These are quite troubling questions for me. On the one hand, I understand enough about self-deception, the unconscious, unconscious motives, manipulative forces in society and a bunch of other stuff that imply that “no” would be the correct answer to the question in the title of the post.
On the other hand, I can’t see how the answer would be to just blindly follow everything in the Bible no matter what. I’ve experienced enough strange and wonderful things, that traditional Christian teachings simply don’t seem like a viable option.
Let’s get into the absolute beginning of my spiritual journey. I was a Laveyan satanist (basically ago-affirming atheism, at least on the surface), from the age of 17 to the age of 23. I actually started questioning my beliefs a year earlier. But this was when stuff happened that gradually, over a few days or months, shattered my beliefs. I don’t really remember what exactly took place in my mind, but afterwards I’ve just received more and more reasons to strengthen my belief in God and a spiritual reality.
Since I had vacation to take out, I took a week off from work to think things through. At the time, I lived in Gothenburg and in connection with the vacation, I visited the big shopping mall called Nordstan at the core of the city. I thought that I wanted something to read that could… What? Stimulate my thoughts and help me make sense of things I guess, even though I probably didn’t put it into these exact words in my mind. So I visited a regular bookstore. And as I remember it, the first book my eyes fell on was Neale Donald Walsh’s Tomorrow’s God.
So, I bought the book and read it over the week. And even though I felt a bit uncomfortable with the style of the book, where the author does sort of an interview with God, the book rang true somehow.
But maybe Satan led me to the book to trick me somehow, just when salvation was within my reach. I’m not kidding here. If Satan is real (something I mostly don’t believe in a litteral sense), wouldn’t this be exactly what could be expected of him, when he sees that he’s about to lose his grip on my soul? The question of the devil deserves to be taken seriously, until we can dismiss it on firm grounds. We are after all talking about the beliefs of hundreds of millions of people, and it is a part of the narrative of 2.5 billion people, even if all of them don’t believe in him. And 200 years ago, the absolute majority of the people in the Western world believed in him.
But I’ll leave that discussion for another post. The point is that we have a tendency to filter the information we take in, keep what we like, discard the rest and view it in a way that supports the “truth” that we prefer. To make matters worse, we don’t always prefer the most favorable truth. Our culture and upbringing shapes what we wish to believe in as well. Plus that we have a bunch of other biases as well. We might have a tendency to believe boring or painful “truths” more, since we might have a tendency to believe more in someone that says something uncomfortable, than someone that just seems to tell us what we want to hear.
So maybe this is the truth. That there are no ultimate truths. And that we therefore are free to do what we want with no spiritual consequences whatsoever. Or maybe we can at least just discard everything that cannot be agreed upon from a religiously neutral stance. This idea seems pretty appealing, doesn’t it? We can just go out, have fun and enjoy life in any way the we please and then we’ll go to heaven when we die. Or reincarnate as a better version of ourselves in another life. I know that I find such thoughts appealing.
But then we come back to the problem of our bias towards believing what we wish to be true.
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