Challenged Faith

I’ve been thinking a lot lately. I mean, a lot. Mostly about this: why am I a Christian? Why do I believe in God? Out of all the ancient texts out there, why do I believe the Bible?
For a couple of weeks, this drove me crazy. For a time, I think I actually stopped being sure that I did believe it. Everyone always says to “have faith”, right? Well, I simply couldn’t blindly have faith in something that I had absolutely no idea why I had faith in it. There are lots of other people who have complete faith in their religions. Muslims and Buddhists, for example; I doubt that the Muslims who are out killing people don’t believe that their religion is true. And the people who spend their lives trying to become “enlightened” don’t believe that they are wasting their time on something false.
So why would I put my faith in the God of Christianity? The question wouldn’t stop haunting me. Why? Why?
This “phase”, as I’ll call it, kind of went on and off in my mind. But it was always there to spring up whenever something arose that might cause doubts. I think the initiator was probably my observing of the world, which I had never really used to do the way I started to. I saw how people were fully convinced that there was no God, how they simply saw me and others who did believe in the spiritual and supernatural as “religious” people who were chasing after some hopeful dream that there might be something more.
I’ll tell you something about me here. Sometimes this is a blessing, and other times it feels like a curse. In nearly every debate I have ever seen, heard, or participated in, I can almost always see and understand both sides of the argument. I am able to figure out what both sides are saying, why they express it the way they do, what they want to get across, and a few other things. It always baffles me that others can’t see this stuff when it often seems so clear to me.
Please understand that I’m not at all bragging. Unless I’m delusional and only think I can see all of this, it’s a gift that was given to me by God. And even then, I haven’t used it very effectively. If I had, my house might be a lot more peaceful, and some people I know might have better relationships with each other.
Anyway, here came the problem: looking at the big picture of the world, I started to see the big debate going on about theology. And yep, I began to see and understand every side of it.
Now technically, there are millions of sides to this debate, with all those countless religions that some people subscribe to. But really, all of them can be reduced down to four: religion, atheism, allegiance to God, and knowing allegiance to Satan (i.e. being against God). Soon after I saw this, I found myself being tested by each one of these. The rules, as dictated by my own view of the world, thoughts, and realizations: I could not use the Bible to directly prove reality, I could not base anything on my own experience, and I had to prove everything in a way that did not involve “just having faith” or anything completely incomprehensible. Basically, I could only use tools such as logic and reason to decide and understand my beliefs.
Boy, was that ever an interesting time.
The “test period” lasted for one week. Since it would probably take a long, long time to post them all at once, I’ll post each “test” separately in my next few posts.

The last thing I’ll say for now, is this: when Jesus proved who He was to Thomas, He was very right when He said “Blessed are those who believe without seeing.” If you can have that total and unconditional faith in God’s existence, without having to have anything proved by yourself or by anything or anyone else, you truly are blessed.

Ciao!