If I Die, and I’m Wrong, I’m Not Afraid
"And if that means I must welcome the gates of Hell, then so be it."
If you have ever watched Spiritual Witnesses as a religious individual, I do not know how you could possible proceed in reconciling your faith through feeling alone. Either those in the video are lying to you, lying to themselves, or you must concede that others have felt something similar to your own spiritual confirmations across all faiths.
I do not want to think so little of the world and of my fellow humans—that they somehow would lie to me or to themselves so prolifically about religious matters at this kind of scale. There are plenty of liars in this world, but with an assumption like that, it becomes a full-blown conspiracy at that point. Thus, where are we left? To admit that they must be telling the truth.
Thus, without spiritual confirmation to rely on, how do we possibly find any sort of true, singular, universal faith on logic alone? How could we possibly sift through the vast collections of scripture that every faith and way of life has to offer in this lifetime to perform an adequate amount of due diligence in making such a monumental decision. We can not. We are all lost. We are all left guessing together.
Years ago, while I was in a state of spiritual deconstruction, I found this quote by Abraham Lincoln:
I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live by the light that I have. I must stand with anybody that stands right, and stand with him while he is right, and part with him when he goes wrong.
I could be wrong about my beliefs in God—or the lack thereof—but I don’t want to follow a god that is going to make me guess. Thus, if I must assume that God would not want me to guess, then I must live with the desire to be true and live by the light that I have, not to win or succeed.
If I concern myself with trying to guess what is right and what is wrong in a world with little to no concrete answers on spirituality, then I will be forever lost. The simple truth is, if I kept the faith of my youth, and died in this moment, I would fear that God would look at me and say, “Yes, the faith was true. But, you in your heart felt it was wrong, and you still kept to it. In this I am disappointed.” At least, I must imagine that God would say that, because a god that wouldn’t say such a thing and would ask me to guess is a god I would not follow.
As such, I commit to live in that way in which I found will bring the most peace, happiness, and truth to me and my family. There is no other way. And if that means I must welcome the gates of Hell, then so be it.