Substance Abuse and Spirituality

Spirituality has been a part of the 12 steps since their inception and has always had a place in the treatment of substance abuse. Spirituality is, at its core, about living for something greater than one's self and something greater than that which is in the world. Abusing substances, whether done in an attempt to cope with pain or simply for pleasure's sake, is fundamentally focused on the self. If spirituality can assist someone in recovery then it may be possible for it to prevent someone from needing recovery in the first place. By cultivating spirituality we can, perhaps, help prevent people from ever abusing substances at all.



Experience has taught me that many, if not most, people who abuse substances begin to do so in their adolescent or even pre-teen years. These are the years in which people begin to establish their sense of identity, worth and values. When such times are coupled with stress the results can be quite toxic, both literally and figureatively and culminate in substance abuse. Someone who has little to no idea of who he or she is, what is worthwhile, and what one ought to do, is ripe for stumbling into very unhealthy behavior very quickly. There is often only a weak, or nearly nonexistent, compass for the adolescent to turn to when confronted with stress factors such as peer pressure, the felt need for a social lubricant, bullying, awkwardness between genders, and conflict in the home. Now, if there is also substance abuse in the home, any such compass that an adolescent has is likely to be malformed at best, already guiding the adolescent towards unhealthy or dangerous coping skills. Possessing an utter lack of direction, the adolescent is essentially turning to peer groups, who themselves could be maladjusted and can lead to a much greater likelihood of substance abuse.



There is a relevant joke I heard that illustrates the problem well. Once upon a time there were two sailors who, after getting drunk in a London tavern, wandered out into the streets to go back to their homes. However, a fog had rolled in and soon the two sailors were quite lost. They happened to stumble across another man, an Admiral, and asked, "Say mate, can you tell us where we are?" Indignant, the Admiral responded, "Do you know who I am?" At which point the sailors looked at each other and quipped, "We're in real trouble now. We don't know where we are and he doesn't know who he is."



It can be easy to forget for an adolescent that pain, conflict and stress are all much newer things. It is easy for them to become lost in such things, all the while effectively asking, "Do you know who I am? Do you know where we are?" Without a guiding force, adolescents may very well come up with no answers to these questions at all, or opt to take what appears to be ane asy way out by "dulling" the pain with alcohol or drugs. However, these are exactly the sort of questions that spirituality answers: questions pertaining to the self and self-worth, the community, the world, morality and truth. A new study suggests that adolescents who claim to have a "connection with the divine" are half as likely to abuse substances. Spirituality, Dr. Miller reports, "Cannot be ignored by parents, or the adolescent will go 'shopping' for meaning, communion and transcendence." Interestingly, the study also showed that "religion" had little to no effect upon dissuading adolescent drug and alcohol abuse. The key difference is between merely outward or nominal adherence to a creed or belief and someone who might be called a "true believer," who has internalized the belief in question regardless of involvement with a religious institution.



This would seem to indicate that spirituality cannot merely be taught to adolescents, but it should be seen in the life of the teacher. If it is not, then it may become a form of religion, an external creed or idea that the adolescent has no real, inward allegiance to. Someone who is not interested in following rules is simply not going to follow them, whether said rules are religious or secular. Therefore, the spiritual instructor would need to have these answers before being able to instruct others to avoid the trap of "religion" or, for the sake of this paper, "do as I say and not as I do." Such attitudes are likely to be seen through which will then convey a message of contradiction and hypocrisy and lead to the spiritual instruction being summarily rejected.



Furthermore, while it may be unpopular in the present day, it is worth noting that not all spiritual paths are created equal. Any conclusions regarding which spirituality would prove worthwhile as a substance abuse preventative would require a given spirituality to be logically coherent and correspond with reality. Any view that is in itself logically contradictory would prove to be impossible to follow and therefore useless. By the same token, unless a spiritual view corresponds to reality in our experience as we can know and test it, it would be equally useless as having no basis for its foundations. Spirituality that cannot abide by these criteria run the risk of the earlier example of the moral compass, with adherents asking such questions as, "Where are we?" and "Do you know who I am?" The conclusion reached when such questions remain unanswered is undoubtedly some form of, "Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we all may die."



