Man and God
For all of my childhood, and well into early adulthood, I was a devout believer in the traditional concept of the protestant christian god. I grew up with it. I was steeped in it. You might even say I was brainwashed by it.
Later, I chose protestant christianity as a vocation; studying it and examining it. Immersing myself in it; both the religion of my youth, and the more expanded view I found as a student. As I did this, though, it occurred to me, more and more frequently, that my world view was changing. Being changed, really, by the very subject I sought to study and better understand. And as much as I might have wished to remain unchanged, it soon became clear to me that an expanded knowledge had forever compromised my belief in the protestant christian god.
Ultimately, my study, and the practical experiences of my life, led me out of belief and into what might best be described as an agnostic position relative to god. And the “god” that I conceived as a theoretical “potential,” was not the god of my youth. Rather, it was an ultimately all powerful being, the likes of which, we, as humans could neither conceive, nor understand. Moreover, my observations led me to believe that if such a being existed, it had long ago either ceased to exist, or had at the very least lost interest in its construct: our world, if our world was a construct at all.
God, then, under any set of circumstances, was, to my mind, either uninterested or absent; unengaged or nonexistent, at least so far as we humans could tell.
So I have believed for most of my adult life. And although for many, such a state of belief (or disbelief) might lead to unhappiness, fear and dread, for me it means merely that we are the masters of our own destinies. We must be, and we should be.