Flat Faith - 3

Often belief can come through a crisis of faith. I told you I was a good little boy, but by the time I became a youth, I had done many things that shamed me. I won't bore you and embarrass myself by recounting them. I am sure they are common to most teenage experiences anyway, but I had this guilt thing, that I was carrying around with me. It was not a conscious burden. It was subliminal and perhaps for a lot of it I assumed responsibility for my family situation. Kids often feel the guilt for parents who divorce, that sort of thing. Well I went to a Christian church camp. I loved camping and had no idea what a church camp would entail. Well a preacher there offered me forgiveness for all my sin if I accepted Jesus as my saviour. The only thing I understood was the forgiveness of sin thing and a new life in place of the old. I became a new person. Perhaps it was the freedom from guilt, or the discovery that God was somehow interested in me as an individual, that did it. I don't know but I was euphoric for days. It was such a powerful experience that it has taken me most of my life to even challenge it. I subsequently joined that Church and believed the teachings they gave. Certainly, I have often questioned, and occasionally modified, my beliefs, but that was simply a beginning. It has been a privilege to see the Church change, sometimes radically. I have been horrified to hear of how the Church invented doctrines to explain wrong practices in the church. To stay honest to a belief, change is essential.

I once told someone about my conversion experience, but he was so sad. He wanted to believe but could not. He said that he was envious of my experience that allowed me to believe.

I thought about his words for a long time. I needed to understand his problem. For me it was so easy. Why was it not so for him? He was searching. I wasn't and when the invitation was made I responded whole-heartedly. I guess that to be an earnest searcher he was a believer already. If one is a believer, small changes are easy, particularly if they are logical, reasonable or obviously more correct than before. Accepting a religion is no reason to accept blindly everything they say. If a faith cannot change with the times, it may be out of date. Even the law of a country changes to accommodate changing circumstances.

One of the most fascinating experiences I have had as a Christian believer is to know God's voice. Now I am not talking about a day-to-day thing, otherwise, I would be a true prophet, but on special occasions, it can be to know things that otherwise would be impossible to know. I explored this phenomenon in my book called Adam's Clay. I could describe it as something I know that I know, or else, as an imperative thought. It not often knowledge about the unknown, but could be something less dramatic like I must write an article on Flat Faith.

Flat Faith - 1

I'm sure they sent me to school for no other reason than to define my faith systems. Perhaps refine them would be a better description.

For example, they told me that I believed the Earth was flat, but it was actually round. Well I didn't believe that the Earth was either flat or round. To me it was very bumpy and went either up or down.

Even at a very young age, my own observations entirely determined my belief system, particularly things that interested me, like cars, trucks, tractors and engines. Later I graduated to guns and electronics, and now more recently to computers. I was more interested in how they worked than in using them.

Now a flat Earth could mean squashed flat, like a flat tire. My Earth was nothing like a flat tyre. How about flat out, which was akin to 'foot flat'? These days they say 'peddle to the mettle', but my Earth was going nowhere, certainly not fast let alone flat out. These days they say, 'Stop the Earth I want to get off.' When I heard that, I laughed, and when I understood it, I cried. Perhaps flat could mean smooth or level, under other circumstances, but my Earth was never that. Even the sea had huge waves and moved up and down all the time, but I was always a good little boy and if I must believe that I previously thought the Earth flat and now should believe that the Earth was round, I would remember to say that if anyone asked.

What I did, was store the matter away for future exploration. I do this with many misleading ideas and so-called 'facts' that I hear. Questions that create difficulties I remember and not much else. If I understood something, I don't need to remember it. I can work it out. I am still working on the one that 'money doesn't grow on trees', which is a strange one because my aunt said it and as a farmer's wife, she surely knew that money does grow on trees.

Once I provisionally accepted that the Earth was round, it opened me up to making observations that supported that 'belief', such as ships that sailed over the horizon and a myriad other facts that confirmed the concept. I came to believe that the Earth is round. Later someone persuaded me that it is not perfectly round but slightly flattened by its rotation about its axis. Since logic or reasoning was the basis of my belief, it was easy to make the change.

It is important to understand that no facts were necessary in this case for me to change my mind. Facts would be unverifiable for me and therefore useless. The simple assertion was most reasonable and therefore readily acceptable.