In many circles, particularly those influenced by secular thinkers, any "progress" that has moved us beyond the need for religion or spirituality has been hailed as epoch-making. In the field of substance abuse we do not deal with mathematical abstractions or industrial widgets, but rather whole people. That spirituality should play a role in recovery would seem to be intuitive as it is a vital part of the human experience that, for the good of the patient, should not be ignored.

The Religious Right - Part II

When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.--Gary Potter, president of Catholics for Christian Political Action


The Old Testament contains about six hundred thirteen Mosaic laws. The teachers of the law added to these laws their own teachings and interpretations and compiled them into the Talmud. There were even a sect of Pharisees called "Bleeding Pharisees" who walked around with their eyes shut so that they would not look lustfully at a woman. Unfortunately they kept bumping into things and hurting themselves, hence the nickname. Legalism can lead to such rediculousness that it becomes simply unlivable.

It is also interesting to note that Jesus reserves His harshest criticism for the Pharisees, calling them hypocrites and nests of vipers, whose self-righteous regulations prevented people from coming to God. It is easy, therefore, to stamp the Religious Right as "bad" and move on. Things are, however, not as simple.

You see, I am not an American who happens to be a Christian. I am a Christian who happens to be an American. Allegience to God comes first, as Jesus Himself demonstrated, before anything else. What does this mean? Basically, that the fervent cries to keep religion out of politics is, quite simply, impossible for namely two reasons.

First: we are all influenced by what we believe, whether it be religious or secular. If "personal beliefs" are allowed no voice in governance then that should apply to any and all beliefs, religious or secular. Even a Christian-turned-Atheist is impacted by his or her Christian upbringing, as we see in figures such as Hume, Didero and Kant (although I don't think the last two would identify as atheists; Kant certainly believed in God). If no values are allowed entrance into the sphere of governance, well - I don't think we need to spend too much time dwelling on what this would look like. Suffice it to say that no nation can survive without the espousing of a moral law.

Second: Christians are called to be salt and light to the world by presenting the good news of Christ's death and resurrection. There is, I am certain, a way to "do" politics in a Christian fashion. Before anyone gets nervous or angry, please bear in mind that I am not saying Christians should legislate the observance of Biblical mandates on people to compell a Christian lifestyle or response. The Bible is all too clear on how God views worship of the lips and not the heart.

He hates it.

People see constitutions for Christian organizations that say things like "take over such-and-such a group for Christ," and then explode about how Christians are the secret menace to the United States with their secret Zionist agenda and anger towards GAP commercials in order to corner the market on outlet retail stores and make money to put Pat Robertson in office.

I suppose it is possible for such statements to be interpreted in such a way. Anyone to do so, whether liberal leftist or religious right-winger, would have to ignore what Christ said to Pilate: "My kingdom is not of this world else my servants would fight." There is no need to fight, with guns and blood and fists, on Earth for the kingdom of Heaven. Christians have enemies, but never in people. Paul writes that a Christian's enemies are the spiritual powers who oppose God Himself, who take hostage those who deny Christ.

Jesus did not pass legislation to save sinners. He died on a cross. This is how a Christian behaves Christianly in politics: by serving others first and foremost even at the expense of self-promotion and treating all people with the dignity due to them by being made in God's image. A Christian should remember the phrase civil servant and that the American democratic government is accountable to its people. A Christian should remember that while we are not a Christian nation, that no other worldview would have produced a nation like this one.

To the Religious Right: liberals and democrats are not your enemy. Satan is, along with the hypocrisy that insists on ferociously uprooting the evil in others while remaining blind to our own. We do not win the world for Christ by enforcing laws. We win things for Christ by, personally, worshipping and submitting ourselves to Him. As a commentator on my first post said, politics is the symptom and not the primary effect.

At the same time, I think the leftist needs to remember several things as well. First, that there is no nation that has ever survived without espousing a moral law. Second, that we cannot embrace all values and beliefs or we will ultimately end up strangling ourselves (which, I believe, shows in the fractured nature of the Democratic party). Third, that we should be very careful about ejecting the foundational Judeo-Christian values from our public works and offices which has given us the right to believe or disbelieve as we will because whatever takes its place will likely not afford us the same right.

The Religious Right - Part I

When the Christian majority takes over this country, there will be no satanic churches, no more free distribution of pornography, no more talk of rights for homosexuals. After the Christian majority takes control, pluralism will be seen as immoral and evil and the state will not permit anybody the right to practice evil.
--Gary Potter, president of Catholics for Christian Political Action

An interesting way of putting things, to say the least. As an evangelical Christian, I find that often I am drawn into political discussions that are frequently heated and I am not sure as to why. Usually, looking back at those discussions, it seems that myself and the other people involved were talking straight past each other. I wonder why Christianity seems like such a political danger to many people and, quite frankly, I don't understand it.

