Satan and the Problem of Deceit

I was a Christian once - someone who believed in Jesus Christ.  My transformation into a sort of deist has been forming over a period of ten years and has increased in pace in the last eighteen months.  What brought me to my current theological understanding of life was the slogging through millions of questions where there was no good answer and then moving forward to the next question where I discovered something of the same conclusion.

The fact that there was no good answer is not a conclusion in itself.  It just displays the nature of philosophy and theology in general.  We cannot see what we are wont to believe in and thus must take a bite out of a thing called "faith".  I am convinced this "faith" is decidedly personal.

It didn't used to be that way.

Growing up in an Independent Fundamental Baptist Church that leaned heavily on Bill Gothard's ultra-legalistic Institute in Basic Life Principles, I was taught that there was only one correct way to think and believe.  Faith was clearly established in the inerrant and infallible text of the Holy Bible.  The fact that hundreds, even thousands of other factions and groups used that exact same holy book, coming to different conclusions - at times, diametrically opposed - did not matter in the least. 

They were wrong.  Everyone else was wrong.  We held the keys to true righteousness.  After all, the way was narrow and tough, unlike the easy, wide way that led to ultimate destruction.

Faith was not personal at all.  It was supposed to be and was preached from many a pulpit as such.  But it was a cookie cutter faith.  You were expected to adhere to exact principles and formulas in order to have the kind of faith that provided you with guaranteed eternal security.  Any slight deviation from this faith was cause for concern for everyone who caught wind of the manifestations of your backsliding.

The worst offense of all was questioning.

It wasn't the questioning that was the problem.  Questioning was simply the symptom of a much deeper issue.  Just the fact that you were curious about the "maybe this isn't all it is cracked up to be" caused those around you to issue the warning:

"Satan is a master deceiver and you are allowing him to deceive you by questioning".

There is a simple problem with this factual statement.

First, we cannot see Satan.  There is no proof that he exists.  We cannot see God.  There is no proof that he exists either.  We have no possibility of establishing that every single word in the Holy Bible was written through the hands of men by God himself.  Even if this were the case, the contradictions and paradoxical natures of much of the theology within its pages would steer any logically thinking individual to a conclusion that seems quite obvious - we just don't know about what we should know.

Since we don't know what we should know, being that there are many interpretations for each of the thousands of verses in the Bible, there is no foundation from which to be deceived.  To say otherwise is to claim that it is possible to have the correct interpretation of all questions that can be answered from Christianity's holy book.  This is a tall task for any reasonable person to conclude as fact.

So, if we have no clue, but only the best ideas of God from the hands of mere men and women, like you and me, faith is decidedly personal and there is absolutely no possibility that we can be deceived.