The Difficulty of “Faith” in a World of Conflicting Voices and Ambiguous Evidence

Here’s my conundrum:

Being autistic, (but “high functioning”, and as such, not recognized), which placed me in situations with people, where I clearly felt the power imbalance in the world:
The world demands a lot from you, with often severe ‘consequences’, but people in power, from the tough kids or criminal on the street, to big business and govt. officials, do wrong or make bad mistakes that affect you, or are just too restrictive (sometimes even in reaction to the criminals or other problems) but we usually can’t do anything about it. In fact, we’re made all the more “responsible” to respond to these things accordingly. I’m sternly warned how I must “take care of myself” because “no one will care about you” in the world. (This, after being bitterly scolded for “not caring” about people! Again; it’s power or status that determines these double standards).

“Life” vs “God”

When complaining about all this, I’m told “that’s life”; “that’s the way of the world”, or simply, “the way it is”.
This eventually makes religion appealing, where there’s a divine Person in control, rather than supposedly random, impersonal “fate” (and powerful people who managed to exploit this to their favor). Someone you could hypothetically appeal to, or may have a good purpose, rather than the random tautology of “it is what it is” (as if that wasn’t already known; hence being complained about to begin with).

Religion affirms that this world is contrary to God’s intentions, but adds that He “allows it to be this way” for now.
Then, He does not give special revelation as claimed in ancient scripture. This is what made it so hard to believe in, to begin with.
Apologists come up with rationalizations for this; usually attempting to place the blame back on us (humanity, via “sin”).

I encounter the paradox” of helplessness vs “responsibility”; implicit in the secular view, and boldly affirmed in certain religious theologies. We can’t control the setup of the universe (including “the hand we are dealt”, or the “revelation” we are given), but we’re held “responsible” to react to it in a proscribed way (having the right attitude”, exerting more effort to compensate for limitations, etc), either to “survive” (secular) or be “saved” (religion). (And in both camps, it’s pitched as “so simple”, yet admittedly “so hard”, which is not accepted as an ‘excuse’, yet those preaching; many of them profiting off of it, even, can’t seem to actually live up to it themselves!)

So “that’s life” stands, and simply has “God“ added to or stamped onto it.
(And hence, “spirituality” often parallels secular “self-help”, even as they condemn it as ‘godless’, and the secularists dismiss religion as a “crutch” or “myths”, etc.)
As a Myers-Briggs “INTP” type (introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking, Perceiving), the dominant “introverted Thinking” (i.e. the T+P) likes to see logical (impersonal) “truth” (think “true/false”) on its own (rather than being force-fed from others). What happens is that instead of some real transcendent truth being revealed (that transcends ALL human reasoning and agendas), other people’s truths“; particularly the opposing extraverted Thinking (Te) perspective (especially as it often is used by people with power), end up winning out by default (and thus presumed to be the transcendent ‘truth’; whether divine [God], or just “life” or “the universe”), and no higher authority ever corrects it. It seems nature favors “alpha” types. It’s more than a simple, blanket “pain and suffering” or “evil”, or even unfairness/injustice; it’s WHY these things are so. The whole answer of the Fall and sin (and other stuff like “free will”) will only carry but so far. This is a struggle with nature and instinct itself, which were created “very good” according to scripture.

Under a premise of Grace, we cannot presume others condemned just for where they fit in the setup of the universe.
And even then, how really is the punishment of others supposed to fix whatever was wrong for us?

I grew up in an agnostic family, where occurences are interpreted simply as “life“, in an impersonal universe of random chance, governed by a set of natural laws whose origins are unknown, from the evidence we can see.
As I grow up, I hear people on TV loudly proclaiming “God”; some using this to try to control everyone’s lives (by fear). Others (or even the same ones at other parts of their message) are adding to this “all He will do for your life”, if you “come to Him”; and accept a whole “plan” He “has for you“. (At this point, sounding like salesmen!) Most will at some point attack the ‘godless’, purely “natural” view of the universe.

Yet “life“, as described by the natural position still goes on the same, and the religious have to come up with explanations for this; the most common being a “Fall”, generally interpreted as God getting angry at the first man disobeying Him, and so cursed the entire universe into a place of suffering; explaining all the [seemingly] random occurences that cause pain. (And also used to even to explain instances of the seeming “unfairness” of benefit or expense among people). Yet they will also claim He “intervenes”, and then good things that happen are taken as confirming this (and so, you better be “thankful”!), and bad things are taken as Him saying “no” to our hope or prayer, thus leaving the default occurence to stand. In other words, what the nonreligious called “life“! (i.e. not usually some supernaturally negative occurence). We’re even given a “Serenity Prayer”: accept the things we cannot change; change the things we can (which more often than not seems to be expending effort when we might not want to), and the wisdom to know the difference. Again, “life” seems to be left as, in practice, sovereign, and “God” just helps us pacify ourselves! Then, instead of answering questions of ‘why’ with “that’s the way life is”; it becomes “that’s the way God is”. “It is what it is” is personified into “I AM that I am”, and as relayed by men; “He is that He is”. (You could call it the “metaessential”: “[pronoun] [be], that/what [pronoun] [be]”)

So we’re right back to square one.

My lifelong journey

This is at the very center of my struggle with “faith”. I grew up originally assuming God, since there were some older adults who believed and taught it to me, and my agnostic parents didn’t voice any other alternative right away. In fact, when I once asked my father what his religious affiliation was, it was one of those “I’ll explain when you get older” things! Then, instead of directly expounding his views right away, he introduced me to science and nature shows on TV, and let me come to my own realization. I saw how chimps looked so similar to humans (and were very intelligent), so then the evolution they taught made sense. (Here we see my “introverted Thinking” drawing a conclusion. For a time, I assumed there was an ape who one day gave birth to Adam and Eve, until I learned it was a very gradual process!)
But then you saw or read Christian preachers loudly condemning evolution at every turn. They began claiming the fossil evidence really supported young earth Creationism and the global Flood, and science as being deliberately obstinate and deceptive, but when they ran out of answers to things (especially why no special revelation), the final word was always “faith” (i.e. in the “unseen”). By this time, evolution made more sense (according to the patterns we could observe in nature) than God picking up a mound of dirt and forming the first man, as these people insisted we believe, or be “lost” to Hell when we die.

When I arrrived at college, during the orientation, and a feisty older Southern black lady speaker mentions “GOD!” I suddenly realized I was down in the infamous “Bible Belt”, as an unchurched unbeliever. In my naïveté, I knew nothing about what’s called “cultural Christianity” (I actually was then surprised the science course outlined old earth evolution rather than young earth creation!), and yet quickly found out that the atmosphere (in practice) was just as “secular“ as anywhere else, and that most didn’t care what someone else believed. (My image of “Christians” was preachers preaching Hell for both unbelief, and bad behavior, with a special focus on sexual practices).
Yet it still seemed everyone “believed in” God, despite their actual morality, and that much of what I was seeing was more of a taking Him for “granted”. Being taught about Him by elders, and not questioning it. Herbert Armstrong of the Plain Truth magazine my maternal grandmother received actually covered this point well around this time in his book Mystery of The Ages, right before he died. Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye (recently killed by his hyper-religious father) Michael Jackson (and his youngest sister, then my “dream girl”), and even the lusty new hotshot sensation Prince always mentioned Him in songs and interviews, and it seems all sports and entertainment figures always “thanked” Him in ceremonies, upon winning an award or trophy. All US currency had “IN GOD WE TRUST” printed on it! The Pledge of Allegiance and national anthems as well nodded to Him! I asked my father what many people we knew, including every relative I could think of, believed, and he sad they all believed in “God” (except for his mother, who was kind of “iffy” and hard to state clearly). It felt like we were all alone in that area!

So I felt an actual jealousy toward those who could take God for granted and not be plagued by doubts, like I was. I tried to rationalize a kind of “belief”, and liked the series of commercials the Mormons were putting out around the time, saying God is “in” all of us (as opposed to only the “religious”. One had a little child complete the statement that He is in “you, and you, and you, and you…”) Even my father spoke of being “spiritual”, as if that equaled or even trumped theism as the true “religion”. (I would begin seeing a lot of people doing this). Stevie’s “Heaven Is Ten Zillion Light Years Away” alternates between saying “My God lives inside of me” and “He loves us all” and the almost fundamentalist sounding “Those who don’t believe will never see the light” (with the background vocal shouting “You sinner, sinner, SINNER…!!!“)

After writing a book report on Ernst Gray’s “The Sky is Gray” (about a kid; much like me and obviously an INTP, who questions the absolute premise of religion) for an English class, I was told about the Unitarian Universalist church over in the fancy part of town, and went the last three Sundays of college. Wow; an actual church for agnostics, basically! Though the copying of the form of the “church” (and with their own little ritual using a chalice) seemed a bit “phony” or at least contrived.

By the end of my two year college trial, frustration about life in general under an unknown condition of “high functioning autism”, plus seeing Armstrong’s series on biblical prophecy that seemed to explain and predict certain events in the world, led me to shortly afterward become interested enough to adopt the faith. Where before, I had despised the Church with its teaching that man was “sinful” rather than “good”, as many other “secular” people did; in my utter disillusionment with “the world”, the teaching was starting to make sense! I took it as more strong evidence of the faith. Though in practical terms, it was more a hypothetical ‘proposal’ and yet still totally uncertain and hard to believe.
The final prompt was hearing conservative talk show host Morton Downey Jr. utter what’s called the “Pascal Wager”: If I’m wrong and there’s nothing after this, then it doesn’t matter. If you’re wrong, and there is a God who judges, then who will be better off? (Basically, it’s better “err on the safe side”! I at the time took this as the “ultimate proof”!)
Making it worse, my father now reacted to this “white man’s religion” now in his own house, and kept pointing out “You don’t know; they [other Christians] don’t know…”, etc. “You can’t prove it or disprove it!”; even comparing it to “trying to grab onto smoke”. As much as I tried to argue back; I knew that’s exactly what it felt like! (This is what science has summed up under the term “unfalsifiable”. It’s not like something like gravity, that you can either prove or falsify right in front of you). And the Pascal Wager now just seemed totally flimsy, in that regard; at least as far as spreading the faith to others. It was only good for one’s own internal “belief”, and what my father was saying it is it can only be “true”, “for you”; not everyone else! I had nothing to say to that! I guess I was supposed to go dig out Romans 1, as used by “fundamentalist” and “sectarian” teachers alike and tell him “You know the truth; you’re just trying to suppress it!” As one friend put it, “Is it that they don’t know, or don’t want to know?” (Which is attempting to get into other people’s heads/hearts way beyond what is possible, based on a hypothesized generalization; especially when I can barely determine my own inner sense).
So the whole point of the faith was “witnessing” and “winning souls”, and getting them to stop suppressing, and “accept” this truth. It felt kind of like being a salesman trying to get someone to switch from one product to another, with each product having some claim of being better than the other! But in such an important, “universally true”, “spiritual” matter, why did it feel that way? How could I settle for this secularized “personal truth” handed to me by an unbelieving “world”? The whole thing (the Gospel) would be not real, then!