After reading the quote, I think I begin to see why. There are other quotes to be found where I discovered this one: http://www.sullivan-county.com/news/mine/quotes.htm. So, taking this quote for what it is worth, let's begin our discussion.

There is a seduction in the Religious Right for Christians. The seduction being that of cultural comfort; namely that Christians will no longer have to put themselves out there, facing hurt and rejection, for proclaiming the triumphant and risen Christ and how He saves us from our sins. The Religious Right offers the easy way of no longer needing to be threatened or mocked, and to be able to pass by on the hard responsibility of evangelizing to the lost. It offers an end to cultural wars in a cultural monism and makes our lives "easier."

Except that it doesn't, or wouldn't.

You see, the Religious Right offers us the temptation into which Adam fell. When the serpent was tempting Eve, Adam was there the whole time, and he did absolutely nothing. He stood by and watched. He let things happen when he was threatened.

The Religious Right allows us to sidestep the hard challenge of evangelizing, allowing us to interpret it as a gift and not a discipline. It is, most significantly, the latter and not the former. Which means, for Christians, that we are all called to to it.

The Religious Right mistakes true religion and belief for culture. It advocates a forced veneer of "Christianity," and forgets the necessary requirements of the heart in exchange for a hammer of compulsion. God does not compel people to believe through nothing but fear. Yes, there are consequences to our actions, and God reminds us of them. In the days of the prophets God said that the problem was not the lack of proper theocracy, but the need in us for a new heart:

For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers; you will be my people, and I will be your God. - Ezekiel 36:24-28

God does not squash people into obeying, He rescues them from themselves through supernatural salvation and redemption, and leads them into a right relationship with Him.

The Religious Right offers me, and others who believe, the temptation that Satan used against Jesus. Namely that all the nations of the world would bow down to Christ, if Christ in turn would bow down to Satan.

The devil led him up to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor, for it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. So if you worship me, it will all be yours." Jesus answered, "It is written: 'Worship the Lord your God and serve him only." - Luke 4:5-8

Here is the primary failing of the Religious Right: it takes Earth to be Heaven, Congress to be the assembled Church, and the White House to be His holy temple and heavenly throne. They have succumbed to the same sin as the Pharisees, who in a word, loved their own kingdom more than God's. They have forgotten Christ's exchange with Pilate:

"Am I a Jew?" Pilate replied. "It was your people and your chief priests who handed you over to me. What is it you have done?"

Jesus said, "My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jews. But now my kingdom is from another place."

"You are a king, then!" said Pilate.

Jesus answered, "You are right in saying I am a king. In fact, for this reason I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me."- John 18:35-37

The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part III

Why I Need Christ to be Moral:

I think this is the question to be answered after all is said and done. Inevitably, someone will think, that it is nice and all that you have found meaning and whatnot from Jesus Christ. I'm glad it makes you moral. I, however, don't need it to be moral. In fact, I wonder why you couldn't just do the right thing. It is a good question. Let me attempt a response.

Morality is not the problem, according to the Bible. Morality is the symptom of the problem which is idolatry, the problem that people have put things before God in significance. Morality is not some abstract principle. It is rooted in the very nature of God. The more we pursue goodness the more, whether we know it or not, we pursue God. God, being all that is good and holy, expresses ultimate goodness in Jesus Christ, who told us to love even our enemies and to pray for those who persecute us.

The longer we seek after goodness, the sooner we will find Christ at the end. The ultimate expression of human morality might be to die for a family member or a friend. In dying, we give up something for ourselves that we cannot get back. The ultimate expression of God is to die for those who hate Him, so that they might be set free from themselves. It is not like a family member dying for a family member. It is like an American soldier taking a bullet for Osama bin Laden not because bin Laden deserves it, but because the soldier recognizes that even someone like this terrorist is made in the image of God. I'm not saying that bin Laden doesn't deserve justice, but love is not about what we deserve. Love is ultimately about giving of one's self for the sake of another.

The first part of the answer is this: the degree of goodness of which we are capable pales in comparison to the goodness of God.

