religion is a crutch for the weak pt.2

The idea of religion as just simply a crutch for the weak came up in my conversations again. And since my first post on it (here), I’ve had some updated thoughts and reflections. Perhaps these thoughts are really just a further fleshing out of my first approach in the previous post. Or perhaps it’s because this time the claim/question was brought up with a different underlying motive. When I wrote the first post, it was with the mindset that the claimer/questioner is coming from the angle that those who go to religion are simply weak and need a crutch. This time around, I want to approach the claim/question from the angle of ‘why is it that it is most often in suffering/illness/difficulty that people find God/religion? why couldn’t they have just found God during normal times?’

Is it because people are more vulnerable when they’re faced with unexplainable and inescapable suffering or pain? Maybe! Perhaps it is so, and if it is so, is that a bad thing? I’d venture to guess that one of the most common answers to the question of ‘why don’t you search for God/religion?’ is ‘because I don’t need him.’ There are so incredibly few of us, particularly in my age group, who really deem the quest for God, religion, and truth as important or relevant to where we are at. Very few are really making the studious and intentional search for spiritual truth (if there is any) the way they are intentionally and pain-stakingly (and desperately) finding a spouse. Why? Well, because they simply don’t see the need for it. Most people in my age group are doing quite well. Their health is at peak condition, they’ve probably just started their careers and marriage, and they’ve got a whole world of opportunities and possibilities before them. And they have so many other things they want to do at the moment – start a business! start a family! find love! travel! The world is their playground and everything seems to be within the grasp of their hands. What’s God got to do with anything of it? What’s the need of God? Where’s the time for God when there’s so much else we’d rather focus on? There’s so many distractions around us! This quote describes the situation quite well –

The diversion pole is people who live inches away from God’s truth, but they don’t want to follow [or search for] it. So what they do is surround themselves—this is Pascal’s great insight—with busy, entertaining distractions, so they don’t have to think about reality and death, let alone the logic of their assumptions. As psychologists point out today, never has there been a generation with more devices that stop people from thinking—what they call weapons of mass distraction. [cite]

But let’s just say for the moment that there really is a God. And that your life, your future, your eternity depended upon knowing Him. That to know Him is to know the greatest joy and treasure there could ever be. Then would not the most imperative and obvious thing for Him to do is to make you aware of this need/truth/joy? Would not the worst and most unkind thing for Him to do is to leave you in your comfortable yet shallow and directionless bubble?

So the question becomes – how do you get people who believe they are perfectly self-sufficient to realize they are not? Well, simple – allow the removal of their crutches. When you’re diagnosed with a terminal illness, you’re suddenly faced with the reality of how limited doctors and medicine are. How limited scientific and medical knowledge is. It removes your belief that you can know, conquer, and solve everything.  Just about any and all difficulties, suffering, pain, and disaster reveals to us one key thing about reality that we so often ignore, forget, or avoid until forced to: you’re not in control, you cannot fix everything, and not everything is going to simply be ‘alright’ because you willed it to be so. We are all one terminal illness, one major earthquake, one big tsunami, one major terrorist attack, one big stock market crash, one devastating loss of a loved one away from realizing that we are not in control, we are not self-sufficient, we can do very little, and a lot of what we’re currently pursuing or focused on can become quite meaningless and useless if one of the aforementioned things occurred.

So perhaps the key to understanding why it is most often in suffering or difficulties that people find God is this: that it is in suffering and difficulties that we see ourselves for who we really are – not self-sufficient, incredibly in need, and desperate for a meaning and purpose in our lives that extends far beyond the localized meaning we’ve been content with so far.  Then we can see that suffering and difficulties are allowed and used by God to pop our comfortable little bubbles to force us to face the realities of what’s around us to give us the chance of discovering something far greater and more important than what we’ve been content with in our little bubble.

One of my favorite CS Lewis quotes from The Problem of Pain puts it quite well –

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.