Some things I believe (part 1)

Before I start:
I am not trying to nor will I ever try to "convert" anyone from their faith and/or believes to mine - I am only offering my personal views. What you, the reader, will do with it, is your responsibility. My views have proven very useful to me, but what works for me does not necessarily work with you...

A little explanation to start with: I was raised and educated in an environment that drew most of its views out of science - father and brother are doctors, graduated from high school in my majors math and biology, and I consider myself a computer geek. Truly not the best basis to develop faith... But it happened.

With all my scientific background, I believe in faith, and I believe in God, and I even believe in the power of prayer.

I will elaborate on this transition another time (I don't want to bore you on my first blog entry *grin*), but for now let me just say that I looked back on my life when I was about 25, and I noticed that somehow it all made sense and worked out. I had always thought that I had had a miserable childhood with a lot of unnecessary pain, but I realized that I would never be where I am today without the bad times in my life, and I would never have learnt a thing about life.
So I noticed that my life seemed to follow a planned path - but I refused to call it God - in science there is no place for God, I thought. After reading "The Celestine Prophecy" by James Redfield, I considered all events in my life "coincidences" that had happened only for me (they also happen for others - I am not trying to elevate myself). And I stopped believing in coincidences.
I could not understand it, so I tried to find a half-way scientific explanation: Scientists have measured some sort of energy leaving the human body - I figured, the sum of all life energy together was the "entity" that created these coincidences. It allows people to intuitively know things because other people already know them, and this energy connected us all, leaking bits of knowledge to other people, thus causing people to act and react in a certain way that would create these coincidences.

Well, that was my theory - the closest I managed to come to faith without calling it God.
I finally gave up - there are too many coincidences happening to be explained by science or my half-bred theory. So I decided to call the sum of all life energy God - at first. Later I followed the crowd - there has to be a reason why so many peoples believe in a God-like entity...

... to be continued ...

P.S.: Comments are very welcome!

edited 8/26/2004: changed typo from "selecting Prophecy" to "Celestine Prophecy" - no idea how that got in there...