So I struggled in the faith, soon settled for what’s called “new evangelicalism”. and then eventually getting into debates with “old-line” fundamentalists (the epitome of everything people might hate about Christianity, and in their view, the truest form of it) over issues like music and politics, and some other sects, and could see how anyone could spin the Bible to teach just about anything. I had my proof texts, which I was sure trumped theirs, but they were just as sure of their own proof-texts.

Entering the new millennium, my faith took a big blow when the charismatic pastor we saw for marriage counseling told us we were “lukewarm” and Christ would spit us out of His mouth if we didn’t “systematically” pray enough (which was the whole “relationship” with God, which no one could “enter Heaven” without). I wrote a letter to him, pointing out the obvious violation of “grace alone, not works” this implied, but never heard back. Still, inside, it just added more to the struggling with God’s ‘silence’ and ‘why’. This was just another attempt to put it all on us, and the solution, being, mechanical and all of our own “will”, which scripture says our spiritual “life” is not based on!)
Then, you had Calvinism (which is very aggressive and loves to delve into the realm of God’s eternal perspective, but then tries to silence any questioner with that) whose strongest point, which was hard to answer is that even with total “free will”, if God “foreknew” something (such as dying “lost”, such as those who never even heard of Christ) and still placed you in that stuation, that’s as good as “preordaining” it. (This realization leads some to adopt “open theism”, where God either doesn’t know the future, or at least chooses not to see it, which provides a perfect caricature of non-Calvinist views).

In 2005, following the Dover Trials, where the teaching of evolution was once again challenged (like it was 80 years earlier in the Scopes Trial), and now finally, evolutionists began becoming much more aggressive and outspoken against Creationists, and even its more moderate new variant, “Intelligent Design” (e.g. the “New atheists” Dawkins, Dennett, Bennetta, Hitchens etc.) where decades before, they totally ignored all the attacks against evolution I witnessed, when first weighing between the two. To mock the “design” argument, a total parody of religion was created, with a hideous, grotesque “Flying Spaghetti Monster”, worshipped by “Pastafarians”. I could certainly see the point (you could make up anything to fill the role of an “intelligent” designing entity), but still reasoned this was a deliberately manmade caricature to prove a point, and thus not the same thing.  In what was basically an attempt to “prove” it to myself, and part of my doing my job of “witnessing”, I jumped into the NYTimes “human origins” debates, and occasionally battled a rather obnoxious evolution advocate (and I also heard, gay rights as well, and who was also said to actually be a Times editor, but he was so inflammatory, he was later banned from the forum), who blasted all “Christers” as he called them. Another caustic poster referred to God as “Spookipooh”. Yet another, who was much more civil, in responding to my aruments, said “If God is real, why does he make it look like he’s not real?“ I knew that he had hit the nail on the head! It was was precisely what I was struggling with! The whole Romans 1 “general revelation” argument employed by fundamentalists (God “showed” every single person who ever lived — “all that may be known of Him”, and that, through “the things that are made”) now seemed like a giant joke! I guess I was “supposed” to point to verses 24/26/28, and tell them that God Himself “gave them over” to their false belief, and perhaps also even 2Thess.2:11 “And for this cause God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie”, and Rom.9:18, that He “hardens” the [supposedly] “non-elect”. But the thing is, anyone can say this, including other groups who are even more strict than us, like those who believe modern evangelical music, worship, preaching, counseling techniques and Bible translations are “carnal” and “worldly” and promote ‘other gospels’, and our consciences are “seared” on those issues so that we can no longer hear the “truth” they are “reproving” us with! If God Himself has so “deceived” people because of their refusal to believe, than why are we even arguing with them, whether on discussion forums, or on the political scene? 

I also shortly after tried one last ditch effort to “witness” to my soon to be 90 year old bitter, troubled paternal grandmother, before she “went into eternity”, only for her to complain to my father who then just rubbed in again how I couldn’t convince her, because I couldn’t prove it. (I really couldn’t even picture either of them ever as “believers”! My mother or brother either. It just “wasn’t them”, as my father had even said regarding his mother. So what was I even doing?) Yet the common reading of Romans chapter 1 was that everyone really knew “the truth” inside. I couldn’t even prove it to myself, let alone any one else already set against it.
It seemed like they could all the more effectively take the passage and turn it around to say we were “suppressing the truth”! The ruthless, for instance, are the ones with a stronger case that “God has shown” us what the proper course of life is, and they followed it and succeeded, (thus “proving” it as “fact”) and others did something else, and that’s why they failed. Christians actually support this whenever they appeal to political conservative philosophy which justifies this!

2007–8, in debates on one of the Christian forums (that for awhile allowed others to peddle their views to a limited extent), I encountered the system of “full preterism”, which claims everything was fulfilled in the AD70 destruction of the Temple. I debated vigorously against them in favor of the standard Pre-Millennial “futurist” view, but they seemed to have a strong point in what they called the “clear time statements”, especially Matthew 16:28, where Jesus said all the “end time” stuff He was describing (including even the judgment itself, previous verse!) would be seen by some of those He was talking to right there. Our standard answer to this was “this will be the generation alive when these things begin (i.e. still yet in our future). But this was an incredibly weak interpretation. Some even say it was to “keep us on our toes”, by making us think Christ could come at any time, so we will be more “holy” and “diligent”, in order to be “ready”. (This is even worse, on several fronts. It has God/Christ/The Spirit who “knows the end from the beginning” basically telling us an un-truth, and ties love and obedience strictly to the fear of immediate punishment rather than the ‘judgment seat of Christ’ we’re all supposed to face whenever and however we leave this lifetime).
One of the things I was struggling with was why the “Second Coming” was being delayed so long, as this “world’ or “life” continued on, seemingly immutably. No matter what world events occurred, making us think this might be “finally it”, the world just kept going on! I even had occasionally thought it looked almost like we were somehow apparently past the Second Coming; a whole world history “left behind”, and abandoned by God, while the first century saints are already in the Kingdom beyond earth. In the widely assumed 7000 year Millennial “week” idea (with Creation at 4004BC, Christ was born 4BC), the actual “6000th” year, when the Millennium would begin would have been 1997. But that date, and all the others men had been setting, just passed like any other (including even the much feared “Y2K”).

The full preterists were yet another “Reformed” group that now bragged about “robbing us of our fanciful view of a future new Kingdom”; — just as the Reformed view “robbed us” of our “free will” salvation. So without an end of this world, people being born as sinners predestined to Hell (with only an elect class “saved” from this) will continue forever (though as this earthly “Kingdom” expands, there should be less “lost” people as time goes on).
Yet in researching this, I stumble across another view based on it, called “Pantelism”, or the “Fulfilled View” (leading teachers such as Max and Tim King), that realized that if the “end” really was in AD70, then condemnation (which comes from the Law) passed along with it. We think of the “Old Covenant” or “the Law” immediately ending at the Cross, and so whatever we see afterward (including retained parts of the Law, and “judgment” for the “sin” they outlined, the still having to personally “get covered” with the Blood, “few shall be saved”, etc.) must be apart of the permanent “New” Testament. And so the perpetual “tension” between “law and grace”, and others, began, as all of this ends up, as in practice, still “works”, and even admitted as “hard”! But the two covenants actually overlapped, evidenced by the “deposit” or “downpayment” (KJV “earnest”) mentioned in 2 Cor. 1:22, 5:5 and Eph.1:14. We take this today to refer to this invisible, either felt or unfelt influence of the Spirit, which is supposed to be the “downpayment” on heavenly bliss after death or the return of Christ. Or some might take it as a sense of “assurance” (admittedly limited) we have now. But this “promise” in these passages is redemption itself in the first place. All of this shows entrance to the Kingdom was not completely secure yet, so they had this “downpayment” on it until the time had come (Hence, Rom.8:16). But this surety itself is the promise they were waiting for. The period of Law was finally ended when the Temple was destroyed (AD70), and Jerusalem basically transformed into an antetypical “Gehenna” (the lake of fire and brimstone, fulfilling the prohpecies of Jer. 7:31–33, 19:2–13 and Isa. 34:4–10 cf. Rev. 14:11, 20:10).
This was in their lifetimes, and the only event that could fulfill “the end” spoken about in the prophecies (including Christ’s own words).

An unknown view that fits things together better

So then everything now clicked, and this seemed to explain a lot of the unanswered questions! One preterist points out the utter silence of the Church between the apostolic and post apostolic ages (where the church that arose afterwards was different, and eventually grew into the corrupt medieval system) that suggests that’s when the actual “rapture” must have occurred! Second century historian Josephus suggests an actual appearance of Christ in the clouds, as Acts promised. It also then gives the best possible explanation I’ve seen of why special revelation has ceased. It’s no longer needed as the divine Plan really is completely “finished”! Rev.15:1 tells us that the “7 last plagues” being described “fills up the wrath of God”. That means, the “lake of fire” we read of in the last two chapters and think to be some other completely separate final session of inflicting “wrath” on the same people and more, is really just another description of the temporal (but still “eternal” in scope) events the whole book had been describing. (The “storyline” or flow of the book from chapter to chapter makes everything in Revelation look sequential, but apparently, there is a lot of parallelism in what it’s describing).

This is a far cry from the conventional view where we after 2000 years of shifting and often corrupt Church history are held to the same or even greater level of burden as those who saw Christ or at least His divinely led Apostles. “To whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48).

All of this is more “hypothesis”, but it makes many things fit together more than the “commonly accepted message” and its admitted “paradoxes” or “higher knowledge” (which apologists have fallen back on way too much, in making excuses for all the holes in some of their theories).
In the traditional view, God’s wrath is [by definition] NEVER “filled up” (and the reasoning actually is, that “sin” is an “infinite offense”, so Christ offers a “pardon”, but only through a “hard narrow path” most people won’t take, so all the others still have to suffer this unpayable “debt” through eternal suffering in Hell, either by divine “reprobation” and/or “preterition”, or by their own supposed “free choice”, which makes little difference. All of this is completely unscriptural philosophy to justify the doctrine).

This discovery also allowed me to be able to be much more honest about my doubts. I was trying to suppress them, fearing “If I was really saved, I wouldn’t have these struggles”. While some evangelicals granted you what would amount to God accepting you “for your sincere efforts” at faith, the way most preached, everything was so “clear”; there were “no excuses”, etc. Especially when it comes to how the faith is to provide the incentive for changing your attitudes toward life, and they speak of this “power” that helps you do it, “proving” it once and for all. One Calvinist at the very beginning of my faith journey when I was really struggling had said it might mean I wasn’t saved. To them, salvation is by “unconditional election”. (And as for the mixed messages of “general revelation”, there are some out there that believe God confounds things like this on purpose in order to “harden” the non-elect [citing Romans 9], and yet still “holding them accountable”!) Popular Puritan leader Jonathan Edwards — (the one who had people “clenching their seats with fear” from his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” preaching on Hell, which people today still applaud for creating great “revivals”), split our [response] “ability” into “natural” (ability not to commit any given individual sin), and “moral” (desire to not sin), and these together create a “double-bind” for man, as God judges everyone by the “natural” ability, yet this is rendered ineffective by a lack of the “moral” ability, — which He only gives to the “elect” (i.e. God makes it look like the “reprobates” only “sin” and then “reject” Him and His offer of forgiveness simply because of their “desire to sin”, even though they couldn’t possibly overcome this. “Electing” some out of this trap then is what “grace” is).] 
Calvin himself even said that coming to God out of “mercenary affections” wasn’t true “saving faith”. And he even had a teaching called “evanescent grace”; that God gives some “reprobates” a “false faith” which He then takes away, so they they fail to “persevere to the end”, and end up falling into “perdition”. (So even any of them could one day in the future fall into this, and how can ANYone possibly know they are “elect”, if they are really honest? They just have to “presume” or “presuppose” it!)

