The fact that the birth of the child is more than a biological experience and sets someone off on a spiritual search speaks to the fact that most people at some points in their lives, highs and lows, start looking for explanations of why these times in their lives are so poignant.

“The problem with your position is that it appears, from the outside, to be a default position – as does the example you gave. To have a profoundly spiritual experience, a sense of the transcendent joy that a child has given you (ignoring the fact that this can mostly be explained by biology) and to apply that to your cultural religion is a cop-out. If the experience sends you on a journey of self-discovery and you research various religions and one jumps out at you that’s one thing, but you appear to have used the experience, applied it to Christianity as it was closest and you knew it best.”

This is a characterization that simply dismisses what I said, I feel.

There are many problems with the Catholic church and everywhere I meet people who have been completely turned off Jesus Christ and the faith because of it, which is to their great loss, in my opinion and grief. I wish they would try over and just read the scriptures and see what it is saying and what it is not saying.

Whether or not you believe that Christian teachings and/or scriptures are man-made, the objective fact remains that we steadily need reconciliation with each other and with the spiritual. (horizontal and vertical dimensions.) If that is just my cultural baggage, you may believe that, or perhaps you may find that is what you need to. Forgiveness lets you live a life free of defensiveness and it is a beautiful thing.

There are many spiritual atheists out there (I’m not one), people like Sam Harris embrace the spirituality of Eastern cultures and try to break it down into more natural phenomena, trying to distill the essence of what meditation, trances and inner peace actually mean. This is relatively controversial to some atheists who see it as another form of woo or fuzzy thinking but I thought I’d let you know not all atheists are rigidly scientific, clinical and materialistic.

The problem with your position is that it appears, from the outside, to be a default position – as does the example you gave. To have a profoundly spiritual experience, a sense of the transcendent joy that a child has given you (ignoring the fact that this can mostly be explained by biology) and to apply that to your cultural religion is a cop-out. If the experience sends you on a journey of self-discovery and you research various religions and one jumps out at you that’s one thing, but you appear to have used the experience, applied it to Christianity as it was closest and you knew it best.

You may be right, but to follow Jesus as a moral teacher, a spiritual guide, does not mean you have to buy into the fact he was son of god or was resurrected. You do not have to follow the teachings of a thoroughly immoral organization like the Catholic Church or subscribe to the man-made beliefs of various Christian churches.

I’ve saved a few links to atheist stories and this is one that makes a lot of sense to me. Maybe this is why you still believe. Materialist or reductionist positions just do not jive with the depth of life and experience.

http://www.newstatesman.com/religion/2009/04/conversion-experience-atheism

Recently, I heard a talk by a man who had no church background but when his first baby was born, he was away from his wife and way up in the arctic. He just went out into the snow to reflect and rejoice and he realized somehow that there was so much more to life than what he had reduced it to (fun, etc.) and he started his spiritual search. He became an Anglican minister in the end. (He spoke about forgiveness because his son had been shot. Tabor school shooting in Tabor, Alberta.)

I can relate to this. There is so much more in having children, living and loving and dying, in beauty and sound and and and… No matter how attractive atheist materialism sounds it does not resonate in the soul. To me and others it is just self-evidently “wrong”, no matter how reasonable or attractive it is made out to be.

And when I look at the religions, I know I want to be with Christ and his good news of forgiveness. It also becomes self-evident to me, no matter how much of life does not make sense. (I just lost an 18 year-old son, as well.) It does not make any more sense in the materialistic mind-set. But forgiveness makes sense.