"You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)."

Without the realization of God, we fail to see the true depths of our own shortcomings (read: sins). The wrongs of others are worse than our own, or our own are grossly exaggerated in comparison to others. In either case we measure ourselves against other people and use it to justify either loving or hating ourselves, whichever we are prone to. Measured against God there is no place left to hide. We see ourselves as we are, compared to the only measure that matters, the nature of God Himself.

The moment of my conversion I was able to see my own sins for what they were, and how I had contributed to relationships which I had felt victimized by. I had no where to hide, no reasons to throw up in the face of God's convicting spirit, no sob stories to justify what I had done. I saw my own sin, how my sinful behavior had trapped me in certain behavioral cycles that were crushing the life from me, and that I was incapable of freeing myself. I needed a savior because, without Him and still suffering through the realization, it would have been me on the cross, dying under the weight of my own sins.

The second part of the answer is this: I am both victim and victimizer, and to see both as they are rquires being measured against the unwavering standard one cannot hide from - God Himself.

"For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)," and "So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand (Isaiah 41:10)."

If I am not living for God, then I am living for myself or for some other creed. Living for myself, I have no one to answer to, no one and nothing to reveal the truth of my sin, and I can basically do as I please. If this is how I choose to live, the question is - why be moral if I live for myself? However, perhaps I live for someone else, or for some other creed, or religion, or whatever. These can still give us places to hide from the truth. Heck, even professing Christians can hide from the truth even though they regularly attend church and Bible. They hide from the truth in the very fact that they do these things. We hide for so long that we become lost, and we are lost for so long that we think to be lost is actually to be home, and to know the truth is to become lost!

We realize we need a savior when we realize that we are lost. Now, someone without Christ may very well not feel lost. Lostness, like belief, is not a feeling so much as a state of being. Coming to the point of realizing our lostness often requires us being, to some extent, broken. We will never become Christian until we see our brokenness and our moral ugliness for what they are. Much like breaking a bone so that it may be properly set, so it is with those of us, professing Christians or not, who have lost or buried the truth about what we are really like. Only the conviction of the Holy Spirit, in light of the crucifixion, can bring us this truth about ourselves. Otherwise we either explain it away or we are unable to live any longer in the burden of our own trespasses.

The third part of the answer is this: we hide from the truth about ourselves. We may conceive of ourselves as people desperately searching for the truth. We're not. We are people alienated from the truth, who want to fill that need we have for real truth but are content to fill ourselves with a comfortable one.

"The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end (Jeremiah 5:31)?"

I have heard many people complain about the things Christians do. As the prophet Jeremiah says, however, yes sometimes the religious leaders are corrupt. Yes soemtimes they lie, cheat and steal while holding themselves up as exemplars of the faith. The question the skeptic must ultimately ask, however, is not why are so many Christians terrible people - but rather: why am I a terrible person? And what is there to be done about it? But what will you do in the end?
The answer for the hypocritical believer and the skeptic will, more often than not, be the same.

Why do I need God to be moral? To be truly good is to be like God, and only God Himself can enable me to do that. As Jesus says, "there is none good but God!" His truth lets me see what I really am and does not let me hide in circumstances, rationalizations, or existential sollipsism.

Aldous Huxley put it well in his book "Ends and Means," that he and many others declared life to be meaningless not because it was true but because it allowed them to chase their own desires.

It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that... My guess is that this cosmic authority problem is not a rare condition and that it is responsible for much of the scientism and reductionism of our time. One of the tendencies it supports is the ludicrous overuse of evolutionary biology to explain everything about life, including everything about the human mind (The Last Word by Thomas Nagel).

How are you served by what you believe? And what service does that belief demand? Not what you think is true, but why do you want it to be true?

"Then Jesus said to his disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it (Matthew 16:24-25).'"

The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part II

The Sanctifying:

The truth is a powerful thing. It can save a person wrongfully accused or condemn someone to die. It can levy justice and inspire awesome acts of love and faithfulness. It brings light to lies and sets free the captives imprisoned within their own minds.

To be sanctified is the process of being made holy. After accepting Christ, that night all alone in my quiet dorm room, I immediately felt the burden lifting from my shoulders. I still had a lot of wreckage to deal with, and still do, but ever since then there has been a presence and a knowing that has dogged me, sometimes hunted me, always working away within me even when I don't cooperate. I had become weighted down by my struggles to find life in things, relationships, reputation, causes and creeds. That is the sin of idolatry, the chief sin, for from it came all the other sins in my life and any one else's. I had locked myself into a certain way of living from which there was, perhaps literally, no return.