But what these people are teaching is not “good news”, which is the meaning of the “Gospel”. And even if I struggle with whether all of this is real, I can still read the Bible and see what it teaches as the Good News, and that many of these “historic” conventional teachings do not match at all! It’s all about control of people, through fear! 1 John 4:18 says “true love casts out fear”. Conservatives loudly champion a fear message (blaming all modern problems on “preachers not preaching sin and Hell anymore”), which their own historic root theology says ultimately does not save! And to put it on the “enlightenment of the Spirit” then is the “esoteric interpretations” they condemn “cults” for! Anyone can and does claim that. They say the “truth” is so “clear”; then you shouldn’t need a special “calling” to be able to perceive it. Even 1 Cor.2:14, “But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned”; “receiving” is more about accepting things. But they could still see that the doctrine they are not “receiving” is taught there! So this verse cannot be used to say their “hard” doctrines such as God deliberately trapping people in condemnation and blaming them for it is “good news”. For that nullifies the meaning of the term!

The coldness of the universe

This “random” universe was cold, and allowed people with the right “timing, talent and temperament”, to take advantage, and be able to control everyone else (and this includes the religious leaders themselves, as much as they condemned the “a-morality” of the “fallen“ universe. In fact, they were often prime examples of this, further damaging their credibility!) The supposed evil of men is often treated as “acts of God“, (even as it may be condemned by Christians). Something you have no control over, so you better just accept it with the right attitude, “or else”. (Like being born physically disabled, or some unforeseen accident. “Acts of God” is actually a secular term that happens to be one of the only times “God” is treated as a real entity in serious secular usage. It’s for generally big, negative natural occurrences, where nobody human can be blamed).

In all of life (from “faith”, to secular achievements such as gaining credit, getting published, developing “confidence”, etc.) the bar has been set so high, you need to essentially already have what you’re seeking, to even start the process. (Self-esteem psychologist Nathaniel Branden; the “-rand-” actually named after Ayn Rand[!] called this “reciprocal causation”). People just flatly appeal to “nature” with such analogies as “you have to crawl before you can walk”; “the butterfly has to start out as a lowly worm”, etc. (And this, same world that levels terms such as “empathy” at people like autistics!) This seems to explain the in-practice, but butchered reading of the Parable of Talents or Pounds in the song “God Bless The Child” (reflecting what else but the difficult black experience in America): “Those who’ve got shall get; those who’ve not shall lose”. (Though in the parables, either all started out with the same resources, or they were only expected the return of what they were given, and only the one who didn’t try at all was punished. Of course, that’s precisely what many assume about the poor, a certain race, or anyone struggling with anything in life!)

We try to say God isn’t like this; it’s this way because of us; our “sin” (and apparently, this includes the entire universe. A black hole eating up stars billions of light years away is because of God’s reaction to what “Adam” did. (Of course, this has to really be no more than 6000 light years; or perhaps light used to move faster some may try to claim; or at most, maybe because of Satan, the being that posed as the serpent who egged on Adam’s sin).
Still, the fact that God “allowed” this, or even “ordained” this (as Calvinists will claim, but even “allowing” is still ordaining it would be this way), and yet “holds us responsible” (blames us) for this (with an eternal Hell as punishment if you don’t take a “hard path” of believing and/or doing the right things before you die), would suggest the coldness of the universe is a reflection of His character! (This is likely why Calvinism has stuck so well in the church).

Here’s something reminding me a lot of the ‘counsel” I used to get from my family:

https://link.medium.com/VHVrXqpBPzb
“Reality does not need, nor does it want our approval.”
“When you fight reality, reality always wins. All you accomplish is making yourself miserable in the process.”
(Personifying this thing called “reality”. Makes “It” seem like a cold, amoral cosmic troll. Like the worst elements of theism; like the Calvinist arguments for reprobation; esp. citing Rom.9, or why God is three-in-one “just because”, [when further inquiry into scripture mitigates these “paradoxes”] but stripped of all personhood).

Also pitches “no judgment“. Meaning, declaring “reality” to be “right” or “wrong”. (In a Jungian sense, to declare reality “bad” with our “Feeling” function”, or even “incorrect” with our “Thinking” function. “Reality” is only to be perceived, “as IS”, which is basically through the Sensing function. –And I find the “big pictures” of the other perception function, iNtuition tend to point right back to judgment, so that function is ruled out as wel! *[Perhaps this explains why in the Keirseyan temperament theory within type, the “N”-associated temperament is determined by the preferred judgment function: i.e. NF or NT, where for S’s, it’s the Sensing function’s orientation: SP or SJ; the J/P indicating the perception function is external or internal, and the judgment function doesn’t figure in it])
The thing is, once we “accept“ what “is”, it then becomes ‘judgment’ as well. “Acceptance” is a rational “decision“. We’re basically saying it’s “true” or “correct“; especially as we allow it to set our direction in action. Then, as part of the coping strategy, we are instructed to find ways to judge it as “good“ as well (like, “we’ll grow from it”). So we’re told not to ‘judge’, but that really means don’t judge it negatively (“wrong”), only positively (basically, “right”).

Commenter stephenstillwell disputes the point of the article, and citing economic issues, links to his own article https://link.medium.com/KSLx9LuCPzb
Which is a good point, given how people benefitting from situations often further benefit from maxims of “that’s life”.

Another likens it to Vispessana (“seeing things as they are”) meditation, “the oldest of Buddhist meditation practices” (Might at first sound a bit ironic, given Buddhism is the one generally known for suggesting reality is imaginary. But then that’s really our “thoughts” that are imaginary, and hence trying to key into what true “reality” really is, apart from them).

I had noticed in the Jungian writer Robert Johnson’s Living the Unlived Life p.200-1, he speaks of “purpose” in life as “Building God’s Cathedral”, with a story of two workers building the Chartres Cathedral. One just sees himself as “pushing a wheelbarrow”, and the other sees himself “doing the work of God”, in doing his part in building the cathedral. “The same activity, but very different levels of awareness”. One man “has invested his work fatefully—connected to a greater purpose—and therefore rendered his life meaningful. It is not what you do in life that is most important; rather it’s a questions of what consciousness you bring to the activity”. Of course, this is about “attitude” in experiencing the difficulties of daily life, which is the theme of both Christian teaching and secular “self-help”.

I think in either case, this “purpose” is at best very cloudy, and at worst, totally speculatory and fanciful. (Johnson does cite someone as saying “the chief obstacle to heaven is our ideas about heaven”. Now, were using some iNtuition, in speculating on a “big picture”, but Johnson will turn back to the S “what is” perspective, below). Religions use their scriptures, and for Christianity, “building the Cathedral” would be generally doing your part in “building God’s Kingdom”, which is generally understood as winning more souls for Heaven instead of Hell when they die. It also includes supporting the people or infrastructure winning souls, such as “serving” in Church. For some variations, it’s trying to build a literal kingdom here on earth, usually through “taking back” the culture and implementing divine Law.
Both are “futurist” (i.e. believe in a future heavenly “kingdom”), but vary in being either pre- or post-/a- milennial. Both fail to realize that the Law was passing away THEN, not now, and so assumed the descriptions of this “kingdom” in places like Revelation are this future and/or otherworld place that is supposed to be our incentive to both suffer in life as we do our part to fulfill “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven”. Even taking that literally, it was unclear as to what it really is, but we are ensured “we’ll just be in a state of bliss; ‘eye has not seen nor ear heard’ what this is like”.

After a while, when you’re still not there, and still faced with the day to day troubles of this world, what good does that do? It’s not going to pay the bills. But still, they tell you this should “take your mind off” of these things. (Mind you, likely some pastor or teacher who is himself part of an organized “system” that makes sure his living is taken care of, and if not, puts pressure on supporters such as the everyday “lay” people in the church).

Johnson also speaks of “creative suffering” [“suffer” as in “allow” like used in Shakespeare —or the KJV Bible], which is “saying yes to what is” and to “stop fighting it, and instead to affirm it and to affirm your life” (202-3). “Such experience is redemptive in that it leads to healing and self-knowledge. If you can acknowledge what is true in your life, looking at it with objectivity and intelligence, you are getting closer to enlightenment, as your escape mechanism is diminished. By stating what is at any moment, with complete honesty and sincerity, you become conscious of it.” When looking at your past, it should be “in a reflective, honest manner, not idealizing or judging it. It is what it is. Just state what has been true for you and what is true now”. (p.244) When “beset by a seemingly irresolvable contradiction…hold these oppositions in your mind without immediately jumping to claim one as the ‘good'” (p.106) [i.e. again, no “judging” But note the term “what’s true”. That includes a judgment!]
Sounding much like many Christian teachers (especially when discussing “Christ’s yoke” and “casting all your cares on Him”), he speaks of taking “half the ‘burden'” from a person suffering something, by taking the “rebellion” but leaving “the situation”, which they still have to bear or “work to deal with”. (p205). Again, “When you stop fighting your situation, you still have the situation but you no longer have the struggle to cope with. This is to stop wounding yourself on the jailhouse bars of reality—to stop complaining about what is”.

This is supposed to be eliminating the “duality” we split reality to (which includes the “knowledge of good and evil”, defining “the Fall” of course), but it to me is like a cruel joke (pretending to offer “relief”), and seems to all the more favor the division of the poles of two of those dimensions: ST – What IS (S) CORRECT (T). And the T-“correct” in fact being a judgment! He means, again, don’t judge it negatively, which is T-“incorrect” or F-“bad”. He says don’t “idealize”, which would be a positive F “good” judgment (with an N “concept” perspective), so it seems “true” is being seen as T-“neutral” and just associated with S at this point. But me, having a T-dominant ego, I can’t help seeing this in terms of a T judgment, which appears to slant it toward an unfavorable viewpoint. (Then an unconsciously controlled negative F judgment [“dislike”] comes along with it). So in my view, saying things I don’t like is not only a matter of what “is”, but also, what’s “right“.
I wonder if I just see it this way, because of being an N (with individualized rather than environmentalized Thinking), and if there is a different challenge for S’s; perhaps dealing with the abstract meaning of the “big picture”. I notice a lot of them “talk the talk”, but at the end of the day, are really no more “content” in life than I am.

So this ties into what I think is the most utter coldest aspect of “life” of all! How when you’re hurting, you’re told that if you “hold on” to your anger, don’t forgive others, etc. “you’re only hurting yourself”. You’re going to “drive yourself crazy”. (With references to a proverb of IIRC a bride holding on to her rotting wedding cake after the groom stands her up, and even the Frankenstein story is also supposedly about this lesson of what happens if you “don’t let go”; and I guess the Copacabana song too, though I’ve never heard that one given as an example). What a cruel double-bind “life” puts some people in! (And it’s the same world; the same “society”, the same people even, that bitterly chastize stuff like “not caring” or “lack of empathy” who tritely give these platitudes!)

