This statement is sometimes expressed by people who sincerely want to believe in God. “I wish I could”, they say. So what hinders them? I think I know the answer because I have been there myself.
I believe there are 4 reasons which in combination play their role in shaping the mind in a way that makes the whole idea of believing in God imposible. The 4 reasons are:
- An idea that you first need to have the right feeling or condition or sensibility towards spiritual matters. That this religious sensibility is not a part of your nature and therefore it is possible for you.
- A lack of knowledge about documented history understood in relation to the historical and prophetic accounts in the Bible.
- An imprinted idea that all life on earth has a natural origin. This idea is so effectively built into the mindset of Western cultures, that it permeates all our understanding about history, health, development, biology, theories of a healthy lifestyle, and genetics. We are so deeply surrounded by it. It is built-in to the roots of our understanding both on a conscious and unconscious level. So a lack of knowledge about the theory of evolution (the development of biological life on earth) and the theory of the origin of the universe (Big Bang theory) makes them seem like strong pillars of truth that can not be questioned.
- Lack of knowledge of the deliberate attempt to suppress, eliminate and exclude information from universities that provides evidence against the established academic standpoints on Christianity, history, evolution, Big Bang etc. When first you dive into this “forbidden knowledge” and how it has been suppressed you will discover that you are crossing into a world of organized deception.
If you spend time to gain basic knowledge on each of these 4 points I don’t think you feeling of wanting to believe but not being able to, will disappear. So let’s take a short look at each of the 4 points.
No 1: Not having the right feeling and religious sensibility to believe in God
It is a totally wrong way of thinking about Christianity, that it has something to do with having the “right” feelings or having a spiritual sensibility. In Christianity, it’s all about having the right knowledge. Not only about what the Bible says, but also about what the Bible talks about – for example, the history and development of nations. This combined knowledge will gradually develop all the right feelings and a spiritual sense. The more you become convinced that the Bible tells the truth about life and earths history, the more you will develop a spiritual sense of the unseen world and incorporate it as a living reality. It not the other way round. There is nothing.
You may only have experienced Christianity as it is expressed through the church where it is a kind of performance with a series of rituals where people rise up, sit down and rise again, and the singing of psalms and a more or less abstract sermon which seems far, far from the real world when passages are read from the Bible. You will never, ever gain true knowledge here. To gain a true knowledge of the Bible it must be studied like any other piece of literature you want to understand the meaning of.
The reason why they say they can’t, although they would like to, is that they think there must first emerge a change in their feelings, some kind of a transformation that they cannot themselves give rise to or generate. They have an image implanted in their minds that religious people are different from them. This idea is mostly formed by unconscious impressions, sensations, and feelings. It is not something they have thought through. They feel that religious people have some sort of genetic disposition they don’t have, or their minds are tuned in differently than theirs. if they shall explain it intellectually they say that upbringing accounts for most of the religious world. Pure ignorance, tradition, and cultural upbringing are some of the primary answers why so many people in the third world live in a religious delusion. We in the Western culture have discovered that belief in a Creator is simply unscientific since we now know that life on earth developed by itself by processes called mutation and natural selection. The biblical belief that life was spoken into existence by an intelligent Creator is a myth in the same category as the belief that thunder is the northern god Thor riding his wagon with rams over the sky.
Most people have no tools to analyze whether the theory of evolution is based on science or is a philosophic idea – not based on science but on observations falsely interpreted in order to fit the predetermined idea. They have not either had access to information so they can distinguish between myths (Superman and Thor) and religious claims which can be tested up against both history and science. If they had that information they would be able to see how much the western secular education system is developed to deliberately keep people away from getting access to information that gives the “mainstream agreed upon wisdom” a serious blow.
Therefore it is so easy for the secular academic world to purport that “we know the truth”. Therefore it is easy for them to draw the “myth card” because most people are not aware that they are being manipulated. The cant see the difference between apples and oranges when it comes to religious matters. Why not? because the secular education system has stuffed it all down in the same box and by a few generations a new secular mindset has been created and no one knows that manipulation has been taken place.
They wish they could experience this tuning, that the religious conviction could seize them. But the don’t feel anything at all. And here is the thing: They think that it is all about having the right feelings and emotions and then the can believe.
They look at the religious people standing in meditation, performing with their hands lifted towards the sky and they feel that they can never, ever be able to do that if they should retain their integrity. To do this would require that they forcefully overrule their deepest convictions and feelings. It would be a violation of their deepest felt consciousness. They could only do it as a superficial performance – like a theater play. They think that what the see in religious people as devotion and surrender must first be in place….and thereafter they can say: “Now I believe”. Feelings first, then devotion and then the intellectual and conscious conviction expressed verbally.
