True Theology

I have no problem with atheists.  People will believe what they will believe and they will believe on whatever terms work for them.  I fully appreciate that belief in God, or the option of not believing is something very personal.  Having read Blaise Pascal's logical proofs for the existence of God (please let there not be a quiz, it's been so long ago) I have to admit that my reaction was a bit lukewarm. 

Really, I don't care if the existence of God can or cannot be proved rationally.  This has absolute squat to do with my reasons for believing nor with the way I believe.  Even early in my career as a young Jesus freak I was already bored to extinction by the lame and baroque contortions the evangelicals I knew would put themselves, and the rest of us, through in order to explain the nature of God, the complete existence of God, using every possible rational, and slightly less than rational ploy at their fingertips.  I reached a point where I really didn't care a rat's buttocks what the Bible said about God and how eloquently it could be proved.  To me, none of their explanations, none of their prevarications even remotely touched on what was real to me.

Real to me.  God is real to me.  That is how I became converted.  I was drawn, not by cleverly construed arguments and not by well-crafted explanations.  I was drawn by the Holy Spirit.  A group of people, themselves very young, though quite mature to my fourteen years of existence, had experienced God.  God became real for them, and through the Holy Spirit, filled and inhabited them.  An irresistible force of love and power.  They were very ordinary people, some who had already led very difficult and pain-filled lives.  And Christ was there in our midst.

These are things that cannot be explained or rationalized, just experienced and shared.  Having myself enjoyed this supernal divine experience, something which has never left me, I can only grimace and moan and laugh ironically at the pathetic attempts of so-called Christians who have never known him as they try to explain him and prove that he exists.  My dear, it is only by humbly accepting the love that is already there for us that we come to know that God is real and that we can always trust in him.

I do understand atheists.  They have not had this experience.  To explain it to any of them would be like trying to describe the colour green to someone who is colour blind.  So when an atheist, on top of saying that they have had no experience of God, goes on to claim that God does not, nor could ever possibly exist?  That is just too over the top.  To say that something cannot be real for me just because it isn't for you or someone else is simply the height of arrogance as well as being a very ungenerous position to take.  I feel sorry for them.

God cannot be known through the mind, it is through the heart, that we come to know him, and then the mind becomes enlightened.  That is true theology.