No matter how much you “expend” (suffer, endure, or even have to apply effort or to something), it never seems to be enough (unless in the right positions in life). It seems this “beast” (life) is never filled; never satisfied with the pain it extracts from people.

The difficulty of “faith”

You wake up in this violent universe of survival (matter and energy shifts in ways that try to pull apart the physical forms you need to live, and it’s difficult to maintain them).
People come to you with a book, written and printed like any other, by men, and claim it was ‘inspired’ by the Creator of the universe, and reveals His identity and “will” for mankind.
The book is shrouded in uncertainties, such as the authors of the four parallel accounts of the life of Christ, written decades afterward, supposedly by “oral tradition”, the authorship of certain books, like Hebrews, and “Moses” writing the account of his own death and afterward. It also includes many miracles, including a supposed recent Creation and global Flood and stopping the sun in the sky for several hours, that, going against all the laws of nature, just don’t occur [anymore].

Then, they tell you this is all “absolute fact” that God has even “shown” you, but when you question these things, they say it is by “faith, not sight”. 
So they then have to come up with flimsy speculations as to why they don’t, such as “God wants ‘faith’ now”. (But He wanted ‘faith’ then too!) Or others claim all that is “allegorical”. But then that seems to make it lose its soundness. You even have some admitting there is no absolute certainty! An evangelical book is titled The Myth of Certainty (Daniel Taylor, Intervarsity. 1999)! Yet there remain those in their midst who act as if it is absolutely certain; especially when they start talking about divine “judgment”. (And 1 John 5:13 does kind of sound like it might be tying certainty to salvation! At least the way one person I knew preached it, with a vocal stress on “know”!) Apologists then keep coming up with these supposed ’empirical’ proofs. Like “There is more evidence for Christ than for Caesar”, but most of these ‘evidences’ end up being the scripture texts themselves.

We’re supposed to “just believe” all of this, and then, when all else fails, they tell us “you know deep in your heart it’s all true; you’re only suppressing this to have an excuse to ‘hold on to your ‘sin’!” (What a gaslightish double-bind! If it were really something we ‘KNEW’; then they wouldn’t need to appeal to this thing they’re calling “faith” then; ‘believing’ it wouldn’t really be ‘faith’; now would it? i.e. in the sense they are using it in, of believing in the ‘unseen’. It would by definition be “sight”!
*They’ll then probably shift the definition of “faith” (pistis) to ‘trust’; i.e. in one you already see and believe in; but the way they use the term when arguing for His existence and presence, it’s basically belief in something not perceptible by the senses).

They tell you all men have sinned and are naturally inclined to do evil (which I would say is the strongest proof of scriptural teaching), but they expect you to take their word for everything (as if they weren’t men; and not question them at all) and do what they say. (Hence, the appeal to your own “conscience”; to get them off the hook as to the fact they’re the ones telling you something, and possibly skewing it, as they freely will claim other men do). Some Calvinists even promote this way of thinking as what they call “presuppositionalism”: whatever they believe and say about God is automatically right, and they don’t have to prove it or consider anyone else’s perspectives or feelings. You’re the “enemy of God”; they’ve been “elected” and sent by God to preach “the truth” to you. They have free reign to trample over the world for Christ, if they so desired.

Using the same line of reasoning, these people’s forebears, whom they declare ‘godly’, and whose ‘values’ we should go back to (and should never have departed from) just showed up and declared themselves the rightful rulers, claiming people’s land and freedoms. Today, they favor this “muscular” philosophy that frowns on weakness (such as financial) as deserving hardship. (Like they’ll blame people for getting caught up in ridiculous rigged student or home loans, but never challenge why prices and interest are so high. It’s like “that’s the way it is”, like God did it or something, and the “responsibility” is only on the vulnerable recipients). They appeal to our “sin”, and how it earns us “suffering”, so anything bad that happens (including if it is at their own hand, or blessing) is justified.

Then they claim God’s “power” will “change your life”. but when you say you don’t feel anything, they tell you it’s by [again] “faith”, and then begin describing a “process” of mechanical self-willed “choices” (efforts) that anyone can learn to do.

It’s like a meme I have seen showing the pope, saying

“You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them. This is how prayer works”

This basically renders prayer (“making our requests known to God”) meaningless. You can just feed them without praying.
And of course, so can people who do not even believe in God.
This is similar to an African proverb I’ve seen: “You ask for the ancestors’ help and then help yourself”. (This is pretty much what the common secular cliché “God helps those who help themselves” paraphrases). So yet again, it leads credence to the notion that all “spiritualities” are the same.
(People probably derive this from Phil.2:13-4 “work out your own salvation…For it is God who works in you”, but the first “work” is “accomplish” or “achieve”, which actually carries a more passive (a result that you can receive) sense, while the second one, the one God does, is the one meaning “be operative; put forth power”. So even this does not really support the common understanding of “power”, regarding our own efforts).

They hold up “heavenly rewards” as being our hope that encourages us (and makes all of life’s pains tolerable), but this is based on promises to Christians suffering actual persecution, not the general pains of life; and also creates a selfish motivation, centered on ultimately gaining something.

The notion of “justice”

Feeling that power imbalance as mentioned, I became very fixated upon the notion of “justice” and “compensation”, and this is what lured me in. It offered some solace for awhile, but as problems kept coming in the early “faith” of my early adulthood, the demand for some sort of instant validation increased. (Mainly, a father whose alcoholism was flaring up at the same time, and who then challenged the faith almost nightly, and I was hard pressed to answer, already struggling believing myself, and couldn’t find a decent job, with him pressing me on that and telling me God won’t ‘take care’ of me, in addition to loneliness, blamed on my social flaws in a confirmation-biased [“told you so”] fashion, and yet now committed to a “purity culture” that mandated marriage in “answering nature’s call”.
Christian leaders seemed so aloof and far removed, often doing nicely in the world. They then offered platitudes to the suffering, including “heavenly rewards”). The terms “trials” (negative situations in general) and “tests” (more individual ones) were turned into frequent “biblical” catch phrases, that on one hand, seemed to assure these things were not simply “life”; someone was in fact “doing this to you”, but utltimately, it was “God” (who you better not “murmur” at), and even if not Him, but instead “Satan” (as most are more likely to say), it was still God who “allowed” it for some “good reason”. This I soon found to just make it worse, and the situations were still the same things others called “just life”!

One commenter on a question of why God doesn’t heal amputees claimed that God “taking his life”, spiritually that is, by “causing his ‘old nature’ to die”, took his “focus” off of his ongoing severe back pain, and made it instead “remind me of His sovereign grace and mercy”. Extending this principle, in fundamentalists’ criticism of the modern Church for allowing psychotherapy, the claim is that “all people really needed” instead was what one leader quipped as “a dose of the Book, the Blood and the Blessed Hope”. All of this is pitched at the suffering, and if it doesn’t change your attitude, then you are harshly judged and accused of “denying the power” God offers you!

But I began feeling a “disconnect” from scriptural examples of ‘suffering’ and ‘rewards’ the promises were originally given for. (For one thing, as we see, this even extends to physical and mental suffering that is not even an issue of “justice” i.e. for wrong done by others). I could not honestly call much of my pain “suffering for Christ”. Some of it was even legitimately for my own faults or “sins”. (Which [the same] Christians will then certainly bring up if you complain too much about “injustice” and “why God allows suffering”!) So what about that? Even that which I did technically suffer from my father or occasionally others over the name of Christ; what I was going through was still not the same as the early Christians’ experience of being burned at the stake, sawn in half, crucified, appearing before leaders and told at the point of a sword “Christ or Caesar?” etc. (And neither was that of the modern well-off Christian leaders, often complaining of being “persecuted” by secular society, for taking away elements of the dominance they once enjoyed!)

Eventually, I began fearing that this was actually just another appeal to the ego, or our sinful natures, which get us into such trouble to begin with. I now see the desire for reward as ‘vain’ and even ‘legalistic’. It certainly doesn’t ‘prove’ anything now, and ‘life’ remains ‘life’. If anything, it just becomes another pacifier, like the “success” and “mental health” offered by secular self-help. I realized that whatever “rewards” for suffering or “punishments” for others’ evil will not make up for the pain here, in the midst of the uncertainty of whether the afterlife is real, or what nature it will have (will we even be ourselves?) and (with all of that up in the air), whether “grace” will even pan out as we think (e.g. others forgiven, us judged, so that “rewards” and “punishments” aren’t even meted out as we [thought we] were “promised”)

Counting on a “reward” seems mighty presumptuous, especially when the promise was made to Christians suffering often fatal persecution, and I’m applying it to largely, daily inconveniences and some lifetime setbacks, and then the same “spiritual” messages (and their ‘secular’ counterparts) are also telling you you haven’t done enough to “deserve” more. Also, it feels like a ‘reward’ for those ‘little’ things validates the system that caused them. You played your legitimate role, now you’re “paid” for it. If this were known now, then we could confidently look forward to the reward. But instead, nothing is known now (including whether there really is a “reward”, or whether the afterlife is anything like we’ve imagined it), so it instead comes off as, again, a pacifier to shut up complaining or even grieving that a “toxic positivity” culture (and Church) don’t want to be bothered with.

I know I have not really earned any “reward” (in a biblical sense). I cannot find joy in something that turns so naturally into stroking the ego (which is so frowned on by secular and religious world alike as it is). Christ had even told us “So likewise ye, when ye shall have done all those things which are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” Luke 17:10.

Succeeding in the world is a matter of being in the right place at the right time, (whether by accident, or by knowing how to navigate your way to that position). It is not [necessarily, or in itself] a sin that must be punished in order to maintain justice (and so neither is lack of success a virtue to be rewarded), and divine punishment of others in an afterlife really wouldn’t help us now or make things even better then, anyway.

So it’s like there’s no individual to even blame; it just “is”. (Making their position seem Godlike; He’s the one who claims “I AM that I am”; yet it seems like men and their systems get to take on that title. Look at how political and even religious conservatives justify everything “capitalism” does with “the market”,

All of this comes from feeling that cold, unmitigated “No!” from life every time something goes wrong, and the general pattern of unrealized wishes in life as well). All defenses (such as divine retribution ,or “I’m the oppressed good guy”) smashed; what is left but cynical lack of trust of any good expectation from life?

Through all of that, I eventually realized, that if I were these peoplewith power, I might do the same thing! It’s instinct they’re going on. Whether it’s capitalism (with conservative arguments playing on “nature” being hard to answer), or “pest” animals such as rodents or insects, it’s all the same drive. We can try to employ religion to say God expects man to rise above his instincts (and thus the level of animal existence), and this is what he will be “held responsible” for and condemned over, but what good does that do for us now? Especially when we’re living just as much by instinct most of the time!