But this is a complete delusion. I thought like this once. Therefore I also said: “I wish I could believe, but I can’t”.
When I many years ago was traveling in India and observed the religious people performing their rituals I could never see myself doing anything like that. I did not feel disgusted towards it but I found it completely closed to me as an option. I was by nature denied access. I found it exotic and attracting to look at. But it was unapproachable and very distant like a dance performance – completely detached and unrelated to my life, and my problems – but beautiful to look at. A fairytale. Good for an escapist like me. I had much too much in my crazy mind to struggle with, and I could not see that performing all sorts of rituals could make that go away.
I think that I had the idea that the things that I struggled with in my life (my mind) were way
But when in Denmark I had to go to church in order not to offend family and friends during baptism, weddings, and burials, I was always filled with disgust. The rituals, the dress, the choir, the organ, the psalms, the black dress, the cross on the wall, the paintings and sculptures of the suffering Christ. I literally hated when the priest turned his or her back away the audience and stood in silence. The whole performance seemed so artificial and styled. My mind was filled with an inner scream calling me to do something disruptive to destroy all that I considered as hypocrisy in this performance. I hated that we all were forced down on hard benches listening to words being read from an old book that none of us believed in. And then we were “forced” to fold our hands while a prayer was being said. I felt there was a kind of group-pressure at work because if you didn’t fold them people sitting next to you could see it and maybe judge you as an unpolite rebel. But that I guess was just thoughts possessing my paranoid brain.
But believing in God is not a question of feelings but a to take a stand based on knowledge. The change in feelings and the transformation of the mind and the shift in interests, desires, motives are nothing that we shot care for. These things grow slowly and gradually as a result when we have taken a knowledge-based stand. When I say that it is knowledge-based I really mean it. But what kind of knowledge is it that you need to be able to take an informed stand? It all depends on your background. Some people have a more developed intellectual
But common to all people who take a knowledge-based stand will be able to answer in an intelligent, reasonable way why they believe that God has created the world
it has something to do with a change in feelings.
But the story in the Bible seems so far away from anything that can apply to the reality. The idea of a God that created everything is so far from the world view we have today. Believing in God seems like a naive, unreal fairytale.
But I can tell you that the reason why most people today perceive the idea of a God as a creator is that a century-long propaganda-machine has been pumping a secular worldview into our minds.
It is very easy to mold the mind. Let’s say that you together with your wife and one child shipwreck but are saved on an uninhabited island. You can either tell the child that everything it sees is created by God or you can say that everything came by itself. You can teach the child about the Creator of everything and also teach about the biblical world view, that we come from our forefathers Adam and Eve, and that they fell in sin and that God has sent Jesus to save us from sin. You teach the child what sin is and that the very nature of mankind was changed after the fall of Adam and Eve. You explain that before the fall our moral conduct was in complete harmony with God and that there existed no evil thoughts of selfish inspired acts. Everything was altruistic love for and complete harmony. But after the fall a our nature was change. Not only our moral conduct but also our physical structure. The function of our bodies changed on a genetical level. Scientists call it mutation. Something in our bodies made it impossible to think and act in complete harmony with God. What Adam and Eve did as the most natural in the world, they suddenly were unable to do. Their thoughts were unable to be clean and pure. Suspiciousness, irritation, and impatience were completely new states of mind. Like a chronic disease, it overwhelmed them and they were not able to defeat it. And another state of mind occurred for the first time: fear. Have you ever experienced in a relationship – in a marriage – that the love and kindness between you gradually go downhill? The smiles and kind words that were once plentiful between you are gradually evaporating and substituted with. Love has been substituted with Suspiciousness, irritation, and impatience. Inside both of you feel emptiness. And you have no idea what to do to change the situation. Now you live with the new situation as if this is the norm. You accept it. You get used to it. Even though this is not what you want, you cant change it. You cannot force the old, cheerful, kind and loving state of mind into your self. You can’t fake it. You can still act outwardly kind, but your heart is not full of love any longer. Some of the people who have known you before the change will feel that the atmosphere between you has changed. But others who haven’t known you before will not notice anything. And the reason why they don’t notice is that this condition is the norm in most marriages. The spouses become strangers to each other. This is what happened, I believe, to Adam and Eve after the fall. This was the result of sin.
Even though we wished to be in harmony we couldn’t.
Why does the proposal of a spiritual, unseen intelligent force behind everything in the universe immediately create opposition in us? The reason is that our minds have been gradually molded into a secular mindset.