I appreciate your concern and I would agree with your assessments. I wrote this in my journal today. Perhaps it can better explain how I feel:
I desire God, but I am skeptical about the validity of that desire. I acknowledge that to be completely skeptical is to accept nothing, including the idea that one can be skeptical about an issue. Skepticism, when carried out to its extreme, is untenable. I ultimately act because of faith, but my faith is weak. I consider that, being one prone to obsessions and depressions, I cling to religion like so many others have before me. It provides a fantasy of calm, and a fabricated purpose to a world wrapped in chaos. People have proven to believe in some truly bizarre things, some by which we have enough “faith” to discard as absolutely false. I do not think myself above this hysteria, which is why I am always on guard from being ensnared in mass delusion and groupthink. The Christian message I approach with the utmost caution. I imagine the most extreme perversion of Christianity, such as a suicide cult, and superimpose the whole of Christendom on top of it. Yes, Christianity, if lived “as it ought to be lived” can be a beneficent force in one’s life, but that does not mean that it is absolutely not the product of some hopeful messianic Jews, who two centuries ago clung to the memory of their persecuted leader, believing he would rise again in a short time. Then, throughout the centuries, as their position became more and more untenable, their successors fashioned elaborate ideologies, which they portrayed as “eternal teachings of the Church.” Now, so many things stand in opposition to the Church. Is this truly the power of Satan, or is the fantasy fading? Modern apologists write off such things as evolution, but would an early Christian regard it as anything other than absolute heresy, and any attempts to reconcile it with the faith as equally misguided?
Even if I am to draw to God, to set aside these fears and live in faith, my troubles are far from over. For I think in terms of black and white, and if I am not absolutely for something, then I am diametrically opposed to it. To speak practically, I cannot reconcile listening to secular music with living a religious life. Every time I turn to something that does not possess the character of holiness (admittedly a character I myself perceive, and not necessarily a holiness inherent to the thing), I am struck with an unimaginable guilt, that I am not living to my potential, that I am weak, that I have positioned myself 180 degrees away from God. I must spend my money only on the necessities and on charity. I must consume only things that will draw me nearer to God, anything, even “harmless diversion” is spiritual sabotage from the lower self, and perhaps from the Adversary himself. Realizing this harsh dichotomy, I become angry and defiant. I think, no, I will not succumb to this dualism. I will not see the world as such. And so to compensate, I do much worse: I indulge in things that are purposefully harmful for my soul. Violent and sexual media, and the flippant and blasphemous words of sophomoric academics who worship relativism and hedonism, who sling arrows that, while never striking their target, confuse and disorient me as the observer. Soon I am living two lives: a holy one and a wordily one, and I can no longer reconcile the two. So I despair and wish to find myself a master, and with the confusion set in, I turn to what makes the most sense to my senses: that there is no God and that there is no rhyme or reason to it all, and that I must indulge in the false hope of tasting even the slightest absolution.