God, I have to admit that there are times when I don't believe in You.

The temptation to turn away is strong sometimes. I find myself reading an article theorizing that all religious experience is psychological, the brain's attempt to escape the confines of the individual, the mortal. We want to transcend ourselves and so we create God as the vehicle for our transcendence. The sociobiologists and the neuropsychologists have got religion all nailed down, it seems. They offer compelling explanations. And then I go outside and look up and where before I had seen an irruption of God's grace enveloping the world, now I see only sky, photons buffed blue by the earth's uncaring atmosphere.

God, where are You in these moments? Why have You pulled away from me?

I downloaded Christian apologist Lee Strobel's book The Case for Faith from Audible.com and listened to it--about halfway through I gave up in disgust. I ejected the CD from the car stereo and threw it on the seat beside me. Strobel creates in his book a host of facile arguments and workarounds for the primary problems confronting the nonbeliever and I do not buy any of them. I listen to Strobel (earnestly narrating his own book) describe his meeting with an Old Testament scholar from an evangelical seminary and my jaw drops; Strobel excitedly recounts the professor's dismissal of criticisms that Yahweh's orders to slay every man, woman, and child in this or that offending city are cruel and heartless. These people were evil, the professor shrugs, and they deserved to die. Tough ta-tas. And hey, most of the women and children probably left the city beforehand, and even if the children had stayed, they would just have grown up to be as evil as the adults who really did deserve to die.

The anger that this aroused in me was furious. What kind of God did these people believe in? Could they worship a deity so vindictive and petty as this? Could I? Was this the God that I claimed to believe in? I couldn't let myself believe in such a God. No, better that there be no God at all than a God who would be so indiscriminately heartless.

And what of my own rationalizations and apologetics about the Old Testament God and his genocidal ways? I've always held that the ancient Hebrews were the sort of people that liked to pin everything on God. Everything that happened was God's will, in their eyes, whether it was truly God's will or not. And so these folks could believe that it was God's will to place the ban on all of these cities, reducing the people and all their possessions to ashes because they opposed Israel. If they thought that God had told them to do that, I thought, then they were sadly mistaken.

But who am I to say which parts of the Bible are invented and which are true? You'll never catch me believing that everything in the Bible is literally true. It's simply unacceptable. And yet, as a notorious man once said, "What is truth?"

Atrocities and disasters, the foulness of human nature, the absurd extent of our sinfulness and immorality. What place in God's plan do the child molesters and the rapists have? I understand that free will is necessary in order for us to live meaningfully, but if God made us, then why did he make us so terrible, so capable of every imaginable atrocity and vicious impulse? Are we humans aspiring to be God, or are we merely animals aspiring to be human?

This is a sermon you'll never hear from the pulpit. This is something no preacher will ever say at the altar, at least not one that intends to keep his job. But I know I'm not the only one out there who thinks these things sometimes.

What choice do I have? Can I turn my back on God because I can't agree with any manmade conception of Him? Because his Holy Books are so contradictory and strange? If my soul is not owned by God, then what is the alternative? No soul at all. A consciousness that is nothing more than a wavefront; an emergent property of a complex bioelectric system. Viktor Frankl might be able to eke some comfort from such a worldview but I can't. A world without God is no world I want any part of. I need God, need Him like air, and yet there are days like today when I do not feel Him at all. Days when He seems like a mirage, a fairy tale, an empty dream. Hell, how many of the Psalms are lamentations shrieking to the sky, demanding why God isn't showing up?

On these days I just want to hide my face in my hands and cry, and I can't do that. I have to find ways to be okay because there are people who depend on me; people who do not want to hear that their daddy is having a crisis of faith and that's why he doesn't feel like having a tea party today.

God, give me a staff that turns into a snake, or a still small voice, or a heavenly escalator covered in angels. Chariots of fire. Something. Anything. Jesus, give me some of that living water you offered the woman at the well. I believe you, but sometimes I don't believe in you.

I believe. Lord, help my unbelief.