I am sorry if this is too rambling or too personal for your style. If you do not like personal diaries I suggest you click back and go to the next diary in your bucket list.
People have asked me in the past "Why would you be a theist? What makes you believe in giant invisible man in the sky...." and I have no answers other than my experience. I hope the below answers it to some degree?
I've been doing a lot of thinking, recently, on matters faith, religion. hope, and the future. As a summary as some of you know I am not in the best of health. I've been diagnosed with SLE, a heart attack, yada yada yada.... each year seems to add another new diagnosis.
This year I was laid off from a very good job that I had been lucky enough to have during the tight economy. I had been with the same company for ten plus years and really enjoyed my position. Unfortunately in May I was let go I was given a severance package, luckily, though which completely ends at the end of this month. So as I wrote in an earlier diary I have no income coming in, I am applying for disability (having been denied for time 1, waiting for the appeal---basically it means no income and no insurance until I get approved for the disability for if I apply for unemployment or find another job (which I cannot anyway, thus the need for disability) I lose all hopes for disability.
Anyway, what should happen that ties everything together?
What the doctors thought was either a simple stomach bug at first has gone to their worst concerns and now turns out to be chronic Pancreatitis. I am just in the begining stages and everyone is in a hurry to get this test done and that test done, and of course it hits right around the holidays when everything is closed. Basically I need to get a few more tests to "confirm" their dx. But they're prertty sure it is due to my history of auto-immune disease and will be yet a new thing to manage, watch out for, and deal with.
I just have to figure out on top of everything how I am going to get the $, without a job and without much savings left to manage the costs of the tests and and then tx associated with this and prior conditions.
OK... so all the above seems like a giant old pain in the tuchas. I sometimes feel as if I am at wits end.
But I still have faith, hope even that things will work out. I am not sitting idly by as the roof caves in, but I am doing what I can to do what I can. To me, I guess, this hope, this faith that something will come up to pull me thru the miasma of bleakness is why I am a theist.
I just have this kernel of faith, this trust in everything, that it will work out, that I will not en up on the streets dying of pancreatic cancer within the next year.
Does this mean I have "evidence" that I can show to person X that shows there is a G_d? No....of course not. It is a deeply personal gut knowledge, feeling, reaction, insert your term here, I guess that prevents me from being an atheist or agnostic.
Does this "kernel" making me a theist the same rational that makes someone else a theist? Of course I cannot claim to have such knowledge of their internal workings to know.
Well, if you have read this far you're either into the topic, into self-abuse, or are very bored. Either way thanks for reading and regardless, of course, as to your worldview, have a great Thanksgiving.