Grokking Gordon

Our world is not filled with answers.  It’s filled with patterns.

Therefore, there is freedom of choice.

You choose to believe nothing, or you choose to believe something.

What do you choose to believe?

Gus is like a brother to me. We grew up together in the mountains of North Carolina. His younger brother, Gary, is my longest standing friend. Gus’ life was of particular interest and influence to me growing up. As the “older brother,” he was the first to go out into the real world. He was a pioneer of sorts.

Gus and I both lust for the truth. This desire was instrumental in me becoming an Evangelical Christian who’s faith is continuously torn apart, refined, and fortified by my own neurotic tendency to question everything. However, it lead Gus to become an agnostic who takes an atheists perspective in believing there is no need for “God” or “a god” in his life. I have great respect for Gus, but I hope that he will one day join me in pursuing the will of the one true God. This is his story so far; let it continue to unfold for years to come.

Since I was small, I remember having a rather keen interest in a grander meaning to life. As a born-and-raised Catholic being told that the Christian God existed, I sought him out. I did this through prayer, attending youth groups, by reading the Bible, and so forth. Sometimes, I felt I had a real experience, an undeniable experience that proved to me, at the time, that God was real. Sometimes, I even remember prayers being granted and attributing such miracles of chance or coincidence to God.

Shortly after graduating High School, I lost faith. For a year, I searched outside Christianity for answers to life’s questions. Having read all of the New Testament and the greater part of the Old, it was trivial to decide that there were no answers from that religion.

During a study abroad in Altmünster, Austria (Europe)–a time that was filled with a strange depression for me, I met Mormon missionaries, Elders Head and Hoffmann. The first was a native of England, and the latter of Idaho. (I am friends with both of them on Facebook.) They introduced me to The Book of Mormon, and I devoured it in about three weeks.

With the help of the missionaries and the one Mormon family living in Altmünster, I decided to pray and ask if the Book of Mormon really was “Another Testament of Jesus Christ”.

After prayer, I felt an overwhelming feeling of joy sweep down my body in a wave. I concluded that The Book of Mormon was from God and, hence, that Mormonism really was the one true Christian religion.

About a year and a half later, after meeting some of the kindest people in the Brevard Branch of the L.D.S. Church, I served a mission in the Domincan Republic for two years, baptizing a number of people.

On returning, I moved to Provo/Orem, Utah in hopes of going to BYU and/or finding a wife.

For over three years, I tried the Mormon-to-the-bone approach of listening to only “good” music, watching no Rated-R movies (aside from The Matrix), living with a prayer in my heart, etc. Eventually, my innate tendency to challenge tradition and the routines of religious living got the best of me in quite a literal sense.

For a time, I became a Mormon yo-yo, going into the church and falling away, becoming more and more liberal in my approach each time. This lasted for about three years, after the six or so years I spent being rather fundamentalist and very strict in practicing my professed beliefs.

Towards the end of 2006, I moved up to Salt Lake City and lived a solitary life. For that past year, I had slowly become more skeptical, and as I tried to go to church and “Institute” (seminary-like) classes, I became even more so. I started reading No Man Knows My History (1945) by Fawn M. Brodie, having tired of constantly re-reading the Bible, Book of Mormon, and other L.D.S. scripture, along with writings of General Authorities in the Church, preferring instead to broaden my mind with historicity.

My increasing skepticism proved fatal to a relationship I was having with a woman in her early 20s, who wanted to be married in a Mormon Temple. I was also introduced to a depression like none I had ever known. I was alone and lonely, feeling like, “Yes, I have friends, but no one can help me resolve the pain of separation from faith.”

It must have been sometime in early 2007 when I found a book called Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, regarding a simple meditation technique where one sits down, keeps their back straight, and allows the mind to relax and (ideally) stop thinking. I would compare it to prayer, or any other form of meditation, except absent the thrill of speaking to an imaginary being, or that of having a mantra work to calm the mind. For me, the thrill came from realizing that I didn’t need God or any other faith-based (and hence unproven/unprovable) hypothesis to have a profoundly deep and relaxing experience of what I presently consider to be self-hypnosis.

The question always surfaces of, “What do you believe?” when speaking with believers. My answer is very simple: I believe in that for which I have evidence.

I believe that people are generally good, that we need no dictatorial, but loving sky-deity to give us the morality that has evolved with social mammals (and especially primates) for millions of years. I am a humanist, a somewhat agnostic atheist (if you would call someone like Bertrand Russell an agnostic), a skeptic, a nontheist, a non-believer, a heathen, and a blasphemer. I believe that critical consideration of faith through reason is something that can remove predispositions and untruths inherited by youthful indoctrination. I believe that criticizing faith is a good thing; respect the believer, but not the beliefs. Most of all, I believe in happiness. I believe that it is possible to be happy right now, and the idea that there is going to be a hereafter is nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky delusion (which accordingly grants little or no comfort in the tragic passing of loved ones).

I do not believe there is such a thing as (paraphrased) “evidence of the unseen,” as Paul says (Heb. 11:1). There is evidence and lack thereof. It can be objectively shown or proven, or it cannot.

* I should mention that I still read the Tao Te Ching, and consider it to be excellent, as Eastern philosophy goes. If one reads Taoist literature (separate from the TTC), one will find revelations, miracles and a mythology of such very much as spectacular as Judeo-Christian and Muslim mythologies (see specifically The Pocket Tao Reader, edited and translated by Eva Wong).