“Dear God, sorry to disturb you, but
I feel that I should be heard loud and clear
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears
And all the people that you made in your image
See them fighting in the street
‘Cause they can’t make opinions meet about God.”
- Andy Partridge – XTC (1986)
“Dear God” is a song by the English band XTC, written by Andy Partridge and produced by Todd Rundgren. It concerns the existence of God and the problem of evil. The song’s anti-religious message provoked some violent reactions. Partridge received a large amount of hate mail. He said he “felt sorry” for whoever he upset, but “if you can’t have a different opinion without them wanting to firebomb your house, then that’s their problem.”
My parents were Lutheran, and I was brought up in the Lutheran Church. I was at church all the time- youth group activities, dances, Boy Scouts, Sunday School, retreats, confirmation class, worship services, etc. My closest friends were all from my church. I continued to go to services throughout my life, and although my wife was not brought up in the church, she would go with me. All of our children went to Sunday School and were confirmed. For a short while I was a youth group leader. I went to adult Sunday School. I joined Church Council. I was even a lay leader for our contemporary worship services one year. I recognized that my kids never enjoyed the whole scene as much as I did when I was young, and I felt that my obligation as a parent were over when my kids were confirmed; after that it was up to them to decide what they wanted to believe. Over time I found I was the only one in the family who continued to go on a regular basis. As I got older, I began to feel out of place and that I had more questions than answers. Much of what I had been told made no sense to me. I held on for a while out of respect for my mom, but after her passing in 2022 I stopped going to Church.
photo: I’m 4th from the right in the middle row
My closest friends growing up were my church gang, since we spent so much time together. When I went out on my own and started working for Merck, my horizons expanded. I worked in Worldwide Product Safety, and as such, I got to travel around the world and meet people of all faiths from all corners of the globe. It got me thinking- I was raised as a Christian because my parents were Christian. But what would have happened if I was born in Japan or China or India or Egypt or Israel? Would I have been a Buddhist, or Hindi, or Muslim, or Jew? Or even if I was born in the U.S., suppose my parents were Catholic or Jewish or Mormon or Atheist? What would I have been? This became a burning question. I asked a few people in the ministry about this and I was given 2 different answers, neither which I found very satisfying. One was that there was one way to eternal life and that was by believing in Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and all others were going to hell. So I just lucked out that my parents were of the right religion and my friends born into other faiths were destined for eternal damnation? The other answer I got was the God chooses to reveal Himself to different people in different ways. While that was a bit more satisfying, I was still confused. So my religion is the true religion, but so is everyone else’s? My questions about my faith and religion remained unanswered in my head.
Pinpointing precisely how many religions there are in the world today is next to impossible, although some estimate the number exceeds 4,000. The vast majority of those faiths are contained within a handful of major religious groups. The most widely recognized world religions are Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. To follow up on my quest, I took online courses studying these five major religions. The courses were very interesting. A common theme is that there is a supreme being who created the universe and sets moral guidelines for human behavior. All religions have holidays and ceremonies that commemorate important events in the history of their faith. And most religions have an established hierarchy with a governing body that decides on rules and practices. Religions have been frequently tied to government power and politics and wars. There are also some significant differences between the world’s major religions. Buddhists believe in rebirth. Good actions lead to a better rebirth, eventually leading to enlightenment and a state of Nirvana, where the enlightened person finally physically dies and there will be no more rebirths. And then we have Islam, which I was always thought was bad (particularly after the attack on the World Trade Center on 9-11), but then I learned Islam and Christianity are actually closely related- like Judaism, they are Abrahamic religions that revere Abraham in their scripture and share doctrinal, historical, and geographic overlap. They believe in one God, and accept the tradition that God revealed himself to the patriarch Abraham. Muslims and Jews have a hard time understanding Christianity’s Holy Trinity, and do not believe Jesus was the Son of God. Jesus was a Jew, so Judaism was the true religion until Jesus came along, but then you had to switch to Christianity? What about the Jews that didn’t convert? It’s mind-boggling to me. Hinduism has been called the oldest religion in the world, dating back to 5000 B.C., way before Christ was even born. (Were they given a free pass to heaven because Jesus didn’t exist then?) Hinduism is an umbrella term for a range of Indian religious and spiritual traditions that are unified by adherence to the concept of dharma, a cosmic order maintained by its followers through rituals and righteous living, as first expounded in the Vedas. I wondered- did I just happen to be born into the one true religion out of thousands of possibilities? I began to think perhaps all religions were just man-made belief systems created in various parts of the world at different times to explain the mystery of life.
