That's me in the corner

Here it comes. I've been thinking a lot about things lately and I have to get my thoughts out. I'm not sure of their significance, but it's where I am. (Note to self: This will probably end up being either pompous or disjointed or a combination of both. Don't judge yourself too strongly as a result of that, you are merely being honest. There is nothing wrong about where you are in life and your thoughts. Seek the raw truth.)

1) I think I am at the end of my faith. Because I seek knowledge and only what I can understand, believing in things unseen is a much more difficult task than I ever thought. I always assumed I believed in the intangibles of the faith but upon further review, it was just that I only believed in a non-committal way. Odd.

So I am now committed to finding truth wherever it lay, and if the faith of my past doesn't stand up to scrutiny, it clearly isn't something that is truth. Truth itself cannot and will not shirk from investigation. It goes against its nature. I cannot get rid of truth and say there is nothing, because it seems that there is something that is right. I am not willing to dispose of the concept of truth, mainly because that leaves me with only humankind as the end result of millions of years of evolution. And it's not evolution that I have a problem with, it's that if there is nothing else besides coincidence, then we are left to our own devices to determine what is "right" or "good" and we don't have a very good precedent for that (cf. the 20th century, what with its wars and rumors of wars and all).

Maybe I am trying to admit that I want to have the crutch that some atheists view religion as. I really don't want to be the product of consequence and happenstance, and I guess that's all the farther I can go down that line of thought. I can't commit to the possibility that there is nothing else, so I'm defining my boundaries as being that: truth does exist and something exists outside of us.

I can't leave this topic alone. I'm not sure why. My only guess is that I can't intellectually determine why I want something else, I just really want something else. So maybe I'm trying to find the intellectual buttress to support this section of my faith structure.

I'm not sure where to go from here. Something in me wants to explore other faiths but I don't know how committed I would be to that. At the same time, I absolutely must be willing to look for truth everywhere. There is not one faith that can contain all truth, because that would mean that anything that happened outside of that faith structure was wrong. Because we are operating within the structure of time, I think that societies that existed prior to faith structures should have the same opportunities for finding truth. There is nothing new about this idea but I think I'm starting to internalize it.

[This post was begun on July 31, 2006 and was left unfinished.]