Last week, Misery Marketing asked, "What would you say is the percentage of yourself that really believes he does have a choice to screw around or not and not that he is unwillingly controlled by addiction?"
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| Image credit: Photo by Torbein on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
Many years ago, when I was in college, I had a conversation about God (no trust me, Misery Marketing, I'm going somewhere with this) with a friend who was an evangelical Christian. I was delighted to get a chance to ask him my big question: Why? Why did he believe in God?
I think I was expecting some great revelation, some light shining out of the sky, some secret proof that no one else had yet been able to give me. Instead I got an answer along the lines of, "Because I just do. During my years growing up and going to church, I have come to feel Him in my life."
And for years I carried that around with me, puzzling evidence that religion made no sense and there was no good reason to believe in God. Years later, I shared my confusion around this with someone else, who told me, "Your friend has faith. That's what faith is." Oh. I had heard about faith every Sunday of my childhood, yet took me nearly 30 years on this planet to see that belief in God isn't about some secret certainty, some hidden fact, it's a belief. It's faith.
I had another conversation about God a few years ago with a friend, a scientist who identifies herself as atheist. I identified myself as agnostic, and I had to admit to her that I didn't understand atheism. One of the reasons I identified as agnostic was because the existence of God cannot be scientifically disproven. How could she definitively embrace atheism when proof of God's non-existence was impossible?
And she gave me an answer very similar to that of my evangelical Christian friend: "I may not be able to disprove God's existence, but I just don't believe that's the way the universe actually works. I believe there is no God as strongly as someone who believes in God believes."
In fact, I had to admit that my agnosticism wasn't completely the product of scientific rationality either, because agreed with her: I couldn't believe that the God of my childhood was how the universe worked either.
All of us -- Christian, atheist, agnostic -- were taking our life experiences and all the data we'd gathered about the universe, and we were crunching those numbers in our heads. We were getting as close as we could to an answer, making the most sense we could based on the evidence we had, and then we were, each and every one of us, taking a leap of faith.
And that's what my husband's addiction is to me. It's a belief. I've taken all the evidence from all the experiences I've had in my life -- from everything I know of myself and my husband, from every interaction I've ever had with anyone on this planet, from all the research and learning I've done, from all my spiritual searchings -- and I've drawn the best conclusion from all of the forty years of experience and knowledge that I possibly can. I found that compulsive behavior is what makes the most sense to me in explaining the most data. And then I take a leap of faith. It's in that leap of faith that doubt lies.
When it comes to God I have to admit that there is a possibility that God is actually a man up in the sky with a flowing white beard who does things like prohibit the eating of meat on Fridays. That vision of the universe doesn't make a lot of sense to me personally, it doesn't feel quite right to me, it doesn't work as well for me and with my life experiences as my vision of my God does, but it could be true. Some part of me always wonders if I'm wrong and am going to end up hanging with Satan having my flesh burned by fire for the rest of eternity because I've had an abortion or engaged in pre-marital sex or eaten shellfish. But I can't live my life in that nebulous region of "what if." I have to live my life with my God and my understanding of the universe, on this side of that leap of faith.
It's the same thing for addiction. There is no certainty and no way to attain certainty either way. Maybe my husband is making choices about what he's doing. I have to admit that that's possible. I have to admit that the way I used to see the universe didn't fit, that I've had to change, that I've been wrong before. I have to admit that sometimes I wonder if my husband is an evil person or doesn't love me, just as I wonder if there is a Hell and if I'm going there. But it doesn't fit the data I have nearly as well. It doesn't fit well with what I know. It feels wrong to me.
At some point, whether I'm going to believe that he (and others) are acting compulsively or believe that he (and others) are choosing to act hurtfully, I'm going to have to make a leap of faith in order to live my life. I can't be (no one can) one hundred percent certain, but where I am now is working for me better than where I used to be five or ten years ago. So, I'm going to keep on believing with (oh, let's say) somewhere between 95 and 99% of me, and trust that if my leap of faith was ill advised, I'll find out when I hit the eternal rocks beneath.
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