Day 14 → A hero that has let you down.
When I was little, I suppose you could say the Christian god was my hero. I thought he could fix anything as long as I believed hard enough. I thought that I had to do as much as I could, but, at the end, when everything was on the line, god would step in and make it all better.
Somehow that never worked.
As I grew older, I became something of a cynic where god was concerned. Why would some all powerful being let friends die? Why was my brother born with Down Syndrome, high functioning enough to be hurt by the knowledge of his difference? For those who say he was put on this earth to teach us how to be better people: go do something physically unlikely to yourself. If a god is mean enough to cause a child pain to make other people better, that’s not a god I can believe in. Also, I’m not sure that the experience necessarily made us better. Different, yes, and our lives were unquestionably changed, but to be sure that our lives were actually better because of his disability would require the ability to look at different timelines to see what would have happened. Not something we can do. Don’t get me wrong. I love my brother and I’m glad he was part of my life for as long as he was, but I would not have wished pain on him, and his differences caused him pain and unhappiness. That’s really not okay with me.
I asked questions of friends, family, and priests, and none of them could answer with much other than “You just need to have faith.” I saw too much hypocrisy among Christians to be able to accept that they actually believed. “You’ll know they are Christians by their love” doesn’t hold much water when you have a friend who grew up in a strongly Christian community, a part of the community, much loved and respected, who was shut out completely when he came out as gay, or when I see people who figure they are good Christians because they go to church every Sunday hurting their animals, kids, or spouse because they can, because they have power over them.
God was once something of a hero to me. I think, once you learn too much about a hero, you find that they are not as amazing or wonderful as you thought. There are flaws. In this case, the flaws were so big that I eventually realized that there is no god, that we choose what we do and who we are.
Next: Day 15 → Something or someone you couldn’t live without, because you’ve tried living without it.