It is tiring to carry with us all the hurts, the failures, the dark moments. Equally heavy can be the victories, because sometimes the loneliest moments are those when we accomplish what we feel is the ultimate and find it lets us down. For me it was like breathing fresh air again. My first reaction was to read more of the Bible, to learn more about who God was. My second reaction was to read about the Bible itself, to see if what I believed to be true was actually true or if I merely wished it to be. Having fallen into atheism years before I had read plenty of things to make Christianity seem ridiculous to believe. I never knew there were thinking people who defended the faith, nor had I ever read them.

So I did. You see, the atheist views on religion are not neutral nor are they free of bias. They assert the denial of that which Christianity rests upon. How can the atheist perspective then be free of bias? SImilarly, one can't dismiss the Christian perspective out of hand simply because it is religious, without betraying an enormous prejudice for religion. And prejudices have nothing to do with the truth.

So, familiar with the atheists perspective, I undertook to understand that of Christian thinkers and scholars. I learned about the Bible's history, about how it had been penned over centuries by many different authors. Yet within the Bible's pages I saw the internal consistency, how it was the exact same God throughout the ages. I had my doubts at points and I worked through them. Nor did I ever feel bad about having doubts - doubt is a halfway house between sin and salvation, as I have heard. There is no growth without doubt. The sin is in how we respond - either we raise the questions and assume they are unanswerable, or we raise the questions and seek for answers. I can say I have never had a question prove to be impossible to answer, nor do they require me relying on straw men or rationalizations.

I found that Christ gave me great insight into myself and others, for in His light I was coming to know myself for the first time. I came to see some of my fundamental weaknesses and problems, and in some areas I saw the need for therapy. I realized that I could not always trust my thoughts or reactions, nor my motives. I realized that the burden I had felt lifted was the weight of God's judgment upon me which I had reaped, unable to do anything else. For without Him I could do nothing but sin. Most of all, I learned that Christ was not rules, regulations, confessions or creeds.

I learned that Jesus Christ, from that moment I prayed alone in my room, has come to live in me through the power of His Holy Spirit. I have learned that I can't evict Him, that He is faithful to complete the work He has begun that night several years ago whether I am working with Him as much as I should or not. I have learned that either I am a slave to my own desires, hurts and longings, or that I am a slave to Christ and am freed from all those things.

From studying the history I have learned that the best explanation for the Biblical narrative and what I have seen in my life is that it all actually happened. The Bible is not just a bunch of stories with moral teachings. Moral stories do not radically change lives, and philosophies do not free from the burdens of sin. If Christ had not died to suffer God's judgment I would still be under it, and if He had not risen from the dead then there would have been no lifting of my weight.

I've learned that God does not wave a magic wand and fix all of my problems. But God does provide the strength to see my problems for what they are, the strength to endure them, and the power to take me through them. God does not deal in sidestepping or avoiding issues, He leads you through the worst parts of it in love, to remind you that He is God, and you are His. This, truly this, is the power of Christ in those He has rescued. Not in miracles, although they are powerful. Not in convicting words, although they are needed. The power of Christ is this: the truth of transformed life. The truth my brother began to see in that photograph I mentioned in my last post, the truth that between then and now I have been changed dramatically. Not a mere change in behavior by adherence to rules, but a change in kind, a deep and fundamental change concerning who and what I am.

But more than that, He has given me love, joy and peace. The love of His son to know that I am precious in His sight, and was bought at a price. Joy to understand that circumstances come and go but Christ carries me through happiness and sorrow, and that the joy in Him enables me to worship and love Him even in the midst of pain and tears. Peace to calm my anger, to know that if God is for me that what does it matter who is against me, and that all things work for the good of those who love Him. Those who know me have seen the difference. Being Born Again is a uniquely Christian thing. I have never encountered anyone from any other philosophy or faith that can claim the same radical transformation that is found in Christ Jesus.


I've learned that there are many things I must unlearn, such as how I think about some people, places and things. Like a house built on a poor foundation, anything above the break must be torn down, the break fixed, and built upon anew with good, strong materials. This has required the sacrifice of some ideas I held sacred, some images I held to be important, some attitudes I held to be necessary. Yet the more I turn them over to Christ to bear on the cross as only He can, the more I find that they were never really what I wanted in the first place.