This realization is also seen in rapper KRS One’s portrayal of a drug kingpin in “Love’s Gonna Get Ya”:

I got a 55 inch television you know
And every once in awhile I hear “Just Say No”
Or, the other commercial I love
Is when they say, “This is your brain on drugs”
I pick up my remote control and just turn
‘Cause with that bull____ I’m not concerned…

It was clear there is absolutely no reasoning with such people. They are driving on pure survival instinct! We see there they brush aside reason (whether moral or intellectual), for it’s not what immediately works for them; all the impassioned pleas from the public campaigns on these things falls on deaf ears. Three simple words “just say no” are nothing more than ‘hot air’ they basically laugh at! Who the hell cares if it’s portrayed as frying people’s brains like an egg? (And threats of Hell, which many Christians think are what were needed, also don’t faze them).
Conservatives (defending western—i.e. white “exceptionalism”) use all this against black culture, but again, their ruthless conquests, and now, systems like capitalism and global war, are the same exact thing; just on a larger scale. They’ve simply justified it in more elaborate ways (often using “moral” premises and religion), which to them is more valid than blaming racism for street crime; but is really the same survival instinct; and just as impervious to any kind of “reasoning”, except that used to justify it!

KRS in his real life seemed to epitomize this universal “favor”; blasting into the hip hop scene with a highly aggressive (yet intellectual) style, attacking other rappers (at least once, physically), and always seemed to get away with it, and whoever he was battling just gave up, and he then bragged on, in truth, about being “undefeated”. His life success philosophy can be summed up in another line from the same rap: “Where I’m at, if you’re soft, you’re lost; to stay on course means to roll with force!” Another glaring example is Michael Jackson’s father Joe, who harshly abused the boys, and basically broke Michael down into the total mess he became in his later years. When all the abuse was exposed in popular media (including after Michael died), he, sitting from the huge Encino mansion the children’s careers gained fo him, in all his “alpha” swag, justified with with “Well, they’re rich aren’t they?”. When he himself finally died, many people on YouTube comments defended and praised him as a good father as well! (I guess him staying alive and pushing them to greatness by any means necessary, was better than the stereotypical state of many other black fathers, as derelict, absent or dead. But meanwhile, them being a “religious” family, whatever happened to Jesus’ statement that “a man’s life does not consist of the abundance of things he posesses”?) Donald Trump is another example of someone who can get away with anything and still rise to the top (and even brag about the idea of literally getting away with murder; and even as far as having the moralistic conservative Christians of all people extolling him as “God’s man” for the nation, despite being morally “wicked”!) The difference with him is that the position he has kept him under the spotlight, and being not mentally well, he’s gone a bit far. Yet he can still possibly end up pretty much getting off unfazed! There are still millions who would vote for him even with his legal troubles!

The turning point in realizing all this regarding power was in reflecting on a relative who was schizophrenic, and gave her child a horrible upbringing. The few times I spoke to this person, it became obvious that what else can you really expect from her? How can you blame her? It didn’t make sense to wish punishment on people like this, because we all still sin (and feel we couldn’t help it, or are doing the best we can), and so could all be judged then. That’s the central teaching of the Gospel, and thus the basis of the whole idea of “Grace”, and what much of religion (focusing on behavior control through points of “the Law”) has missed!
(But it’s totally frustrating, as now this completely ambiguates the whole notion of “justice”, or any compensation for what pain and difficulty such people have caused us).

A saying of Jesus that is so significant, that I have taken notice of in recent years and wonder how it is hearly heard about is John 9:41: “If ye were blind, ye should have no sin: but now ye say, We see; therefore your sin remaineth.” The person who can “see” everyone else’s flaws so well (and even presume to see their own and be improving them), is really the most “blind” one! This is what the Johari Window covers; that yes, you can see yourself and others, and show others what you want to, but there will always be parts of you that you do not see (“the Shadow”), and some of it is even exposed to others! So what good does it do to judge others beyond a certain point?

Even with justice as commonly held in religion, it is quite disconcerting that people would be allowed to get away with everything in this life (because of power, while those with less power suffer consequences, at the behest of the rulers; i.e powerful; including things like being perhaps too tough when subordinates do legitimate wrong or mistakes), and only when removed from this timeline, after they’ve done everything they’ve done, are they held to account (sent to Hell if a nonbeliever, and losing “rewards” if a believer). They will then know for sure that justice was served, rather than the total frustration of having to grope in the darkness of wondering if it ever will be.
So “truth” will only be fully revealed when it is no longer useful (i.e. when we die and the “veil” is removed). According to conventional theology, its purpose will be to sentence uncovered sinners, and reward the faithful. But this will still be useless for any other purpose (and revealing the truth to them then, and only them, and saying they were “shown” the “truth” [which was basically in the unconscious], sounds like gaslighting, when all the evidence we can consciously see now seems to favor, and often reward people’s course of action now.

The whole appeal of “rewards” comes from feelings of deficit in life, and where we’re told we haven’t done enough to gain more of what we want, like others we see (and who may have gained a lot from dirty means, yet are credited with “hard work”, and even if we’ve suffered and lost a lot, passsively, and not proactively, which is deemed the true “earning” factor). So then, “rewards” (in the scriptural sense) are for passive suffering (persecution by others), but the difference was that the “active” factor was holding the faith, and not renouncing it, to save one’s life. This was more difficult than any effort required of us today, and does not address the difficulties many of us face that are not from persecution for the faith.
Deep down, it’s like I “knew” this all along, but could not articulate why I felt the“disconnect” from biblical suffering. I sought a free ticket to getting things (if nothing more than ‘recognition’) in a way that bypassed what people were calling “the laws/rules of life”. But even if this worked, it would only be realized in the afterlife; a totally different and unknown level of existence that is supposed to be higher than the things of ‘this world’ anyway. So it could never give me but so much “hope”. It was just too “fantastical”.

The appeal of “punishments” of others is the same thing in reverse; that if I can be judged for wrongs (or at least feel shame and guilt), then others should be as well; but their ability to get away with things is yet another ‘thing’ they have, and an afterlife is the only place this could ever be fixed (at least, consistently), and seeing that while being pardoned from it would be like another kind of “reward” (and some Christians even acknowledge this when they say the destruction of the wicked will be a ‘glorious’ occasion for the redeemed).

Of course, this side of it is cautioned by “grace”; the realization that you could still be judged as well. (And again, “grace” may well be the reason special revelation has been removed! The “unpardonble sin” [Matthew 12:31–2] for instance, was seeing a miracle of Christ and attributing it to Satan! But then this explanation for the lack of ongoing revelation is just another unprovable hypothesis!)

So when I get annoyed at:
•The decisions of business, government, or especially my own agency, and particularly the extraverted Thinking—introverted Sensing perspective,
•as an example of this, the legal industry, which has everyone afraid of lawsuits, and thus reacting and tightening up “safety” on everything. The firms egg this on with ads encouraging us to take someone to court for whatever hardship befalls us!
•often leading to a rigid system of rules, procedures and discipline (for fear of legal liability. Yet some of the rules actually aren’t practical, but you still have to be able to say you followed them, to be covered legally). On the other hand, is the extraverted Sensing perspective of the movers and shakers, who seize the opportunities of every situation. So on one side, you have the hackers and other criminals who directly affect us, the lawmakers and others reacting to them, and us everyday people in the middle feeling the pressure from both sides!
•Runaway capitalism; how prices have been gouged on just about everything, from housing to education, and even death (undertaking industry, during people’s darkest moments of loss of a loved one), and how people don’t question it, if not many thinking it’s good!
•In direct conjunction with this, everyone complains about taxes, and often blame the poor, but don’t see how the rich benefit from them, and perhaps the filing process is kept so complicated due to the benefit to the tax preparation industry.
(In one presidential election, candidates floated around the idea of simplifying the process down to where most people would merely receive from the IRA a card with all of their taxes basically done, and just check off a box to verify it was accurate. When the candidate who proposed that dropped out of the race, the idea was completely forgotten about, and the only thing changed that year was “welfare” reform! So something was actually changed in this humongous system, but only one specific thing, which remained the most complained about element of taxes, while the rest of the complicated system went unchanged! Who really benefits from this?)
•What I call “inertia”, where we all tend to want to keep doing what we’re doing, and not stop or change course (accelerate the opposite or different direction) unless we want to. People with power get to maintain their momentum more, while others have to change and adapt around them; to move when told to move and stay put and respect the “boundaries” otherwise (and this is often justified with presumptions they “earned” this “right”. To some, it’s just “life” or the “universe”, and it’s like they have just managed to be “in sync” with it).
•”CYA”, where everyone covers themselves, and just passes burdens (responsibility, culpability, etc.) down to whoever is more vulnerable
•and then all the “rugged individualist” rhetoric in politics, which justifies this inordinate power,
•and then tops it off by blaming those on the bottom for not simply “choosing” to rise higher,
•and then, the utter double standards, such as corruption or bungling in those high places that place such standard on everyone else;
•On a grander scale, that people think their forefathers could found this country the way they did, and yet now all the repercussions from that are everyone else’s fault (including those whose ancestors suffered the most from it). That they today can identify with those people and all their supposed virtues, yet then protest “don’t blame us for what they did” when their evils are pointed out.

I would be looking forward to the day God shows them how wrong they are, how “puffed up” they were, how they had not “earned” everything good as much as they thought they had, but did benefit from forces beyond their control (inluding the ability to put forth whatever effort they may have done), plus, the dirty “strings” the have pulled, how much pain they’ve caused, and how it was not justified, not “hard truth” that they easily accepted where others couldn’t; and imagine them at the Great White Throne, reeling in terror at the fruit of their “choices”.
But under the forgiveness of full Grace under the “Fulfilled” (Pantelist or “consistent” preterist) view, where condemnation has been removed (all taken upon by Christ), I often wonder if they’ll just say “sorry”.  If forced to see those they hurt, what else could they really say, but “sorry” (and again, that they only did what they thought they had to do, or thought was right, or they couldn’t help it, etc.)

We’re not supposed to think we’re “owed” anything. Then, how can we presume some afterlife “justice” for whatever we suffered here? This, I have found, leads to what’s been called “Main character syndrome”; where life becomes a big “story” centered around us, as the “main character”. But then, this is wrong; isn’t it? It’s not supposed to be “about us” and our egos!

Then what’s the alternative?
God
But what does this mean? He’s only believed in by “faith” (unseen), while the “seen” world just seems to be about who (or what) ever is the strongest

A concerted attempt at age 21 at trying to both “think positive” and have more “faith” and “humility” (themed around Michael Jackson’s concurrent “Man In The Mirror”) was all wrapped up in the idea of “reward”, but when it quickly became obvious that I would still have to live out life in this same “world”, and the whole idea of reward being by “faith“, which wasn’t really certain like the tangible current ‘realities’ of life, then the positivity just vaporized into a growing cynicism, that I was being ‘had’ in life itself, and ‘positivity’ was just a pacifier pitched by those who uphold the way the world is, and typically look down on ‘victimhood’.

Counting on “justice” and the “afterlife“ seems futile, because it’s completely unknown, and while various Christian groups claim it can be known (and that they are thus following “the truth”), they all disagree, and it’s usually “tougher”, more “old-line” advocates who are the loudest (and most feigning “certainty”). So I can listen to some “modern” teacher who has dressed the message up in niceties of “love” and “grace”, but someone else will accuse that of being “watered down” (to appeal to “sinful man”), and they’ll likely be the ones appealing the most to Scripture as the guide, as well as “historic Christianity”, or “the faith delivered to us”. I can ignore them and believe what makes most sense to me, but then who am I? I can’t determine truth (that God is then obligated to confirm). And I realize my own subjective biases. So the ‘tough’ teachers could be right, and then God is just making everything harder because He is glorified in our suffering (and likely has “chosen” people to recieve the truth).

