simply, is that the world is definitely not moving in the right direction. We might be making a lot of progress in things like science and technology. But the ways of the world are moving us toward Armageddon.

I once ran into a former classmate. I knew that she was a Christian, she was later killed in an accident. Not long afterward, I had a really intense born-again experience. I realized later that she must have said a prayer for me.

The difference between the ways of the world and the ways of God often comes down to the short-term versus the long-term. An amazing thing about life is how when we get what we want it sometimes turns out to be the worst thing, and when we don't get what we want it sometimes turns out to be the best thing.

Something like unemployment seems to be a negative but can turn into a positive. Toward the end of 1999, I was unemployed for six months. But during that time I did a lot of reading and thinking and without it you wouldn't be reading this blog here on Blogspot. I had suspected that there was some kind of underlying patterns in the universe to which everything conformed. I had some things written down in a notebook but didn't have time to work further on it. I nailed it down during that time of unemployment. It was my first theory, what I called "The Theory Of Primes" at the time. It is the core of the information theory, described on this blog in "The Theory Of Complexity". I had lost the job on August 23, 1999. Later, I was astounded to find that this was the very day that BlogSpot was being founded.

The Gospels record Jesus as having performed so many miracles. But He was surrounded by people who hated Him and resented His popularity. The Jews wanted nothing more than to be rid of the occupying Romans but they were even willing to bring the Romans in to get Jesus removed and crucified. But what all of this says is how genuine His miracles must have been. To discredit Jesus, all they had to do was to prove that even one of His miracles was false. The fact that they were even willing to go to the Romans to get rid of Him makes a powerful statement that they were unable to discredit him otherwise.

There was only one thing about humans that impressed Jesus. He wasn't impressed with the grandeur of the Temple, and certainly not with the corrupt and hypocritical religious establishment. The only thing that impressed Him was faith. He marveled at the faith of both the Phoenician woman, asking for her daughter to be healed, and the Roman centurion, asking that his servant be healed. Even though both of these were pagans that the Jews would usually choose to avoid, Jesus was so impressed that he granted both of their requests. Have enough faith and God might even "bend the rules" to grant your request. Remember that god is actually not bound by any rules, He is the one who makes the rules.

In the ways of the world, the Golden Rule is that the one who has the gold is the one who makes the rules. In the ways of God, the Golden Rule is to treat others as we would like to be treated.

2) WE ARE REALLY SEEKING GOD, WE JUST DON'T REALIZE IT

We are designed to believe in God. If we do not believe in God then we will just believe in something else that seems to take His place. There is a saying that "If you really want to be a great leader then find a bunch of atheists and give them something to believe in". The Nazis are the first example that comes to mind. They took people that, for the most part, no longer believed in God and did an absolutely magnificent job of giving them something else to believe in.

A lot of loneliness isn't really loneliness. Sometimes we have a vague "something's missing" feeling. If we are single it seems like that is what it is. We are seeking a nice significant other. My experience is that after a while the "something's missing" feeling was still there and it was only after I discovered God that it didn't come back, or at least I knew what it was if it did come back.

The realization struck me as to why there are so many divorces. It is because we are really seeking God, but don't find Him. So we expect our marriage partners to fill the role that our relationship with God was supposed to be. The trouble is that we are all just mortal human beings. A marriage partner is supposed to a companion along the way, and not to provide all of the fulfillment in our lives. There are so many divorces because we expect too much from each other to begin with.

How ridiculous is it that we can get on a plane without knowing anything about the personal lives of the pilot or crew but if someone runs for office, even a relatively minor local office, their lives undergo the most intense scrutiny? It doesn't make a bit of sense unless we consider that we have somewhat fallen away from God, but still base our lives and society around the traditional religious patterns. Politicians have taken the place of religious leaders. This is especially apparent if we consider how politicians of the past, such as JFK, got away with things that would be impossible for anyone running for office today.

