I’ve always been a bit of a thinker, but as I stated in my previous post, I’ve never really been much of a critical thinker.
In high school, I remember often going to my buddies after school got out, smoking a few bowls and then wildly speculating about the nature of reality. Those were some of my most prized conversations. I still love to have those sorts of conversations today in my mid-30s. Although now I feel like I’m much more tethered to reality, and I at least have a basic understanding of the concepts that already exist and have been debated by people much smarter than I, for centuries.
I don’t, specifically, remember much about the conversations that my friends and I had, more than likely because I was stoned out of my mind, but also because it was close to 20 years ago. However, I do remember thinking that a conscious and intelligent mind must have been behind the creation of the universe. I just couldn’t conceive of a way that the universe could have just come into existence by chance, with no intention at all behind it.
Now, I’m still not very well read in philosophy, but this was years before I had heard of any ideas such as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an Ontological Argument, the Teleological Argument, or any formal argument for the existence of god/gods, whatsoever. Since I had never heard any of these arguments, I had damn sure never heard any of the criticisms to these arguments – which very well might have helped me avoid a lot of faulty thinking later in life. This, however, was pre-internet – at least the internet wasn’t as widely available as it is today – and I wasn’t much of a book reader at that point in my life, so the chances of me actually hearing these arguments were pretty slim.
All this mostly uninformed and wild speculation led me to ideas that were very similar to what I now know to be pantheism, or perhaps, panentheism. Which is the type of thinking that opened my mind to the possibility of a god, or gods, later in my adult life.
Now, I’m not exactly sure when the very first thought of the Christian God first entered my mind. As I mentioned in my previous post, I wasn’t raised religious. I went to Sunday school a few times with my neighbors as a kid, and I remember going to a Methodist church with my grandma a time or two, but I don’t really recall hearing a whole lot about god or Jesus during either. Sunday school was mostly just coloring pictures of biblical characters, playing games, drinking juice and eating cookies, and I honestly don’t remember much about my grandma’s church – I was really young. Other than that I never really thought too much about god or theological ideas as a child. It just wasn’t a big part of my life. Indoctrination wasn’t something I really had to deal with. It is possible that the concept of Jesus or the Christian God stuck with me in some ways, I just really cannot honestly say for sure.
What I can say for sure is, at least in my teen years, that I was very much interested, and still am to this day, in the concept of a God – at least some crazy explanation for how the cosmos came into being that we currently do not have.
The difference between who I was 20 years ago and who I am today, has a lot to do with what I will be discussing in the next week or so. How I went from, more or less, a deist, to a Christian fundamentalist. After that, my plan is to move on to talk about my trip down the YouTube conspiracy theory rabbit hole, how I escaped that, and slowly shifted toward a more liberal interpretation of the Bible, and eventually losing my faith altogether. Then, my plan is to shift focus to what I created this blog for in the first place; science and skepticism.
Stay tuned.
Nathan The Skeptic 