Reflections On The Existence Of God: A Series Of Essays by Richard E Simmons III

Author:Richard E Simmons III [Simmons III, Richard E]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: -
Publisher: The Center for Executive Leadership
Published: 2019-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

6.5

The Problem of Pride

I REMEMBER meeting with a man in his early 20s who was clearly on a search for spiritual truth. In our first meeting, he informed me, “I am not sure I believe in God.” We spent a good hour discussing the issue of God, and I shared with him my reasons for believing and then discussed his objections. I did not change his mind and assumed that there was no need to meet again. However, he wanted to continue and learn more about Christianity. So, we met three or four more times, and in our last meeting, he made an interesting confession: “I do believe in God, and I believe what you have told me is true. However, I am going to pass. Being a Christian might negatively impact my social life and my career.”

When all was said and done, he was worried about how being a Christian would affect people’s opinion of him. It also struck me it was easier for him to say, “I am not sure I believe in God,” instead of admitting “I believe in Him, but I reject him.”

The fear of rejection is a powerful force in our lives. We never seem to be able to shake it. I sometimes wonder if we realize how we gear our lives to meet the expectations and approval of others, particularly when it comes to our faith.

Psychotherapist Anthony de Mello makes this observation:

“Look at your life and see how you have filled its emptiness with people. As a result, they have a stranglehold on you. See how they control your behavior by their approval and disapproval. They hold the power to ease your loneliness with their company, to send your spirits soaring with their praise, to bring you down to the depths with their criticism and rejection. Take a look at yourself spending almost every waking moment of your day placating and pleasing people, whether they are living or dead. You live by their norms, conform to their standards, seek their company, desire their love, dread their ridicule, long for their applause, meekly submit to the guilt they lay upon you; you are terrified to go against the fashion in the way you dress or speak or act or even think.”17

I would like to come back to the psychologist Paul Vitz. As I mentioned in the first essay in this section, he was an atheist well into his 30s. His spiritual journey is quite interesting:

“The major reason for me wanting to become an atheist was that I desired to be accepted by the powerful and influential psychologists in my field. In particular, I wanted to be accepted by my professors in graduate school. As a graduate student I was thoroughly socialized by the specific culture of academic psychology. My professors at Stanford, as much as they might disagree on psychological theory, were, as far as I could tell, united on really only two things: their intense personal ambitions and their rejection of religion. In this

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