The way life is, sometimes, or even the “universe”, you have to wonder, if the entity governing this universe and its laws (in which we experience the conflict with random energies as “pain“ and “discomfort”) has it in itself/Himself to provide something different for current creatures. To follow the precedent, it really seems like there wouldn’t be any such thing as ‘compensation’, and nor any need for it, once we’re done for. (The only reason something like that would exist would be “just to make us happy”  (e.g. out of “love”), but neither the personal “God“ nor the impersonal “universe” show any precedent for “making us happy” —as tough talking self help gurus and preachers alike will always remind us).

How will “justice” and “mercy” play out in a situation where both parties are partially at fault (which may be many, if not most situations). Like a matter of a superior being too hard on you for a legitimate wrong. Will we both be punished, or both forgiven (which for the subordinate might be reiterating that whatever the superior did, you really “deserved worse”, but are receiving more ‘grace’; just like what we are often told now)?

Waiting for rewards and vindication seems so “petty” (as well as “self-absorbed”, which we are criticized for being, in this lifetime), and just would perpetuate the events and principles of this world.

What good will it do then (after “everything has been said and done” in this life), when justice and mercy are what we need in the immediate contexts of this timeline, in order to better survive?
(The purpose of “justice” is to establish that “as we move forward living in this world, you must treat others a certain way; else there will be consequences”, in order to deter mistreating others. The common cencept of Hell is basically a disposal of people who did not act [or at least “believe”] right, now, and to scare people in this world with the threat of those consequences. Heaven likewise is the opposite, to motivate people with supposed “good” consequences into behaving a certain way now. But once in those respective realms, where these “consequences” are eternalized, then what purpose do they [continue to] serve, beyond just the reward/punishment motive for now?)

(The apparent truth is that the scriptures on Heaven and justice have been taken out of their original contexts, which was the first Christians and their oppression by the declining Old Covenant Law system)

I sometimes will call out in some sincerely felt prayer (if for nothing more than hoping forgiveness, or at least hoping I have it and the unconditional Grace doctrine is true), but don’t feel like it’s being heard by anyone, and nothing changes, and I don’t feel any different.

So right there, who are people going to “call out” to, if all of this is assumed to point to the identity or character of the Creator? (Of course, Augustine, Calvin and others fit that right into their “reprobation” and “election” doctrines; that He “holds man accountable” for ambiguous hypothetical evidence man really can’t discern for himself without a[n individual] special calling).

If life “is what it is” (and/or God “ordained” it so), then why should any “afterlife” be any different? Or, if the “afterlife” is the ‘real deal’, then why has this life been left this way so long, and seemingly, so “immutable”?

Why most arguments aren’t working

The laws of the physical universe seems to be the highest authority. They seem to be “designed”, and so we can trace it to a “designer”, but the physical laws do not point to what we call a “personal” being; or at least not a particular one, as is argued by “general revelation” arguments..
“Intelligence” is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills (from “inter-” [between] and “legere” [choose, pick out, read])

The “personal” aspect is thus an “idea” that is above and beyond the physical realm. People claim personal experience of the personal aspect, but this is totally subjective, and then they claim following certain steps like they did is what’s required to share the experience, and if it didn’t work; you must have done something wrong.

Here are a couple common attempts at “logical” evidence:

https://link.medium.com/aoZS9Kyqjzb
(Response to Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell, 2017)

This is where they pile on legal themes to really make it look true, and if you still question it, or seem unimpressed, then it’s the clear proof you “don’t want to believe” (i.e. biased against it). But something inside kept saying this wasn’t real decisive proof, and yet I couldn’t put my finger on it and articulate a good reason (and hence, I feared looking ‘obstinate’).
(I did think the “they wouldn’t die for something untrue“ claim was the ultimate answer, but that too is weak, as the article shows. Plenty of people die for things that are not true. Just look at some ‘cults’ or suicide bombers!
Even so, something called the Flavian Hypothesis says the entire revelation was fabricated by the emperors, to replace the Jews’ “Warrior Messiah” with a “suffering” one in order to pacify them. — which isn’t helped by the fact that this is exactly how Christianity has often been used ever since, while the leaders themselves were anything but pacified! This is another one I don’t know how to answer well, except to say that the epistles, at least, look like genuine letters written to people to address real issues).

The similarly themed Cold Case Christianity, J. Warner Wallace, 2013 used postapostolic fathers Ignatius, Clement and Polycarp as “nonscriptural evidence”. But these are people, a century or so later, whose knowledge comes likely from scripture, or maybe oral tradition. [The notion that they may have known John is based on the assumption he lived to the end of the century].

Evangelist Ray Comfort (who’s associated with former TV star Kirk Cameron, also now an evangelist) claims as “evidence” of “general revelation”, that the banana was made specifically for the human hand! (My first question then, is what about other fruits, such as coconuts?)

In this book review, I address a whole set of arguments that takes “general revelation” to the point of actually claiming atheism “steals” knowledge from God. It waffles between pain being “because of sin”, God “developing character” in us, and “nature just being allowed to run its course”. One bad analogy I point out is using physical artifacts as evidence for physical designer to prove physical elements as evidence of a non-physical designer. I think it’s true, that a physical universe with a beginning has to have to have a non-physical source. But the comparison is bad, because you can know what the physical designers are like, but then have to speculate on what a nonphysical being is like (and explain away remaining anomalies, such as the coldness of the universe!)

As for the comparison to evidence for Caesar and other historical figures, belief in their existence has little bearing on our lives today (and our other beliefs, actions and even attitudes). What “faith” in Christ (in practice) asks of us is a lot more, and so more will be expected of it as far as its verity!
Also should be mentioned that the whole point of “Why Won’t God Heal Amputees?” mentioned earlier, by the guy who did the “How Stuff Works” site, is that many Christians are claiming “healing” is still occuring, yet none of them violate the laws of the universe as much as some of what’s recorded in scripture; including the healing of amputees, and the most glaring one to me, again, stopping the sun’s movement (which is really stopping the earth’s rotation, and without flinging us and everything else on the surface of the earth all into space at 1000mph! God must have stopped the rotation and canceled inertia for us, and then started it all up again as if nothing happened, aftrerward. (Reminds me of the old Creationist argument that everything was created with the “appearance of age”). We weren’t there to see it happen or not happen, but know stuff like this just does not happen today. So to say it once did, and offer a “reason” why it doesn’t anymore, is just an untestable hypothesis (and not any “clearly shown” revelation!) Turning water into wine, I’ve seen explained as just the “speeding up” of a normal natural process, but still, that “speeding up” (i.e. instantaneous) is where the unrepeatable violation of nature occurs.

Then, many “miracles” were later exposed as faked. Others may not have been, but were not as impossible to fake as the others. Christians, in their debates with science, became known for what’s called a “God of the Gaps” premise; that anything science has not yet explained becomes a “proof” for God. That is, until an explanation is found for it. Until then, if you do not take it as an absolute proof, then aha! gotcha!; you are being obstinate and resisting what God has “shown you”! I relied heavily on this tactic, but deep down inside knew it wasn’t as strong as it seemed.
Somewhere along the line in my timeline above, there was the much touted supposed cured cancer in the church we were associated with, yet the person later still died from it anyway, and the only explanation was “We just don‘t’ know what God is doing”; He just decided to cure the cancer temporarily and let the person live longer, but then decided to let nature run its course later. In reality, it looks like the “cure” was just something like a temporary remission we did not expect. Again, to point that out was painted as denying God’s work.

On the other side, here is a typical atheistic science argument:

View at Medium.com

It’s worth pointing out that the very fact that apologists need to put their heads together and scheme in this way [Vogt: “some effective tips and tactics to use when speaking with the atheists.”] is itself evidence in atheism’s favour. God has evidently left Christians to stew for two millennia so that they must resort to sophistries and casuistries to explain away God’s apparent absence, the gross hypocrisies that distinguish Church history, the litany of failed prophecies, and the secularizing of the developed parts of Christendom.

This I can’t help but see the point in!

But, he then goes after what seemed like perhaps the strongest argument for theism, which is called the “Kalam cosmological argument”:

Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: The universe has a cause.

[Noting the addition of “begins to exist”, and not simply “exists”]

Time is part of a fabric that includes space and that evolved. Hence, the earliest, subatomic event wasn’t in time. According to scientific cosmology, then, the universe didn’t begin to exist. Time, too, was created with the Big Bang.

[He’s apparently seeing “the universe” as including the timeless realm. I seetlat as outside the universe, whicl consists of the space and time “fabric” that sprang forth]

What kind of proper explanation could this be, though, which somehow accounts for the universe without positing a prior cause? That would be a good question. The theoretical physicist’s likely answer is that instead of positing God, scientific cosmologists posit math. The subatomic fluctuation that broke some initial symmetry in the gravitational singularity was due to an abstract structure corresponding to certain arcane mathematical generalizations that make up the physicist’s theory.

Is that “naturalistic” rigmarole better than just settling for theism? As counterintuitive and perhaps suspicious as the theoretical physicist’s Platonic speculations might be, they are indeed superior to theism in at least one respect: they’re not nakedly naïve in being human-centered personifications. At least the mathematician’s formal structures needn’t be so conveniently like us, making the scientific theory more like a childish outburst.

So “personification“ is necessarily “human centered”. (I acknowledged that the evidence doesn’t necessatily point to “personification”, but to say it is “human centered” is a bit too hard. Human-centeredness will naturally favor a “God” just like us, but the thinking is that our “personhood’ comes from this higher source, not the other way around, as nontheists presume. How are we here as sapient beings if there is no sapience over the universe? Like if we hadn’t come to be, or any other intelliegent life, then what exactly is the material and energy in the universe if there is no one to ‘observe’ it? Even the “uncertainty principle” of mainstream science (think “Schröedinger’s Cat”) says that the position of particles is ‘uncertain’ until they are observed! He even admits this ‘scientific/mathematical” alternative sounds convoluted (i.e. “rigamarole“!) I can understand up to “singularity“, but what is this “abstract structure” and “arcane generalizations”?

Here, even Dawkins is brought to the point of practically considering “deism”, up from atheism (based on the “fine-tuning” argument from the “cosmological constants” of physics, where his own field was biology), but still makes the point that this does not prove the specific God, known through Jesus Christ and all the Biblical teachings.

The uncertain world of in-practice “imagination”

As an extraverted iNtuitive (N+P), I can imagine something being true, and even try it on (and see where things fit together in it and identify a most like “truest” hypothesis), but that will not provide the practical incentive to have hope real enough to change my attitude towards what I face in this world everyday. And then I look at others around me who profess to have this solid faith or relationship with God, and when they put it into practice and then explain the process, it sounds like someone imagining something and then trying to live accordingly (often very imperfectly, admittedly!) And let’s not forget the “how prayer works” example, above! It’s basically doing something, and then imagining God really doing it!
It parallels the secular counsel “look at yourself in the mirror and believe in yourself and say you can, and then do it” (which a lot of the Christian teaching now differs little from; only it’s pray and meditate on scripture). Also, the popular “Law of Attraction”. It’s been summed up as “fake it till you make it!” (That’s bad enough in the world, but a real God is not something that should be “faked”!