Like the followers of all major religions, I grew up believing our scriptures were “the Word of God”. For a long time I just separated the Bible stories from my knowledge of science and did not try to reconcile them. A pastor once told me I was thinking too much like a scientist with my questions. But I began to wonder- was Adam a caveman? Did he descend from apes? Why doesn’t the Bible talk about evolution? Were Adam and Eve living with Dinosaurs? Did a snake really talk to them? Was everything actually created in seven days? Did Noah really live to be 950 years old? Was there really a giant Ark with exactly one male and one female of every single species of animal? In the New Testament, none of the authors of the Gospels were eyewitnesses of Jesus’s life. When I was in college, I took a class on “The Parallel Gospels” and was surprised to see how many discrepancies there were in the same stories. There are countless examples of these inconsistencies, as well as many laws in the Old Testament that clearly no longer apply. People pick and choose what verses they want to believe and follow. To me, it is unclear what truly happened and what are just fables passed down over time to make a point. In Church, after the reading of a Bible verse, we would say “The Word of the Lord”, and I began to quietly think “But is it really?”
We’ve all seen the social media posts requesting prayers to heal someone who is sick or sending “thoughts and prayers” to the families impacted by daily mass shootings in America. Not long ago, a very religious friend of mine was suffering from cancer. There were prayer chains and requests for prayers for the shrinking of a tumor or positive effects from chemotherapy. But their condition worsened and they died. An army of people prayed for them. They didn’t get better. I personally have come to agree with the view of the Methodist pastor and author John Pavlovitz who wrote:
“To contend that God heals when we pray for those who are terribly sick or physically damaged, is to imagine a creator who needs to be convinced. It is to paint an image of a God who, though already fully aware of the gravity of the situation and the worry of loved ones and reality of the injury refuses to move until we ask “Him” to. Prayer appeals almost become spiritual GoFundMe campaigns, where we’re told that if we “just get enough people praying” that healing will happen; that there is a magic number or critical mass that will move the Almighty in our favor. We feel the pressure to adequately make our case that a newborn baby or a teenager with cancer or a grandfather in a coma or a fallen athlete should get a reprieve. The problem with prayer for someone’s healing is that we have to make sense of the results. If the person lives or recovers, we somehow believe that we have engineered their survival and need to process why our prayers were enough and the person’s in the hospital room next to ours weren’t. And when healing doesn’t come, we second guess whether we’d prayed hard enough or we lament that we didn’t enlist enough “prayer warriors” to effectively move God, or we try to figure out why our petitions failed. Either way, it’s not a healthy way to live.”
I do believe there can be benefits to prayer and the power of positive thinking- not from the perspective of telling God what to do, but by making people feel that they are doing something to help in a helpless situation. And the person they are praying for may receive comfort in knowing that so many people are showing they care about them. But if we can change “God’s plan” by praying, wouldn’t that make us the all-powerful ones?
There are several other things that have impacted my beliefs- seeing the desire for power and money by people in religious organizations, the never-ending murders of millions of people around the world over religion, sex abuse cases and cover-ups involving over 3,000 priests dating back fifty years, and the cult-like worship by the evangelical community of Donald Trump, who in my view is the total opposite of Christ-like in his words and actions. And although Galatians 5:14 states “For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself”, I have seen some so-called religious friends who were more judgmental and hateful of people based on their nationality or skin color or sexual orientation than other friends who did not follow any specific religion. And just listen to the vicious way some of our politicians talk about Americans who practice a different faith than them. It’s just not the way I look at things.
When I was young, I was convinced my faith would grow stronger as I got old and nearing the end of my life. But as I gained life experience, I found the opposite to be true. Here’s my current perspective, now that I’m in my golden years. First of all, I totally respect everyone’s personal beliefs. I’ve talked privately to many friends of many different religions or no religion at all on this subject. The wide variety of perspectives of my friends on spirituality and religion has been really eye-opening. I believe it is something that is very personal and that everyone has to come to terms with, in their own way. And if they have found some answers that they are comfortable with, more power to them. As for me, today I would say I’m agnostic- I don’t know what to believe. I do feel that for me, religious organizations are not the answer. Nothing turned me away from the Church more than being on Church Council, where I saw the inner workings and gossiping and bad-mouthing and politics that go on behind the scenes. It wasn’t for me. I can’t rule out a supreme power of some sort- life on earth is pretty amazing when you think about it, and it’s hard to say it all just happened by chance or natural selection, but I just don’t know. Is there a “spirit” beyond the physical body and does it carry on in some way after death? I suppose some day we’ll all find out!
note: I do not want to engage in religious debate in the comments, but I would be more than happy to respond to private messages or, better yet, chatting over lunch some time if anyone would like to discuss further. – Jack