John Myste offers a combination of wit and enlightenment that is only his. When his target is my faith, it seems a shame to respond. There is no way to top his intellect, no way to match his gentle humor. The most I can hope is to avoid detracting from poetry with mere prose.

This week John submitted a question that was a little too short to transform into a post. So it was allowed to stand as is. It is worthy of more consideration.

Why are you a Methodist? Why do you not belong to a Unity Church or something that seems closer to your thinking?

Is it that you believe that God is a living Entity, greater than humans, Who loves us and Who will one day cradle us in His arms and keep us from harm?

It is because you have a long nurtured relationship with the Methodist Church, that probably no longer fits that well, but you keep wearing it because you remember how good you looked when you did, twenty years ago?

You have told this story before, and I think it is a very good one. I sincerely believe that most people who oppose gay marriage today will be embarrassed twenty years from now. I just wonder if they will still wear keep their opposition out of habit more than out of emotional belief, just because they remember how good they felt when they did, twenty years ago.

How can anyone not love that "remember how good you looked" twenty years ago? He notes a bigotry that may be embraced for the same reason. That just might be enlightening.

If childhood faith plays a part, I am not aware of it. I was raised a Methodist, but the connection with my adulthood is tenuous. My family went away from Methodism before I became a teenager, I think. Evil in the world, seemingly endless pain without healing, was a frequent theological problem and a center of discussion. An emotional witness for the prosecution can be found in "Why I am an atheist – Andreas" by PZ Myers at Pharyngula. Myers offers wrenching personal experience, a series of heartfelt prayers that went unanswered during the progression of cancer that eventually robbed him of his father.

The traditional answer to such suffering is some reference to the mysterious ways of God. We don't know the reason, but we must have faith that there is a reason. It is no answer at all. Myers is worth reading, if only to reduce the weight of arrogance that faith is burdened to carry.

More real to me, even as a teen, was the inverse problem of evil within. I am certainly capable of harboring evil thoughts. I am capable of committing evil deeds. I can be guilty of the sin of omission, not preventing or mitigating suffering around me. How can one such as am I be a creature of God, and in particular be deserving of that Creator's love.

A pastor friend listens and agrees. Those are the twin challenges to any reasoning faith: "evil in the world and evil in myself."

My Methodism, at least for now, comes through fortuitous accident. I happened to be invited to a wonderful church in Florissant Missouri and continued to attend. I had questions about evil in the world, about evil within me, about smug exclusivity within the church, and about policies that seemed immoral to me. In those days a prohibition of active homosexuality with the clergy was an active issue. My questions were discussed with the pastor in several hand-on-shoulder sessions. She has since gone to another Methodist congregation in another part of St. Louis County.

I still don't reject or dismiss those questions. PZ Myers' one time anger, current rejection, of God seems almost a reincarnation of a great man I once knew, and whose loss still affects me.

On a purely intellectual level I can understand and appreciate the logic of atheism, or agnosticism, or forms of faith that differ from my own.

A materialistic view is beyond my emotional understanding. I relate to other human beings, I look to what I find within myself, in a way that does not easily fit that view. I cannot reconcile my personal experience with a definition of consciousness as the evolutionary result of subatomic particles and energy impulses. I appreciate John Myste in a way that I appreciate someone who can, in some unusual mental alchemy, visualize the world in five or six or more dimensions. I appreciate the model, but I do not experience it. Perhaps John is just more advanced than I.

I did, in fact, explore the Unity Center of Christianity, and I found much of value. I took the famous Course in Miracles from the Foundation for Inner Peace and found it enlightening. Unity is tolerant of a multitude of theological approaches. They advance a view they see as uniting every religion. I could never get my arms around a visualization of God as a cosmic principle beyond the anthropomorphic metaphor we have in our heads. It was, to me, akin to worshiping a spiritual form of gravity. I am grateful to them. I wish them well. May the force be with them.

Many of us believe we are part of God's plan to manifest the Kingdom of Heaven here on Earth and, through prayer and study, within some part of ourselves. I suppose, in the end, it may indeed be a massive illusion. It may simply be a way of reconciling belief with those unanswerable twin problems, evil throughout the world, and evil within the human soul. It could be we simply want to change the world and ourselves to make it safe for God to exist without cosmic contradiction. But I don't think so.

The late great Jesuit theologian, Teilhard de Chardin, seemed amused by the debate as he saw it develop in the early part of the twentieth century. The almost bullying intellectual argument that consciousness itself was an illusion found its jujitsu answer in de Chardin. He agreed that consciousness was a simple manifestation of molecules and electricity. This proved that all molecules and electricity possessed a sort of primordial consciousness. That entertained me long after de Chardin went on to whatever awaits us all.

The Polish Jewish writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer, once commented on the theological issue of free will. "We have to believe in free will," he said. "We've got no choice."

I have no compelling polemic designed to advance my faith.
I believe because I cannot help believing.