This “relationship” seems to be a mechanical routine of prayer and devotion, and then memorizing and using select verses everytime a painful situation or negative thought or feeling comes up, and then being thankful about other things, beginning with salvation itself. This then is what gradually is supposed to change our attitude to pain and difficulty. We would then react differently, and behave better, and hold this up as God changing things (when it actually parallels “Cognitive Behavior Therapy”), and also as the fruits of salvation (which then implies judgment for those not bearing these fruits).

Current “reality” is ‘guaranteed’; any future good (in this life or afterward) is not; but only “imagined” or “hoped” for. This may sound “blasphemous”, but just think of what you’re actually doing when “accessing” the “spiritual” realm: picturing something in your mind that you have never actually seen!
We’re told to “just pray about it”, but then, we can’t stay there; we’ll always have to eventually get up from the prayer and continue to go out and face the “real world”! Philip Yancey speaks of the things we “hope” for in this life  (such as justice, or even children’s TV and fairytales), and then adds “In real life, a mother caught in a war zone holds her infant son tight against her breast, pats his head, and whispers, illogically, ‘It will be all right’, even as the percussive blasts grow closer”. (Disappointment With God p101)

For example, this article argues that “Gratitude is great until it’s toxic”:

View at Medium.com

https://medium.com/@c-james-horton/you-should-practice-ingratitude-12e16c3912c1

“Universal gratitude [as opposed to “basic gratitutde”, where you’re thankful to a tangible “giver”] requires an act of imagination. The trick, as the name suggests, is to ‘expand’ your understanding of gratitude so that you imagine the ‘giver’ as a nonspecific entity — the universe, or God, or the world — instead of a specific person.” [emph. added]

“Gratitude” often accompanies teaching on “faith”, as basically a necessary part of faith.

Appealing to the afterlife just isn’t VERIFIED as tangible “life” (with its need of survival) is. Philip Yancey has said: “I have learned that faith means trusting in advance what will only make sense in reverse.” But what I’m feeling is that justice (and peace) in some hereafter doesn’t seem to be worth it when it was needed here!

Where natural “random” occurrences are what we know and have framed our life around (including good things, such as love, etc.), the afterlife “compensations” in comparison sound artificial. Much of what people have surmised (from what they try to extract from scripture) is a copy of this world with everything modified to be pleasant. On one hand, I wish for that, but fear it would become boring (think the Twilight Zone episode “A Nice Place To Visit”, where such an afterlife actually turned out to be “the other place”), or evoke the horrors of this world (since there is no separating anything from the larger context of evolution and survival). I realized that in this perfect picture of “The World Tomorrow” (“The Kingdom” or “Heaven”), that is nearly everything we enjoyed here, minus pain, that the whole context of the need of survival is removed, and thus the drive for everything we do here, including pleasure. (Sex is the one pleasure they will acknowledge will have no use there, due to what Christ said to the Sadducees in Matthew 22:30).

It’s hard to look forward to something completely undefined (even if we define it as something as vague and nondescript as “being with Jesus”. Jesus Himself is only believed in “by faith”, and even if we argue to His historicity, He’s not tangibly with us here today. So it’s hard to even place Him in this new “life”. —It’s even hard to place Him in this life, when they say He’s to be our “joy”, etc.) It all comes off more as a hypothesis, which I can easily take on, but when it’s supposed to “transform” your life, and you’re only given platitudes and mechanical “growth” steps, the hypothesis wears thin. (And while “Jesus” can only be perceived by “faith”, and if you “vigorouly seek Him” regardless, “Satan” is often potrayed as easily accessible and clearly “present” in many situations).

People (from evangelicals like Phil Yancey, to sectarian groups like Adventism, Armstrongism, and Jehovah’s Witnesses) have fancied up the afterlife as the fulfillment of everything good we wished for on earth (often citing God’s “restoration” of everything He allowed to be taken from Job), but then along comes Reformed Baptist E S Williams (from widely respected leader Charles Spurgeon’s “Metropolitan Tabernacle”; a noxious mixture of both Reformed theology and “old-line” Baptist “fundamentalism”), who says all of this is “fleshy” and “man-centered”. I guess, Heaven is supposed to be about worshipping God, and Him being “glorified”. So he probably wants to go back to the old stereotypical portrayal of Heaven as just floating around, plucking harps (based on scenes portrayed in Revelation). Whatever joys or “bliss” we do experience, is the “gratitude” in escaping the “Hell” (we “deserved”; with the viewing of the eternal torments of the lost highlighting this. Yes, many in this circle believe this viewing is part of what they “glorify God” for! We can challenge the abject coldness of this, but then our perspective is “corrupted by sin”, and only the elect; —or the nonelect only when forced to “bend the knee and confess” when already in Hell, can see this as “just”). Or, “joy ‘in Him‘” (which they also pitch as the answer to suffering in this life, but is not squared away with the fact that He is unseen now). Hell is clearly and graphically portrayed, but when it comes to “being with Jesus”, nothing is clear. The whole motivation and expected “joy” of salvation can only be tied up in escaping Hell, then, for that’s the only thing that can be understood!

Nobody answers them. Those they denounce as “compromising“ and watering down the faith still respect them for their solid “stand” (in contrast to the modern “world”).

So suppose this is true? Nothing that happens to us now really matters, then. Justice is about God; not us. (Though scriptures on “Heaven” appeal to us, such as receiving “crowns”. We don’t even know what this really means). Christians like this speak of “justice” and God’s “offended Holiness”, but don’t seem to think He would care about many of the slights people suffer. Particularly when they take the “rugged individualist” stance and speak down to “victim culture“ (like in their frequent denunciations of “psychotherapy”, even in the modern church, as well as liberal-style “social justice”). To them, it seems He only cares about attacks against “Christianity” and “Christian values”.
The “unseen” nature of all of this only serves to leave this all “up in the air”. Who’s right? They all are appealing to the same Bible!

The afterlife, being completely unknown; whatever compensation for this life occurs in an unknown context; basically a whole different timeline from this one (which continues after each person dies), that we cannot place in our familiar experience in order to draw real hope from it. (This timeline is essentially “superior“ to the other one, in that it is “real” and current, while the other one is basically only “imagined” and wishful. From the viewpoint of this timeline, the other one is unreal, but from the viewpoint of the other one, where we are being ‘rewarded’ or ‘punished’ for what we’ve done in this one, this one is obviously still “real”).

On the secular side, you have this: https://annamercury.medium.com/how-and-why-to-change-your-beliefs-d396ad73cd5c It points out:

The power of belief is not necessarily that it can change what happens to us— though in influencing our behavior, it can — but that it changes how we feel about what happens. It is, theoretically at least, possible to come to a state of such intense and unshakeable positive focus that literally anything could happen and you would still experience perfect contentment. This state is commonly called “Enlightenment.”

Most of us will likely not achieve, or even actively seek, Enlightenment. What remains important, for all of us, no matter what kind of relationship we want to have with our emotional experience, is to remember that our emotions are responses to our thoughts and beliefs.

It is impossible for an emotion to arise directly in response to an event. Emotions happen when we interpret events and physiological responses to mean certain things. How we interpret is determined by what we believe.

Here’s another one I just found:

View at Medium.com

Again, the parallel to religious teaching is clearly present, as what’s called “faith” is often expressed in terms of changing our perspectives like that; particularly the part about “contentment“!

The need to “concretize” the objects of faith

These issues regarding God can be described in terms of a matter of an internal or external reality. Many of us find “faith” difficult, because God no longer appears visibly to prove Himself. What’s left then is an internal belief, though many won’t admit it is only internal. They all seek some externalization in some way.

•To the Catholics, the iconography and the lofty design of the cathedrals and sacraments are all described as a “sensory” experience; and the leadership (“Vicar of Christ”) would also go along with it.
•To Charismatics, tongues (and supposed healings among many), is the external manifestation of God.
•To the fundamentalists, it’s the rules, moralism, the “faith of our fathers”, nationalism, preaching, the text of scripture as a wrangling point of doctrine, and creationist interpretations of science.
•Sects and cults use a similar approach to fundamentalism, only with some key doctrines changed, and usually tighter authority.
•To new-evangelicals, it seems to be doing whatever it takes to keep their faith “relevant” to the modern world, leading to a combination of a lot of these things, defecting to one of the other groups, or ecumenicalism.
•Reformed groups will vary in the above approaches

All will generally agree on the philosophy I was describing above, of “process” sanctification, and God making us “grow” through trials. All internal concepts made by interpretations of external occurrences!

On the total opposite side of the spectrum, looking at the lives of some queer folk; rather than the totally immoral “God-haters” portrayed by Christians, most have retained their faith (varying from a more “cultural“ secular expression, to some pretty devout church-going believers). I see them, and admire their faith, and bravery in it, despite their relationship practices being basically regarded (or at least treated) as the worst possible violation of the divine Lawor violation of even the “divine essence” itself. (Which is based on the failure to understand fully the full ramifications of the purpose and change of the two scriptural covenants, in addition to the contexts of some key scriptures; and again, the appeal to “the power of the Spirit” to “fix” the problem, unless one wants to “hold on to their sin” too much. And the people projecting their own fears and/or hangups onto God and the queer people themselves. Many of them are actually the ones “suffering” “losing homes, families”, etc. as Christ warned his followers, while those “Christian” authority figures doing this to them are actually behaving just like the enemies of Christ in scripture were! — even for the same stated reasons! [i.e. “defending the household/faith/nation from error”; upholding God’s Law, etc]).
One of the cutest things I’ve seen is the TikTok video of young queer Atlanta stage actress Charity Irby, running across a field praying out loud to God to send her some black friends (who then begin coming from behind the trees greeting her, and everyone’s so happy). I’m sure this is not totally serious, but it just portrays such an innocent appeal to God as the Giver of good things. (And not judging by the old Law, as many religionists insist. It makes me truly hope the total Grace doctrine is true).

This sort of sentiment is what some of the more moderate believers would say is a way to see God in the tangible world. But still, in light of the way life often goes, plus the much louder voices of condemnation, it often ends up feeleing it would be “too good to be true”.

“Objective truth” in our “subjective” egos, and the manipulation of “tough talk”

Man so wants an external experience of God (especially when having to justify the “duty faith” interpretation of Rom. 1), and many of these groups will go as far as to put down an “internal” focus as “subjective”, and thus worship of man; yet faith is ultimately internal (since most will admit or even insist special revelation has ceased); however, their ways of trying to externalize their faith end up seeming contrived, mechanical or exaggerated, being based on bending certain passages of scripture where something they are basing their practice on is mentioned, or supposedly alluded to.

So it’s just difficult wading through this religious sea, trying to find something tangible to hold onto as an acknowledgement from God.

I often feel I’m not supposed to argue for my rights, because I feel totally nonobjective (realize it’s just the ego), and I just get more and more subjective as I try to fight back with my “reason”, and yet feeling I’m probably still wrong.
So if there’s something I “want to believe”, deep in my heart feels as if it’s just my own mind, and probably won’t be real, and if there’s something I don’t want to believe (and yet others are teaching confidently) and am fighting against, then it probably IS true. So the conscience pulls me in totally opposite ways(i.e. morally strict theism and existentially strict non-theism), and can’t be relied on at all.

