And, yes, not choosing is a choice. As proof, I cite two great sages and philosophers

Jesus: “He that is not with me is against me”

Neil Peart: “If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice”

That’s a good starting point for me. I delved into Zen a bit. But not as a full-scale, “one-with-the-universe” Buddhist. More as an “agnostic” Buddhist. I came to the point where I realized the specious process of “the discursive mind” and the false (but universally attractive) thinking that words and ideas and beliefs were the reality of the thing.

Jerry Mander, in one of his “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” (”The Mediation of Experience”) points out that a person, having seen the Hawaiian volcanoes on television, is deluded into believing she has seen the Hawaiian volcanoes in reality. Likewise, having seen a mere pictorial representation of a muscle cell, a person easily believes she knows what a muscle cell looks like. As I understand things, atoms exist, but only as a matter of theory. A good, provable theory it is, but a theory, nevertheless. The same for evolutionary theory. Et cetera, ad nauseum. It’s easy (remarkably so) to wrongly think that the words, the representations, the theories, the opinions, the ideas, the political obfuscations, are the reality itself.

Epistemology holds, basically, that there are only a small and finite number of ways of knowing anything: direct observation, logic, and authority. Some Christians (and others) say there’s a fourth: revelation. By and far the way that almost all people almost all the time “know” something is that they’ve taken that something “on authority.” E.g., no-one living today observed directly Columbus discovering the new world. We all “know” it (”Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety-two”) because we were all taught it and no-one questions the veracity of our teachers. (The same holds true for our birth dates–we weren’t really there–our birth dates are just what they told us.)

All that having been said (perhaps a bit didactically), I have continued to maintain a belief in God, etc. I think that’s what’s meant by “faith”–I have no proof (but neither does the other side). We have only arguments; and the arguments go both ways. But we feel we must choose one side or the other. Can one live and think without choosing sides? Isn’t not choosing even possible? (Is it, as they say, that choosing not to decide is nevertheless a choice?)

I have chosen Christianity over “not-Christianity.” Can I say why? Perhaps “logic” (the books I’ve read and the ideas I’ve entertained). Perhaps cowardice (I am afraid of the consequence of unbelief). Certainly nurture and authority and persuasion. Perhaps nothing more than a coincidence of experience: my life was collapsing around me and I chose Christianity as a “life preserver.” Probably all of that, and yet then some….