The next day Preston edited the above note and sent it to Jenny. She responded.
Dear Preston,
Thanks for reading my letter and taking the time to reply to it. Now it may not sound like I am trying to be
open-minded, but I really am. I just don't understand a lot of things and it's hard for me to grasp some of
the ideas you propose. I guess I am one of those people who have to physically see something to believe
it. I don't even know. Maybe the one thing that made me start questioning my beliefs was Young Life. I
know that most of the kids who attend are totally going against what its purpose is, but even when I did go
to Young Life and listened, some of the lessons made no sense to me.
I see what you mean about having faith, and I do have reasonable faith, but religious faith is what I lack.
Since you said you looked through the Bible for the passage on blind faith and couldn't find one, it makes
me wonder where the idea came from. To me it seems like a concept people are making up to explain why
things occur the way they do and how.
For me religious faith is hard to comprehend because it's requesting that I have faith in something I can't
see, touch or have proof even exists. I can understand a belief in Jesus because he was a real person and
history can prove that. But what about God? Who is God? What does he look like? Where is he?
Before I started to question my beliefs, God was a "spirit" to me, a nonexistent being that I occasionally
made requests of. But then I realized I'm praying to nothing, just some society-approved "person." If I
prayed to a tree people might wonder what drugs I was taking, or if I was out of my mind. For all anybody
knows, God could be some fictional character that people made up a long time ago to explain unknown
phenomena.
I haven't read much about the creation of the universe, but to my understanding there are two theories:
the big bang theory and God created it. From what I do know of the big bang theory, the earth and
everyone on it could have started on their own, without any outside help due to evolution and how nature
works. So where does God come in on that?
In dealing with the few other people I know with no faith, some had traumatic experiences with loved
ones that spurred their disbelief. My family has a long history of health problems. My grandma had two
strokes in a week, a different grandma came down with ovarian cancer and died, then my step mom got
cancer for a second time. The uncle I was closest to died about a month ago from angiosarcoma of the
liver, a very rare form of cancer. So my question is, Why these people?
I realize that everyone dies and that there are "sacrifices" (I don't want that to sound like the wrong kind
of sacrifice, not like an animal-ritual sacrifice or anything!), and without these deaths, many other things
may not occur. But if Jesus and God wanted there to be peace in the world, and God created everything,
then why did he make such destructive diseases?
Another topic is heaven and hell. When I was a child, I went to church until my parents got divorced.
Later we started going again. When I was eight years old my mom and I were really, really poor and she
looked to church for refuge. They gave us food and that gave my mom a basis for reestablishing her
beliefs. As a kid I never really understood what went on in church, I just regurgitated the information that
was given to me. After we got back on our feet we again stopped going to church.