Desperate to believe

Sometimes I talk a big game.

I've reassured myself time and time again that the easiest explanation for the belief in God (aside from personal divine revelation) is that it serves as a means of coping with mortality and uncertainty. If one only believes in God, there is no need to fear death, and it seems to me that there is less of a need to agonize over the tribulations of this fleeting life because it is only a somber prelude to the glorious hereafter. Without my own divine revelation, or any other evidence in support of a belief in God, this notion that Man has invented the idea of God for his own reassurance undid my faith.

I had to start again from the ground up with a purely humanistic philosophy, and realized that not much was lost in God's absence. The earth was just as beautiful for existing by its own means, my love and affection for my friends and family was just as pure coming from my own fragile mind rather than being inspired in me by a creator, yet suddenly there was so much more fear and doubt. Without the guarantee of immortality, suddenly everything I had taken for granted was imbued with a deeply melancholy ephemerality, and there was no greater, guiding purpose to my life. It seemed to me that this long imagined creator had relinquished custody of my life and suddenly placed it into my own young and unskilled hands, and I had no idea what to do with it. For the most part, I still don't. But after a while, that stark autonomy and awareness of the fleeting nature of my life and the things around me grew to empower me. Suddenly, I became a wonder in my eyes, emerging from beneath this imagined creator to realize my own potential and revel in the beauty of every heart-wrenching moment of my life. I had the power in God's stead, or I should say I realized that humanity had always been in control of its own destiny. If not for fear of death, maybe we never needed God at all.

And this is all fine and good most days, and I've drawn strength and courage from this empowerment. But some days I find myself in my mom's hospital room listening to how lucky she was to be alive, or at the foot of my grandfather's bed as he struggles to sit up by himself but can't, and I want so desperately to believe there is something more beyond the veil. I have never wanted so much to be wrong. And I worry that some day all of my rationality and philosophy will do nothing to protect me from an inconsolable grief, and there will be nothing left of me.