A Manageable Despair
The last few months have been a time of great spiritual darkness for me. I’ve realized that there are no answers to the questions I’ve asked and that there is no way to know for sure which religion is True, since they all contain the same doctrines and make the same claims. They lied to me. They told me that there was a mountain of evidence, available at any time to those who wanted to see, that would prove our faith. They lied. They told me that we were different from all the faiths of the world. They lied. They told me that we were perfectly rational and our opponents perfectly irrational. They lied.
So what’s the point of going any further? Why even study the Bible since I’ll never learn anything ? And whatever puny morsels of truth I recover are available in a clearer and more understandable form somewhere else. Any question that cannot be answered by reading some commentary cannot be answered at all. Period. And there is no available method for answering those questions except to say “trust, obey and just have faith”. Even if I were dedicated enough to struggle with the Text itself, I would find that there is no need to apply my Reason to it, for if I ever reached a conclusion that was not approved by Tradition, I would be wrong, no matter how logical or scriptural said ideas were.
It seems that the only recourse is to study the Gospels and to burn the rest of the Book.
Surely I have gone insane, but it no longer matters. If I am wrong and the majority right, I shall never see Heaven. And if I am right and they wrong, it will not do me any good to tell them, since they will reach the Gates regardless. But still, it seems wrong to allow such lies to triumph when I know the truth. My mind must either be destroyed to save my faith, or else my faith must be destroyed to save my mind. Either way I go, whichever path I choose, I am doomed to a life of misery. I no longer have any hope, but I find that it is a most manageable despair.
