Existential angst: I am at a turnpike in my life which may determine my future path on the road with respect to religion, in general, and Christianity, in particular. I am severely uncomfortable with the notion of myself becoming an agnostic, but a confluence of events have rendered such a questioning inevitable and undeniable. The rhetoric of "what is the meaning of life" has taken on an entirely new, profound dimension---one that is enough to keep me up at night, and spawn a deep emptiness and anguish.

On a more personal note, I am not suicidal, merely very disillusioned and disheartened. The trajectory of my future, one so frighteningly clear, is now---more than ever---a seemingly opaque and meaningless one.

While I have been trying to stay in "the will of God", I am starting to see the futility of the entire endeavor. Why remain holy, when it is an ideal that is perpetuated by our minds? If this life is all that it is, what do we live for? Meaning in life has begun to fade; and I am desperately trying to find a moral compass. This is what philosophers over the ages have anguished over, so I know that I am not unique in this.

It is easy to try to seek simplicity. Sometimes I wish that I had a simple faith. But that is not who I am. It does not resonate in the core of my being. I am inquisitive, and I want to know. Although faith can never ever be reasoned, I need a reason for that faith. For the longest time, this was the personal experience of my communion with God.

I arrived here rather innocuously, actually. What I had taken to be the voice of God for so long, while always a challenge in faith, had never been refuted by events. Now, however, I cannot square the hermeneutic circle that I have somehow---consciously or subconsciously---created. What is worse, the "voice" remains eerily silent; silenced, as a matter of fact. All which lead to the logical conclusion that all that I believed to have been God was simply a matter of thoughts that were somehow manifested by my own devices.

The task now, then, is to establish a belief system that I can subcribe to. It seems, however, that the extreme choices are the most rational ones: Either a hard leaning on faith, an unquestioning reliance on what has shown itself to be very potentially untrue; or a descent into hedonistic living. A middle ground, that attempts to take the moral philosophy of religion and adopt it as a way of living, just seems to be an unstable---and maybe even irrational---choice. After all, it may provide some temporal comfort in that I am simply hedging my bets, but ultimately, such a system cannot be an equilibrium. We must necessarily move toward one end or the other of the spectrum, in order to be time consistent.

In a practical sense, this has left me in a rather uncomfortable position. The past ten or more years of my life seem to have been chasing after the wind. But who knows? It may have been the choices that I would have chosen, regardless. All I can say is that, absent this moral compass, I feel much more alone and unguided in what I need to do now. There is some relief: I am no longer bound by an exogenous force; but that endogeneity also rests on, ultimately, the shifting sands of a stochastic and messy and meaningless existence.