Faith and shtuff

I am a Christian. I suppose. Maybe.
I do believe in a God. Sometimes. Usually when it's convenient or necessary.

Okay. That's a bit of bullshit. I find it difficult to believe. This could be related to the previous post on this blog, which centered on the idea that what you choose not to use, you lose. Maybe I'm not flexing my spirituality and faith muscle anymore. Maybe I'm not practicing reading my religious texts and praying. But I feel skeptical of the practices that are supposed to lead to a deeper life. It could be because I'm lazy. Very possible. This laziness tendency is a reality that I have started to face in my life and looked towards attempting to conquer. But I also have this mindset that reality should be reality whether or not I work at it. I'm not sure how this statement fits into the puzzle of this concept in my mind, but I know it does.

I believe strongly that we are socialized into patterns of behaviour, into beliefs, and even into our identities. The practices that humans have created to keep their beliefs fresh in their minds have been given to us by social forces and we, in a very Foucaultian sense, monitor ourselves and adjust our behaviours to side-step the consequences of social control. That is, we decide to behave in a way that involves aligning ourselves to the social norms so that we avoid the consequences of acting deviantly.

I think I was inspire to write about this today because I met someone and talked with them about their faith. And of all the people I have met, she embodied what I would want to look like as a Christian. She sees Christ in every homeless person she sees. She recognizes their beauty, resiliency, and humour and is in love with these qualities. I wish I could have such a heart of compassionate love. And she talked about self-examination. Which I feel, if there ever were some way back to faith, I have this nagging and annoying belief that it would come from within. Which is so infuriating, because it loops back into a cycle of socializing myself.

I feel so little progress when I talk about issues of faith and my ability to believe. I feel like a dog chasing it's tail. However the tail is invisible and the dog is not always sure that it's there, which is part of why it keeps slipping through its teeth. Because it's not actually sure. And that level of uncertainty makes the dog refrain from giving it's all to the chase.

I know that I arrived at no conclusion in this post. It feels disjointed even to me. But part of that, I suppose, is my own lack of solid, consistent worldview. I have no Christian lens through which to interpret every act in the world anymore. Instead I must figure things out for myself. It gets lonely when you don't believe in God. The world seems emptier. Sometimes it's freeing, but most of the time it makes me feel like I have less of a tie to the world, to the people around me, to the good of humanity, etc.

I don't know what else to say. I think I may be "coming out" as an Atheist. But not really. I don't know. I guess I am still on the fence.
Toodles. Confused for now.