I've learned that temptations remain ever present, and to remember that a good sign of Christianity gone wrong is to identify people as enemies. The Christian's battle is never against people, the battle is a spiritual one against sin to establish the kingdom of God in the hearts of all those who believe in Him until He returns. It is not to blow up abortion clinics, to legislate relationships, or to elect republicans. It is to preach the life transforming power of Jesus Christ and Him crucified. This is what the religious right does not understand - that only God, not laws, can change people.


I have a long, long way to go. I cannot answer every question, nor right every wrong, nor perfectly conduct myself so as not to insult people or sin before God. But I am His, and He is mine, and though God does not love all that I do He does love me. That love is the strength to deal with and work through who I am and what I have become.


He does not have a message. He is the message, and that message is life. There is no life apart from the truth, and there is only one truth. Not your truth or my truth, only His truth. The problem isn't that there is only one way. If He gave us a hundred ways we would want a hundred and one - we would want our way.

Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).

The Difference in Christ and the Difference it Makes Part I

The Problem:

A few years ago while my brother was home visiting, he happened to be sitting at the dining room table and flipping through a photo album. In it were pictures of me, looking miserable as I often did. He asked me something along the lines of why I used to look like that, presumably because I no longer do. My answer was very simple: I saw no meaning in life. I believe one of his girlfriends once referred to me as "sullen." She was correct. I wanted for nothing physically; I was well fed, lived in a good house, and did fine in school. I had gone to Sunday School, been baptized and confirmed, and it meant absolutely nothing to me.

Outward adherence to a creed is religion. I had experienced religion and found it wanting, and therefore doubted that there was a God. There was neither substance nor depth behind it, and certainly not an all-powerful and loving God. That left me being the product of blind forces adrift in a world, supposedly free to choose and find my own meaning. But here is why I remained miserable, though I would not have been able to vocalize it as such back then.

Being free to find my own meaning is slavery. Choosing to give my life meaning is a lie. Either life has meaning or it does not, and if it doesn't than anything else is just how I decide to polish the outside of my tomb. Hope, too, becomes pointless because hope, like faith, requires an object - we put our hope or faith in something.

If life has no meaning then merely imposing some reason to live, because I find myself in need of one, is self deception. I end up living a lie but the problem is I know I am lying to myself. So while I might fool everyone into thinking that I am a man with purpose and a "self-actualized destiny," or somesuch, I know that it is mere facade - until the day I eventually begin to believe my own lie. And let me tell you something, dear reader, there is nothing more pitiful than believing your own lies. That is bondage in its truest sense. Seeing that my recourse was to give myself a lie to live for, and unable to shy away from that truth, I was left with only one other option - the details of which I won't address here. Suffice it to say, if life is fundamentally meaningless, then living or dying ultimately makes no difference. To live was to live with a lie, the other option was far more final but seemed to embrace the truth of it all.

Either it ends all at once, or I endure with the living lie. But in so enduring I would die as well, just the slow death of hope and of the soul. Until, at the end, I no longer really care if I live or not because I am too numb to anything to care.

At that point I began to question and read, in order to make sure I was arriving at the correct conclusion. I read many things, and it's funny how we tend to make truth so dependent upon our perspectives. But, when we are stripped to the core, and when we relieve ourselves of any pretentious notions and academic blindfolds, we tend to know what is true when we discover it. We just don't really like the truth, but more on that later.

I read the Qur'an. I've read it twice now, once as a believer and once as someone who was seeking. The option of Islam was tempting, perhaps the most tempting. What struck me was the immense discipline it seemed to instill, in rising, praying and submitting utterly to Allah. Merely submit to his will and one would find one's place in the universe.

Allah, however, is cold and distant. Nor did he seem to have much to say about the modern day. So I read the Tao The Tchung and meditated upon Daoist truth. I found kernels of wisdom in its teachings, and many riddles that helped me expand my mind, but nothing to fill me. I knew that if there was one thing I needed, it was not more of myself. Being me had brought me to this point, and to be anyone else was again another meaningless lie.

