As a boy, the only parts of those museum field trips that didn’t bore me to death were dinosaurs and anything involving ancient legends. The stale smell of the building and broken cassette-player guides couldn’t have contrasted more with the glory and violence on the canvas. Whether they showed the fury of Zeus, or the might of Ra, I dreamed of being with these incredible figures (sometimes combining them with the dinosaurs), watching them battle for command of the universe. Few things can spur a young lad’s imagination more than a bunch of monstrous reptiles throwing lightning at one another. The day I discovered old Z-grade Godzilla movies, my life couldn’t have been more pristine.

In school and church however, my wide-eyed questions about the gods and monsters were always dismissed with adults’ fake smiles and rolling eyes. They just answered that these old tales were merely ways of “explaining things they couldn’t understand.” This phrase was always used regarding a scientific account, referring to weather events or medical anomalies. Eventually I swallowed the pill that these awesome stories were just dodges of reality or reason by a bunch primitive brutes. My church at the time though, which was of the literalist variety, inadvertedly refused to let my wonder fail me. I began to question why one faith was less legitimate than another, if the general rule was that the account was merely a cover up for limited technology or other tools. Sitting at my window at night, watching lightning dance beautifully across a black sky as a storm mercilessly pummels the land, I refused to believe that things could be so simple, so cut and dry.

As I’ve grown in my experience – in the loss of loved ones, feeling the earth shake from an Iraqi car bomb, or the joy of experiencing real beauty – my understanding has grown with me. Most of the arguments between my fellow soldiers in our oven-like barracks were about faith and in another way, truth. This has been true throughout our history, leading to some of our greatest art, philosophy and heroes, as well as our most horrific wars. Faith and religion, I’ve come to realize, are about more than overactive imaginations or ignorance of scientific methods. It is about humanity’s pursuit of the bridge between our world and nature and that of transcendence (or divinity). The stories, parables and beings present in religion are our ways of explaining these things to ourselves, regardless of the presence or lack of scientific empirical evidence. Christ talked to his followers in parables for this same reason, to show the nature of divine will and how we relate to it, as well as each other. He was not speaking of God as a physical man operating a vineyard that we will one day see with the Hubble Telescope, that was never his point.

Just as it was with Christ’s life and the parables he left us, it is with religions around the globe. It doesn’t matter whether it is the self sacrifice of the great Norse allfather Odin so that he might gain true knowledge, the self immolation of Hercules on a pyre to atone for his great sin or the near murder of Isaac by his father Abraham’s hand to fulfill his covenant with God. From profound loss to immeasurable joy, along with my deep intellectual revelations, I have learned of their truths regardless of any prejudice. These stories are about the deep truths of our existence, the cost and impact of our decisions. Religion can be subject to mistaken reasoning, which often is, with devastating consequences. However, this takes nothing away from its wisdom and truth, and the guidance and hope it seeks to give us in our dark hours. The billions in the world who have devoted their lives to faith of any kind, I realized, are no different than I was, looking to explain what they could probably never grasp through reason alone, what they could never understand. In the words of St. Anselm, “For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe, – that unless I believed, I should not understand.”

Will Holloway is a senior majoring in philosophy from Salt Lake City, Utah. His column will appear every other Wednesday. Comments can be sent by e-mail to will.r.h@aggiemail.usu.edu