Response to the Daily Post question about faith.
I don’t have any strictly organized faith. This was not the fault of my parents. They went to church regularly, taking my sister and me regardless of our preferences. It wasn’t until we got into High School that we were allowed to choose two Sundays a month to skip Church. I think my parents expected us to inhale the whole of religion from Sunday School, Church and Youth Group. Obviously, I didn’t. Yes, I know the stories and basics but, being the literal person I am, I’ve always had a hard time with the strict concepts of faith.
My parents never talked about their beliefs. I saw my father praying in church but never understood what prayer meant to him because he never told me. Did he believe strictly along denominational lines or did his faith veer off somewhere along the way, taking in the bits and pieces which made sense to him and leaving the rest?
If I believe Jesus is the son of god, do I then need to believe each and every word written about him? If I believe in the story of Noah’s Ark, how do I mesh that with the scientific history of the world?
History is written by the victors. So how do I balance that with a word-for-word belief in the Bible? The Disciples were starting a ‘new’ religion. Can you tell me without a shadow of a doubt that none of them ever embellished a story?
The Disciples were actually just revising a religion. The idea of one God wasn’t new, just some of the building blocks of the Bible are differ from those which came before. Or maybe not. Comparative Religion was never a serious interest for me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love the idea of religion. It plays a large role in several of the manuscripts piling up on my bookcase. I just don’t believe organized religion works well in the real world. Too many years of Victors rewriting history to champion their cause.
And that certainly does not mean I don’t believe. I believe all the gods in all the religions are one. I believe we are all one. The ‘god’ is in us and is us. I don’t need the four walls of a building to celebrate the beauty and glory of the God within us all. All I need is a beautiful sunset or the quiet call of the whip-or-will to remind me of the real truth of God. Those things are worth more than all the Sunday’s of my life spent inside four walls, worshiping like I’d been taught, not how I really believe.
A Writer's Life 
I get the feeling that, in at least this regard, we think alike. If there is a “God,” I suspect she already knows what I’m thinking, or what I experience or feel, when it happens. And I don’t think she judges me to be any better, or any worse than I might judge myself.
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Definitely. I try to think more as a universal field/force/energy/being instead of a person.
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