Faith vs Logic: A Journey Through Belief, Doubt, and Understanding

Episode #00 of the God Series: Introduction

I was raised Catholic, and ever since I learned the three laws of Nature Newton discovered when I was in Senior One or Two at Jinja College, my belief in God was irreversibly shaken. I even started calling myself the devil. I remember writing an article critiquing God and praising Satan, which was later censored by Muwaya, the then Editor of the Current Affairs club, even though I was the assistant editor. Math, Physics, and Chemistry became my favorite classes, while Literature and Fine Art were my worst. The science classes made me fascinated by the simplicity of logic and simple linear reasoning.

In S3, I was forced to take either Literature or Fine Art as one of the eight subjects I would be examined on in the national exams the following year. It was either one of those or enduring Mr. Nambwonu's boring Agriculture classes, which, if you ever sat in one, would make even calling them "boring" a compliment. Mr. Acon, my first class teacher in Senior One and the Fine Art teacher, hated me. To this day, I cannot fathom why, and I will spare you any assumptions out of respect and gratitude I am required to have towards him as my former teacher, now that I didn't end up so badly after all. All this is to say that I probably could have been a fine artist if the universe had conspired to put me in better hands, considering that I settled for a less respected craft: photography!

Anyway, back to this Catholic thing. When I was in primary school at Budo Junior, I once left my uniform out on the wire overnight after washing it. Stealing someone else's clean uniform from the wire was as common as breathing at that school. In the morning, just before assembly time, I remembered my grave mistake. What will I do? I wondered. Not wearing a uniform on a school day was a crime at the level of voluntary manslaughter in real life. It did not attract the worst punishment, but it was quite bad. I remembered the priest at church who had emphasized that if one prayed with conviction and faith, God would answer. Jesus had confided in him that he who asks shall receive. As a last resort, I broke to my knees and asked God to give me back my uniform like it was the last thing I would ever ask Him for.

"Matovu!" the matron yelled before I could say "amen." "Where is this lazy boy?" I was shivering as I approached her, wondering what punishment awaited me. Why did I waste my time praying when I could have been out there looking for my uniform, escaping from school, or committing suicide? Anything else. "What do you take me for? Your maid? Do you think I am in this school to pick your clothes from the wire for you?" The matron rebuked me as she threw my uniform at me. Damn! This God stuff really works, I remember thinking as I humbled myself with gratitude. She then instructed me to dress up at once as she went on to lament about all the other things she could be doing with her life instead of being our matron, which she considered to be a favor she did for us out of her good big heart. After that incident, I would occasionally test God, praying for a few small things here and there just to check Him. I think He knew because He would sometimes answer my prayers and sometimes let me suffer the consequences. But I had no doubt in my mind that if I actually needed Him, He was available to step up for me.

After being introduced to physics, which not only included doctrine on how the world works but also weekly experiments in physics and chemistry labs that proved that these funny characters on the page could accurately predict the swinging of pendulums and color changes from mixing two colorless liquids in a test tube, I was left with no choice but to question everything I once believed about God. That one favor God had done me that one time had started to fade from memory. I had stopped talking to Him much because His responses to most of the conversations I had with Him started to feel random. Maybe prayer was the problem. Maybe physics was the language God spoke. I decided to replace Moses' laws with Newton's.

I stupidly chose to do Physics, Chemistry, and Math at A-Level. Physics became probabilistic and illogical. Chemistry became a long, tedious, and boring literature on the behavior of carbon bonds. And pure math was just weird. While I understood it enough to answer questions, I did not know why I needed to. I could not imagine when in my life I would need a partial derivative of a random variable. I was tired of playing games with God. Maybe He just didn't want to talk to me after all. Because if He did, why make it so hard? Why play all these games?

During the Senior Five third term holiday, my father sent home a computer. A desktop computer that he used while in Japan. The computer had a lot of videos downloaded from YouTube, mostly music videos. One of the videos was George Carlin's routine on the 10 commandments. If I were a cartoon, my jaw would be on the ground as I watched that HBO special. Not only was he funny and so blasphemous that I was worried God would strike our house down with lightning, but that old man was right. He was asking all the right questions. I kept laughing, nodding my head, pointing accusingly, and opening my eyes wider at every punchline. I wanted to carry the computer to the priest at church and yell, "What do you have to say for yourself? What?" After that, the idea of God was a joke. An afterthought. And it wasn't just me. Muwaya was wrong. George Carlin agrees with me. And all those people in his audience laughing at his jokes agree with him and therefore agree with me too.

But this idea of not believing in God left a gap in me. The existential questions that were once on the other side of the phrase "God's Plan" were now worthy of contemplation. Who am I? What am I? When am I? Why am I? One day, as I was looking for an episode of Game of Thrones on The Pirate Bay, I landed on a book by Bhante Henepola Gunaratana called "Mindfulness in Plain English." Straight from the very powerful first chapter, Bhante comes at me. He lists everything that I think is wrong with me and assures me that it is not just me; it is simply what it means to be human. He goes on to promise that meditation will solve me. Well, the word promise is a bit disingenuous because he concludes the first chapter with the most persuasive sales paragraph I have ever read in a book.

"Meditation sharpens your concentration and your thinking power. Then, piece by piece, your own subconscious motives and mechanics become clear to you. Your intuition sharpens. The precision of your thought increases, and gradually you come to a direct knowledge of things as they really are, without prejudice and without illusion. So is this reason enough to bother[with meditation]? Scarcely. These are just promises on paper. There is only one way you will ever know if meditation is worth the effort. Learn to do it right, and do it. See for yourself."

And just like that, I immersed myself in meditation literature and practice, along with a bit too much marijuana smoking. While meditation was a good tool for improving my attention and psychological health, it did not have the answers to my existential questions. The literature emphasizes this concept of Nondualism, which is the recognition that underlying the multiplicity and diversity of experience there is a single, infinite, and indivisible reality, whose nature is pure consciousness, from which all objects and selves derive their apparently independent existence. Basically, everything is everything. A fancy way of saying, "We don't know, and we shall make it our life's purpose to know."

While meditation clearly seemed like the right path, I was in a rush to know and did not have the patience to find out by myself. So I ventured into mysticism and occultism. I read Aleister Crowley's work and tried some of the magick rituals that were not a big inconvenience. Long story short, I ran mad.

I am now back to reading the Bible, practicing Vipassana, and reading Crowley's work. Not to worship God, nor to get enlightened, nor to command the universe with my will, but more to attempt to understand what the writers meant. When you notice the similarities between all the spiritual texts from various traditions, it is hard to reduce them to medieval or backward thinking, even when you're not convinced about the main characters like the Buddha or Jesus or Aiwass. There is a layer to these texts that allows itself to an interpretation that is only available to one as an individual. Something that is only comprehensible at a layer below human language. Something one can only know but cannot tell. I plan to share my interpretations of what I understand from the teachings of Christianity, Buddhism, and Paganism (from Aleister Crowley's work) in a series of blog posts with the subtitle; “Episode #<number> in the God series.”

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.

Anatta asserts that there is no unchanging, permanent self, soul, or essence in living beings.

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.