I suppose one of my biggest disappointments is

That there is no answer.

Everyone seems to have lots of answers when you're searching for faith: lots of scriptures that can point you in the right direction, encourage you to believe, re-assure you about how wonderful it all is.

What happens when you start to look a bit harder and become concerned it's a house of cards?

What happens when you start to look at a card and realise it's possibly not standing on anything?

I get that we need to use eyes of faith, I really do, but you need more than a wish to base that faith on. We know that 'reality' will let us down, and as Christians we live on the basis that the world is broken and failing. At the same time, the more I read the bible the more I read things that look like they have been made up, possibly for all the best reasons, but still made up.

And the thing that ticks me off most is that there is no answer.


Someone I knew a little - pastor of a church in Abingdon - had a heart attack and died the day I started writing this post.

A good friend's wife died of cancer a couple of years back, leaving a young family.

We may have some experience of this kind of thing too.

I'm fed up with the thinking that it's more important to reach out than to understand what we're offering.


Yesterday I bumped into the people who I now realise helped start me on this path of thought and theology. They had a thing about the people of Israel and the rock that went through the desert with them as described in 1 Cor 10 v3-4 - they believed that there was a physical rock that followed the Israelites through the desert, and that rock was Jesus in some other form.

I think it was that point that stopped me being a fundamentalist and instead started me searching to know what was true and what was just made up.

People like to make up stuff, not from malicious intent, but because they just want to have something to believe in that helps explain why the world is like it is and provides them something to believe in and bring hope and comfort. I'm NOT saying that Christianity is all a fiction, but that it has absorbed various peoples made up stuff along the way. At one time I would be cross about this corruption, but at the moment I'm just accepting it for the reasons above. Disappointing, frustrating, but nothing to burn someone at the stake over.

How do you know something is a fiction? It's hard to tell, but if people feel the need to defend their god by force of arms, anger and violence then that's a pretty strong clue they know it's not true. If god is really God, why would He need people to fight for him?