Almost a year and a half ago, a doctor told me
I had cervical adenocarcinoma in situ. For the regular English-speaker, this is
basically cancer that has not yet become invasive (in situ means “in its place”).
It is still very “treatable” (I use quotes because the “treatment” is cutting
out the affected tissue which doesn’t really seem like treatment the way I
imagine it to be). It was still very traumatic for me for two reasons: 1) I was
completely blindsided by it. Cervical cancer is generally a slow, meandering
beast. This is good, because it allows plenty of time for screenings to catch
it before it becomes dangerous. Screenings aren’t always accurate, though, and
they do miss things sometimes. 2) This was caused by HPV, which in the small,
moderately to extremely Christian communities I grew up in only happened to
girls who sleep with lots of boys. (For the record, I got my first abnormal pap
with a presence of HPV after my first sexual partner. It only takes one.)
Furthermore, condoms??!! Well, you would have to be having sex to need those.
And you don’t have sex, you hormone-crazed, rebellious, irresponsible, judgment-impaired
teenager, you! Teaching you how to protect yourself from pregnancy and disease
is just going to put ideas into your head and make you think you can just “get
away with it”! We want to make sure God has his “opportunity” to fully punish
your filth if you step out of line.
I had
already begun rejecting my faith at that point in my life (wonder why…), but
was still very conflicted on the matter. It’s natural to feel powerless in
these sorts of situations, or even feel “dirty”. It is easy for a person of
faith to feel like this is happening to you for a reason, and that reason might
be that reason is God is “teaching you a lesson”/punishing you. The flip-side
argument might be that “he” is trying to draw you nearer by putting you in a
situation in which you feel powerless and are forced to turn the situation over
to “him”.
My parents
are quite religious (of the Christian persuasion) and urged me to turn to God
and pray. But the more I entertained the idea, the more absurd it became. IF a
God exists, I am convinced that “he” can only be either all-loving or
all-powerful. We also get to assume that we get free will, in which God cannot
meddle. I guess we then have to define what exactly “free-will” is. I think
that free-will is the ability to make decisions on your own without outside
coercion. It is difficult for the concepts of free-will and an all-powerful god
to coexist, because, in theory, God must sacrifice some of his power to grant
us free-will. Even if he still possesses that power but willingly refuses to
use it, he is still rendered not all-powerful. But for fun…
Let’s say I
turn to God (all-powerful, all-knowing). In doing so I have to acknowledge the
possibility that I was being punished, either for stepping out of bounds, and/or
for drifting too far from God, but both of these concepts run counter to the
idea of an “all-loving” God. It also
assumes that this is something God “did to me” in an attempt to
coax/encourage/force/coerce me into turning back to him, which not only runs
counter to the idea of an all-loving God, but also infringes on the premise
that we were fully-endowed with our own free will. It’s like a crazy boyfriend
whom just as you are about to walk out, poisons your oatmeal and proceeds to
tell you he has an antidote that will “potentially” cure you, but only if you pledge
your undying love and unending loyalty to him will he give it to you. If God
really loved you, he wouldn’t have poisoned you in the first place, and if it
so happened that you had become poisoned outside of his bidding, he wouldn’t
withhold help on a condition that you love him, dammit. I see only minor
differences between submitting to a God that gets off on making me feel like
shit about myself and/or traps me in an abusive relationship against my “God-given”
right to free will vs. eternal anguish and torment.
You could
make an argument that God doesn’t have the power to cure you or save/protect
you from the afflictions of this world, but does love you, and that your faith
in him will save you not in this life, but after it. Thus, he is all-powerful,
but only outside of the realm of our human life on this plane of existence. In
this scenario, thus far, God can be both all-loving, and, hypothetically, (at
least in a sense) all-powerful. And that’s works well until we introduce the
idea of needing to have something to be saved from after this life. Hello,
hellfire. This is actually where a little bit of divergence presents itself,
since some Christians have begun to reject the existence of hell. Let’s assume,
for now though, that there is one. If God is all-loving, then he would surely
do everything he could to save you from such a horrible fate. And in the event
of him being all-powerful, there is nothing he can’t do, so he can absolutely save
you from Hell. So, if we have an all-loving, all-powerful God, why even bother
to gain his favor or attain impossible perfection in our life when obviously he
will want to/be able to save us in the afterlife? If he is not all-powerful
outside of this plane of existence but remains all-loving, then that means that
this other force (Hell) has an edge over God and maybe God can’t even save us
after this life. If God is all-powerful then the only reason we would go to
Hell is because he is not all-loving, and in fact, is quite likely full of a
great deal of malice, which doesn’t bode well for your chances of gaining his
favor. But maybe Hell isn’t all fire and brimstone. If Hell doesn’t exist, then
it doesn’t really seem like there is anything that we need to be saved from
after this life (which, I guess does allow this God to be both all-loving and
all-powerful…in a way), but then if everyone ends up in the same place, what is
the benefit in believing in God at all? If God is all-powerful outside of this
realm, then if you do meet his rigorous standards of perfection you get to hang
out with him for the rest of eternity…but presumably your free-will is waived…which
leaves you a little like an automaton. The alternative being, you either burn
in fiery hell for eternity (if God is malicious and hateful) or, maybe more
mercifully, cease to exist.
We haven’t
even brought in the concept of all-forgiving, yet!!!
So, in order
for God to be a relevant force warranting such unending faith, loyalty and
adoration/fear, God is, most likely, powerless in our earthly plane of
existence, all-powerful in the afterlife, but hates your guts by default and
relishes the opportunity to see you sizzle unendingly forever, unless you
managed to sneak a quick prayer in for forgiveness before your earthly demise,
in which case, you’ll be best buds!
The
alternative is that God is all-loving but powerless, and can only negotiate
your salvation if you follow a strict code, except for the silver bullet that
if you are able to seek forgiveness for your sins before having the opportunity
to commit anymore before you die, you are automatically in…but only if you ask…he’s
sort of like a genie.
The
alternative to all of this mess is actually much more comforting…and waaaaay
simpler. This happened to you, simply because these things happen. You were unlucky,
and/or you did not know that you could protect yourself from this fate, and/or you
were just a stupid teenager. Conflict can create moments of clarity and
opportunities to know more about who you truly are. It helps you discover truth.
In the end, I fell back on the fact that as a human being I have inherent worth
and dignity that no sexual history, tiny virus or really confusing, probably
non-existent, or at least irrelevant, deity can take away from me for as long
as I live and breath!
This is what
else I took away:
The perpetual threat of death (and its
permanence) is what makes every day of life important and meaningful. Conflicts
make life interesting, and by overcoming them we learn who we are at our core
and what it is that we really believe. I think happiness is a carrot evolution
dangles in front of us to motivate us to be better, to adapt and to excel.
Happiness is a fleeting thing that we chase through life, catching it occasionally,
only to release it (or have it taken away) when we get bored of it and start
chasing it again. The journey to happiness, the journey to overcome obstacles
and tribulations, is more exciting, beautiful and profound than the actual having
of happiness. This journey is what gives life meaning. And it is a
fuller and more complete and more certain than anything
I know about Christianity at this time.