When I was a boy, there was a definite reverence for science. I picked up on it and have been interested in science ever since, long before I was interested in religion. I realize now that it was because we were falling away from God and science was taking His place as the new "religion".

But nothing can lastingly replace God or Heaven. If you live in a small apartment and wished that you lived in a mansion, you would be happier in the mansion than you are now, but you wouldn't be as much happier as you think you would be. You would still be the same person except that you would live in a mansion.

3) REALIZATIONS ABOUT HUMAN NATURE

With an understanding of God came the realization of how different were the ways of God from the ways of the world. It is really human nature that is upside-down. There was the paradox of dogs. An intelligent, capable and loyal creature emerges from the wild and becomes our companion, even being called "Man's best friend". But then can you figure out why calling someone a "dog" is universally considered as an insult and, as far as I can see, no nation has ever chosen a dog as it's national symbol. Instead, we choose vicious wild predators as our symbols. Calling someone a "lion", "tiger", "hawk", "eagle" or even a "cat" is a compliment. Of course, this paradox is not about dogs at all, it is really about human nature.

Suppose that one country has abundant natural resources and another country is poor in natural resources. Logically people in the one with resources should be better off, right? But don't forget about human nature. The government of the resource-rich land might use the wealth from those resources to keep itself in power and oppress their people. The government of the resource-poor land will be more dependent on the will of the people to stay in power, and will thus be more likely to be a democracy. The people of the resource-poor land will also have more incentive to develop their knowledge and skills to make up for the lack of resources, and will usually end up better-off. this is known as the "Resource Curse" or the "Paradox of Plenty".

Suppose that writers in one country always seem to praise their leader and their government. But writers in another country are often critical of their country and it's government. The first country must be much better-off, right? Wrong. What is probably happening is that, in the first country, writers face dire consequences for criticizing the government, while in the second country writers are free and can criticize the government.

Suppose that one older person has no regrets about their life, while another is full of regrets. It might mean that the first person has lived a better life. But it might also mean that the second person has matured, while the first hasn't. Growing and maturing almost always means having some regrets. At least it means that the second person has made progress, and opens the possibility that the first person hasn't.

Hate is not the opposite of love, both are more like flip sides of the same coin. The opposite of both love and hate is indifference. If we made lists of the most loved people and the most hated people, there would be many of the same people on both lists. Whenever someone voluntarily pays a lot of attention to you, it is a compliment. When people put a lot of effort into trying to cut you down, it is a great compliment. It is a negative compliment, but nonetheless a compliment. Whether a person loves or hates you depends not just on what you are, but also on what they are.

Our minds are like rooms full of boxes. Suppose that a potentially valuable new box comes along. We can fit the new box into our room but it will require rearranging the boxes that are already there. We might reject the new box, not because it lacks value but because it is too much trouble to rearrange the existing boxes.

4) THE WORLD IS ALIGNED AGAINST GOD

To understand God we must grasp how different are the ways of God and the ways of the world. The word "holy" doesn't actually mean "good". It means to be set aside, or separate from the world and it's ways.

We want to celebrate the holidays but so many of us are not really comfortable with the message of Christianity. So, we invent Santa Claus. Isn't it interesting how the letters in "Santa" can be respelled as "Satan". Something that is not blatantly evil but gets us away from God.

One difference between Heaven and Hell is that we can follow the crowd to Hell but cannot follow it to Heaven.

Logic would seem to dictate that it would be the most sinful people who had been enraged at His message and crucified Jesus. But it wasn't. Many of the most blatantly sinful people repented and followed Jesus. Amazingly, it was the religious establishment who felt their power threatened by Jesus' message and got Him crucified.

We tend to fall into the "ritual trap". We use rituals to help us to feel closer to God. But then we deteriorate into thinking that all we have to do is to go through the rituals in order to be right with God. This is what Jesus told the religious leaders and it enraged them and got Him crucified.

Another trap that we fall into is the innate superiority trap. A nation follows God and receives His blessings. But then they deteriorate into thinking that they have accomplished things that other people haven't because of their innate superiority.