This will explain my situation and I apologise for its length.
My relationship with Christianity is long and confused. It certainly didn't start early in my life because neither of my parents were believers. The first time the matter of Christianity disturbed my life was at school where it was imposed with little discussion and therefore it became an inconvenience. It was probably when I was about ten years of age that I met my first Christian, a dear lady teacher at the special school I was sent to because I was anti social I think. She was a Quaker and became a friend for the rests of her life and I sometime sit at the desk she left me in my study. She emanated what I instinctively knew was Christianity before I even attempted to understand it.
I attach a one page memory of religion in my early life at the end of this missive.
The next experience that I had with a Christian was in Korea when following a United Nations parade I was invited to the house of Don Shields who worked for something like the YMCA but I lost touch when I was posted back to Hong Kong.
When I left the Army I visited a few churches local to our house in Oxford but that went nowhere and when I met Joan I went to church with absolutely no commitment.
My next experience with religion strangely enough was triggered by my daughter when one day at the age of about nine she decided that she wanted to join the choir and of she trotted. I like to believe in “signs” and I took this as a sign that I should go to church as well. I don’t remember how long that lasted.
Eventually, in about 1970 I started studying with the Open University and spent a year or so taking a course on theology where the existence of God was one of the elements. My main thoughts on the course was that it was based on attempting to prove or disprove the existence of God by logic and beautiful as such arguments were I was not impressed and I fell back on the thought that one can not prove such matters by logic. One either believes or does not.
Ontological argument.
Anselm's ontological argument purports to be an a priori proof of God's existence. Anselm starts with premises that do not depend on experience for their justification and then proceeds by purely logical means to the conclusion that God exists.
Cosmological argument.
Taken from Wikipedia. In natural theology and philosophy, a cosmological argument is an argument in which the existence of a unique being, generally seen as some kind of god, is deduced or inferred from facts or alleged facts concerning causation, change, motion, contingency, or finitude in respect of the universe as a whole or processes within it.[1][2] It is traditionally known as an argument from universal causation, an argument from first cause, or the causal argument, and is more precisely a cosmogonical argument (about the origin). Whichever term is employed, there are three basic variants of the argument, each with subtle yet important distinctions: the arguments from in causa (causality), in esse (essentiality), and in fieri (becoming).The basic premises of all of these are the concept of causality and the Universe having a beginning. The conclusion of these arguments is first cause, subsequently deemed to be God. The history of this argument goes back to Aristotle or earlier, was developed in Neoplatonism and early Christianity and later in medieval Islamic theology during the 9th to 12th centuries, and re-introduced to medieval Christian theology in the 13th century by Thomas Aquinas. The cosmological argument is closely related to the principle of sufficient reason as addressed by Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, itself a modern exposition of the claim that "nothing comes from nothing" attributed to Parmenides.
Heaven, the afterlife, call it what you will.
I actually discussed this concept with my son and it covered what happens when one dies. We couldn’t accept that Heaven was up in the fluffy clouds where if we had behaved ourselves we would meet up with all our relatives and friends and we reached the provisional conclusion that Heaven was a collection of all that was good about those whom we had loved in some form of spirit but we knew that was a very loose description.
Why raise the question of God now?
I have been going to church again for the simple reason that I felt that I needed to so I waited until an Easter time a year or so ago and the question arose in my mind when a prayer was being made, “Just who or what am I attempting to communicate with?” Perhaps cynically, I thought that most of those in church may well pray to God but they had never given any thought to just who or what God was.So, there we are. I lay in bed or sit in my sofa and pose the same question to myself and I’m going nowhere with it. It would be so much simpler if I could have a C. S. Lewis experience where he wrote that he resisted the call from God and it was with reluctance that he eventually gave in.
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