Confident speaking gives a feeling of absolute certainty in the middle of all of this, which is appealing in a world of uncertainty, yet the problem is that the ones who speak the most confidently are often those pushing oppressive systems of control we have already seen causes more problems than it solves. (Or other “tough teaching”; even in the secular world).
(Typologically, introverted Thinking [Ti] questions religious hypotheses, extraverted iNtuition [Ne] says anything is possible, and so by itself cannot ground consciousness upon anything, and introverted Sensing [Si] sees no predcedent of things taught by religion. –That is, inasmuch as it is taking a back seat to Ne; where Si as a “preferred” function is very common in religion, because it is a real world institution that provides the familiarity Si drives off of. This leaves extraverted Feeling [Fe] to seek “community” in a sociopolitical landscape — found to be divided into a “historic Christianity” that believes in rules and control, and a “secular” world that sees religion as unscientific and thus unreal (the [for me] “shadow” extraverted Thinking perspective); or at best, just some cultural assumption taken for granted. The former then become the biggest arguers of “scripture”, which is the only tangible evidence of the religious view (yet they themselves cannot even agree on what it really teaches in many areas), and the latter largely ignores the scriptural debate for one reason or another. (Either not believing in it, or believing platitudes such as “love” or “the Golden Rule” [reflecting the introverted Feeling perspective] extracted from select scriptures automatically answer them. A hybrid view, such as perhaps Philip Yancey’s version of evangelicalism, takes a totally softer “grace” position, but then naturally will likewise not be big on arguing doctrine against tougher more conservative positions).
Hence, I still feel a bit jealous of those who can take Him for granted, without all of the questions and uncertainty.

[People finding later in life altruism as ‘fulfilment’, and thus the answer are likely extraverted Thinking types developing their tertiary or inferior introverted Feeling]

Instinct pulls us to have wants that we in the end realize don’t (in their own right) mean as much as we’ve made them out to be, and in both religious and naturalistic views, won’t be satisfied in any “afterlife“ existence (naturalism assumes there will be “nothing” after this, while the religious afterlife is really totally undefined).
It’s like if I was where I am now when I was young, and people told me “that’s life”, or “it won’t matter in Heaven”, I would have been able to better receive it. (Particularly with the introverted Thinking perspective that needs to determine ‘truth’ on one’s own). Instead, life has forced you to come to the realization that the tough-talkers were right about it being “life”. But then where does that leave God? (Again, the Christian tough-talkers will fill it in as God giving us pain because of “sin”, and then you’re supposed to realtize “God is God”, but “life” is the one that has immediate empirical verification). It’s like instinct drives us through all of these painful, largely futile wants, and then releases us from them when the universe is almost done with us).

I end up stuck between the most “hardest“ extremes of the two sides:
The “orthodox” position is true, and where God made salvation “hard” for the reasons usually claimed (“sin”, etc. along with the whole Calvinist setup being the most consistent and likely view).
None of it is true, and there’s probably nothing after this.

The latter ends up having the edge, due to the lack of real evidence of the former, who on one hand say “it’s by faith”, but then must turn to such shabby arguments as “conscience” or “special revelation“ (but skewed by ‘presuppositional’ tautologies). But then you can’t really disprove the conscience argument. The more you deny, the more you prove the other person’s point. So in that way, that side has an edge.

Religion is full of tough talking ‘warners’ about death, and usually dismissed by the world and moderate religion, but seldom answered scripturally. No matter how “strict” a path you follow, someone more strict will come along and acuse you of “compromising”. An evangelical will condemn my criticisms of futurist “duty faith” as too “universalistic”, and defense of LGBT as “liberal”, and it’s like I should re-adopt their beliefs. But when I did agree with them on those positions, I saw the IFB’s and Lordshippers accusing us of stuff like not being “holy”. I could give into the Lordshippers and become one of them, but the IFB’s will still say our music and worship are too “modern”, and we’re not standing against the Catholics enough. If I become an IFB, the Lordshippers and other Calvinists will say I believe in a “weak god that depends on man” in salvation. So I can join some group that combines elements of both (like Spurgeon’s “Reformed Baptist” church or even “Puritans” like Edwards), but now all I have done is take the “lowest common denominator” of “toughness”, and it’s no longer any “Good News”.
I can read scripture and come to my own conclusions, but realize I may not be objective about it
The world sends mixed messages, with some telling me to just “look within”, and others saying essentially to follow established external authority (such as the strictest forms of religion), and some even saying a mixture of both (“special revelation“ and “conscience”/“faith“ arguments).
So “conscience” is tossed to and fro, feeling a tug from the strict messages, and yet there is always someone stricter demanding more rigorous adherence, and the conscience is just as much pulled in that direction, with the emotions resistant. The way things are set up, it’s those with the “tough“ message who are the strongest and most aggressive arguers, while the less strict are by nature more passive. So the tough, strict talkers are very convincing. (This creates what can be called a “punching downward” effect). The only defense against them:
The intellect tugs the other way, seeing all of this as having no proof; but just manipulating the conscience, and yet its own contribution can make anything “truth”, which it then doubts as likely “really“ true, anyway.

“Inner” vs “Outer” revelation

The article “Needs are Only a State of Being” https://link.medium.com/qRGaOkH2Jzb points out how our sense of “needs”get screwed up:

The mind trips us up when we equate the experience of satisfaction with our concepts of what satisfaction ought to look like.

The thing is, when we experience any kind of lack, our bodies are seeking the opposite of that lack. When we experience cold, we are seeking warmth. When we experience hunger, we are seeking satiation. It isn’t just physical needs, either. When we experience isolation, we are seeking connection. When we experience shame, we are seeking acceptance and approval. When we experience fear, we are seeking safety.

But our needs are only ever states of being.

The problem arises because many of our needs don’t get experienced in their purest form. We often experience dissatisfaction in a particular situation, and so we conceptualize solutions that pertain to that situation. For example, we feel disrespected at work, and so we imagine the only way to experience “being respected” is to triumph at work.

Except our subconscious mind, and our body, still know the truth: what we need is to experience feeling respected. This leads to a kind of transference, in which we seek to meet that need through unrelated pathways. For example, feeling disrespected at work leads us to take out our need to feel respected on our partners or families.

This is another incredible adaptation of the mind: it can find substitute experiences to meet an unmet need that may have nothing to do with the situation that brought us the initial experience of lack.

When we aren’t aware that we’re doing this, we can wind up taking harmful actions in an effort to meet our unmet needs. Drawing from our current example, think of the classic story of a man who feels belittled at work, so he goes home and belittles his children, who then bully their classmates at school in an effort to make up for their experience of lacking respect.

Harmful cycles like this typically arise when we seek to meet our needs unconsciously.

We’re left to fend for our own in this violent world of uncertainty, and all we’re offered is platitudes of inner ‘peace’ that are the same as other religions and philosophies, and don’t even match the contexts of the scriptures they are keyed into (e.g. the first century Christians being persecuted for the faith, and promised “rewards”, and their persecutors punished) and this is to be our “hope” that makes it all bearable.

In both the secular and religious view, we’re supposed to just “look within” (to “divine power” or “inner strength”) to cope with “life, as it is”, but there is really nothing within us (or at least, as I can experience, within me), except our instincts, which are what are clashing with “life as is“ to begin with. Hence the “struggle” people practicing this attest to, with many not being able to overcome (at least, completely). It is just a mental pacifier, for lack of any other solution, as well as being a big selling tool for those who market “self-help” or “spiritual growth”. (Of course, some problems such as PSTD might be helped by these methods, but that will still depend on other factors in the person’s past or present life).

While all of this uncertainty leads to demanding things in the here and now, their lasting is still not certain. The [‘spiritual’] message I have gotten in a fear of fire or other destruction (from growing up seeing good neighborhoods go down) is that no matter how nice things seem, it is never ‘safe’ in this current world to become too attached, because anything can happen at almost any time. (I was always greatly troubled by the idea of the destruction of things I thought were ‘cool’ or unique).

We thus have a fear of death, and the destruction of our identity, from death’s unknown nature.

Here, I have outlined what causes what we call “pain and suffering:

•The energy of the universe pushes matter to be constantly changing.

•Living beings need the matter they depend on (bodies, shelter, etc.), to stay in their current form, to sustain the living state (i.e. “survival”)

•This is what makes the universe what we call “violent”, and life “difficult”, as we are essentially going against nature in trying to maintain these temporary particular, specific forms as they are tugged on by forces such as gravity and oxidation (i.e. air, water and fire damage alike).

•Within this context, instincts (both survival and reproductive) drive us and every other living creature to act “by any means necessary”, and far outshine conscience, and especially “revelation”.

•As part of this, nature “rewards” those who master fulfilling the instinctual demands the best. The reward is “survival” (and flourishment) itself!
°(Even conservative Christians acknowledge this whenever they promote “rugged individualism” and defend systems like capitalism, and appeal to concepts like “bootstraps” and “delayed gratification”).

On the other hand, I would say “good” is a judgment of a situation as favorable according to our emotional affect, which is from our limbic survival instinct filtered through the cortex which cognitively interprets the data.
So the common question of “why evil?” is basically why we had to develop cognitive interpretation of “good“ (with “evil” as its lack) to begin with. Naturalism will just say it’s an evolutionary anomaly, while [biblical] religion will say it’s a divine design marred by a “Fall“, and the only possible rationalization for that will (at least, eventually) be a theodicy.

So we’re not supposed to become attached to the things in the world, since they’re so temporary, but the transcendant world remains so elusive and totally “neither here nor there”, and subject to anyone’s hypothesis.

Conclusion: faith as “trust”

I’ve long said that belief in an invisible God is a very powerful tool, which can potentially be dangerous in the wrong hands, since it holds great emotional sway and fear over many, yet cannot be readily proven or disproven (sort of parallels the power wielded by early men who discovered fire). It should be used with great caution, humility and love; knowing our human tendency to control others. So we are not to use it to silence people about the “unsearchable counsel of God” when we have been making extrabiblical speculations on what He is doing all along!
“Trusting God” ultimately winds up meaning trusting men, when they are the ones we are receiving it most clearly from, and then, teachers use their own interpretations of His promises, and personal experiences (and even revelation) read into them to instruct people on the “walk of faith”.

In the end, as stated earlier, the word translated “faith” (pistis) means “trust”, and that’s all I can do. I could listen to all the tough talking voices out there and out of pure fear, feign some unwavering adherance to some doctrinal system, but that really isn’t “faith”, and when I had gone that way before, it sure didn’t feel like real “faith”. (To say “Trust is the substance of things hoped for” [Heb.11:1] makes more sense than the tautological way it is usually treated, essentially, as “hope is the substance of things hoped for”, or “belief in the unknown is the substance of thigns hoped for”!)
I just find myself saying I hope it’s true!
So I can discuss what I believe the Biblical “gospel” teaching is, which is Grace,, but I don’t pretend to be able to “prove” it, to myself or anyone else. Skeptics will just take that as proving against it, and this is truly disconcerting. Then, many “believers” will say this is “agnosticism”, or “trying to sit on the fence”. Calvinists will add “faith” being a “gift” witheld from many, and yet the people still “held responsible” for this. This confusing pit of mny oppopsing voices is the background through which true “trust” in divine Grace (and divine existence to begin with) is needed.