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The thing about faith is that faith is not based in reason, or necessarily experience. Faith is by definition almost irrational.
So, if you ask if there is any reason to believe in God, the answer is no, not really.
I persist in believing in a God, whether I think it’s rational or not. I can’t think of any better way to say it.
It’s a feeling. It’s an emotion. It’s a vibrating antenna. It’s my spider sense. I don’t know. I feel He’s there.
For many people, it’s a good thing. For many people, it’s a bad thing.
In an age where essentially most of us are choosing whether, at least in the West, we’re choosing whether to be religious or not,
it’s difficult to say whether a belief in Him is good or bad. Certainly, atheists can be moral people, and certainly very religious people can be total sons of ***.
So, I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I can’t answer it. I suppose it depends on the individual.
I think the last time I felt the presence of God was probably, strangely, in the camps.
I lived in Poland, I think it was ‘02 to ’03. I lived there for a year and I traveled, and I wound up going to pretty much as many death camps as I could.
And you would think that would be a very strange place to feel God, but the thing is – I’m trying to give you this in 100 words or less –
but the thing is there’s a lot of discussion about what we owe the victims of the Holocaust.
The conclusion that I came to myself is that the only thing we can decide on that many of them, not even all of them,
but many of them would have wanted is someone to say Kaddish for them. So, whenever I had the opportunity I would say Kaddish in a death camp.
It came to the point where as I became more familiar with the prayer, because I haven’t had much reason to say it in my life fortunately, I began to …
the prayer is essentially you’re magnifying and sanctifying the name of God. You’re not really talking about the dead. You’re talking about God.
And I began to feel … I don’t know if “presence” is the right word, but I began to feel a connection with the divine
in trying to through this prayer beseech for the victims of the Holocaust, trying to say something on their behalf and contact Him.
That was really the closest I’ve ever felt to Him.
There is no rational reason to believe in God, yet.
And despite all of the rock solid arguments against the existence of God, I strangely persist in believing in Him, or Her.