I read Satanic scriptures from the "official" Church of Satan, founded by Anton LeVay. This proved equally fruitless, offering me only a philosophy to help me ascertain power over and in my personal life. Power for power's sake was also meaningless and offered me nothing. Mastering my inner world would leave me master of a desert, and mastering my surroundings would not change that. All it might let me do is impose that desert upon others, all to prove that misery does indeed love company.

Lastly, I read the Bible for the first time. I came across a verse in Matthew (16:24-26) where Jesus said: Then Jesus said to his disciples, "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?"

This really is the crux of the matter. I had been trying to fill my life with myself, with my grasping for what would bring life meaning, whether they be skill in my interests, friendships or romantic attachments. To live for these is to live like a vampire, draining the meaning from others until they no longer satisfy before casting them aside out of necessity. It was then that I saw how I had been existing as just that, and how the weight of it had brought me to a very uncomfortable but necessary decision: live with a lie or die in truth.

However, God also told me that those desires I had were given by Him, I had been trying to fill them inappropriately even some of those things were quite good. I was longing for many things, ultimately for truth and meaning, and had found them only in the possibility of death. The irony was I had long since moved past the point where the truth and life might be one in the same, and yet that was the answer.

"I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me (John 14:6)."

You see, I was not looking for any reason to live. I needed the reason, for anything else was mere fantasy and delusion. Christ had met me where I was, seeing life without hope for what it was and no longer being able to hide from it. In seeing that truth I came to know another, that I myself was a morally unlovable person. The tendency, of course, is to dismiss all that happened to me as the response of a desperate person at the end of his rope. May I submit to you that it was only upon coming to that brink of dawning desperation that I saw things the most clearly, without the easy conceits and rationalizations to hide behind. I saw that there was only darkness, a darkness necessary before I could see the light that is Christ. For by Him not only do I see, but by Him I see everything else - including myself.

I had seen the truth of my condition, and the truth of myself. It is a terrifying thing and yet it is a liberating thing. We all crave and desire love, yet sadly most of us project images of ourselves we know to be false because we think we really are unlovable. There is no love without truth, because true love is knowing someone truly and deeply, and still enduring and abiding in love.

To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, "If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free (John 8:31-32).

The Hitchens' Challenge

I have to confess that I am a late comer to this particular question. That aside, there is really nothing to be done for it.

Hitchens' has made a challenge, and the challenge is this: a religious person must perform a moral action or make a moral statement that an atheist cannot also affirm.

The thrust behind Hitchen's challenge is, therefore: is there anything a religious person would claim as good that an atheist would not agree with? The underpinning assumption that if the answer is no, atheists and religious people both arrive at morality. Since the atheist arrives at morality apart from God, God is not necessary for morality. One swift application of Occam's Razor, and God is removed from the paradigm.

There is an easy response to this that has been boldly stated on various blogs as an answer, namely the first half of Jesus' summary of the Old Testament Law: "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind (Luke 10:27)." I think that even answering Hitchen's challenge, however, does not really answer his challenge. Confused yet? Quite simply, Hitchens is asking the wrong question. Furthermore, I don't see Christian Thinkers making any such claim as he seems to be responding to.

The question being asked is not can atheists agree with good moral codes that come from religion, but rather: "How does an atheist postulate a morality which serves as an ontic point of reference for all of humanity?" The question should be asked with the addendum: "How can this point of reference be arrived at, by the atheist, without subsuming the morality of various religions?" It is far too easy to claim to have established a certain moral code that affirms many Christian points of morality at the tail end of two thousand years of Christian history.

What is the criteria? Reason? I believe it was Kai Nielson (although I could be misquoting here) who said that reason alone, even with a good grasp of the facts, does not take one to morality.

However, the atheist might counter that "there is no such thing as an ontic morality, and this talk of a point of reference for all people smacks of objective morality which I reject." Well, if that is the case, then on what grounds does Hitchens' make his claim? Let me explain this in a different way.

There is a classical atheist argument that asserts since God, who is all good and all knowing, exists and evil exists, that claiming the two is a contradiction. The contradiction being that if there were such a God, He would not tolerate such a thing as evil. Therefore, either God is lacking in some capacity, or He does not exist. However, if the atheist denies the existence of evil in the first place (or states that there is no such thing as objective morality), then on what grounds can the above problem be asserted?

You see, the questioner must always answer his own question before asking it.

The question Hitchens, and other atheists, need to answer is this: why be moral? And what is the point of reference for this morality?