If there’s one thing you don’t want to do in the process of indoctrinating someone to a belief system, it’s telling that someone to study science.  Science and religion are both processes by which some form of truth is sought.  Religion tends to teach trust.  Science teaches us to look at evidence.

This is why, so often, the two are painted as opposites.  As enemies.

And that is why I am no longer in the faith I was raised in.  I was taught the faith, but I was also sent to school to learn and excel.  I was encouraged to take advanced classes, to be a good student.  So I did.  And I learned.  I learned to look at the world around me.  To look for evidence.  To not ignore certain pieces of evidence.

So what I learned to question most about my home faith was its method of verifying truth.  If the truth I was taught didn’t match with the evidence in reality, how were we so sure it was the truth?

Now, I will absolutely admit to trying to reconcile the two.  I didn’t know what it was called at the time, but for a while I followed the lead of those around me and got pretty good at apologetics.  It could get complicated, but there are all sorts of explanations one can come up with to bridge the gap between fact and faith.

But over time, those structures inevitably begin to crack.

If it takes that much effort to map reality to faith, faith to reality, then is your truth really true?  If you have to exclude evidence to validate your beliefs, isn’t your truth a lie?

Useful spirituality needs to apply to reality as it is, not as we imagine it to be.

Does your belief system describe reality or fiction?