I read Helen Mildenhall's article on why she doesn't go to church anymore with great interest [Viewpoints, July 5]. I am drawn to her statement because I think our paths both converge and diverge in ways that would be worth writing about.

Helen, I greatly admire the courage it must have taken for you to "come out," as you say. I gather there would be little support from among the people you know for doing such a thing. I wonder how many others there are who have thought about doing what you have done, but have not had the courage. I think there are many whose faith is very shaky and who are reluctant to examine the grounds for their faith too closely lest all they find is habit, tradition, guilt or fear, not something alive, viable and relevant to the world in which we live today.

You have a need for honesty, even in an area where there may be little reward for being so. You know something which I think is very important-which is that faith is nothing if it is not honest. That's one place where I think our paths converge.

You write with a sense of relief, as one released from some kind of bondage. I gather that believing in the Bible and God, as you have understood them, has become more and more of a burden to you. Here our paths touch but then veer away from each other. Like you, I have spent a lot of time weighing and shedding things in my faith tradition which I believed were not compatible with the essential elements in that tradition. I like what you said about needing a God who could exceed the best standards you could imagine. I can also understand why you would not want to believe in a "God who hadn't been able to figure out how to save most of humanity from eternal torment."

Here our paths fork, however. Do I hear in your protest the disillusionment of an undeclared fundamentalist? Where else than from some fiery fundamentalist doctrine would you have acquired a belief so antithetical to the heart of the gospel? Yes, I agree, better to have no God at all than such a God. Those who think they know more about God than they really do place themselves at great risk. When such a gerrybuilt tower of false certainties topples, great will be its fall!

But having no God at all is also risky because other gods, unrecognized, can enter in. Atheism holds for me no prospect of liberation, only even more susceptibility to idolatries which rise up endlessly like some great monster which regenerates itself each time its head is severed.

Again our paths touch. There are a number of things in my faith tradition which are either no longer helpful to me or never were. The classical arguments for the existence of God would be one example. The ontological argument claims that having the mere idea of a supreme being implies there must be one. The cosmological argument looks at the chain of cause and effect and says there has to be a First Cause. The teleological argument claims the intricacy and order to be found in nature is proof of divine intention. The current flap over "intelligent design" is a variation of this argument.

Modern philosophers, starting with Hume and Kant, have long since demonstrated that none of these arguments constitute proof. They are meaningful to someone who already believes.

Others claim to have had some kind of special event or epiphany or conversion experience in which God became very real for them, and they base their faith on that. I have had no such experience. Sometimes I have wished I had. Most of the time I am just as glad I have not because it is so easy for us to trick ourselves into thinking we know something about God that we really don't.

Recently I listened to a series of lectures on the philosophy of religion by James Hall. He characterized himself as a "religious agnostic." He lays no claim to any kind of knowledge of God based on reason, experience or revelation but he chooses to see the world (read cosmos) as "an arena of divine intention." He was raised in a conservative brand of Protestant Christianity in southern Illinois and is currently an active Episcopalian. His designation of himself makes a lot of sense to me.

"But what about the Bible?" some may say. "Isn't that the inspired word of God?" I believe it is. I also believe it was written by human beings who used the thought forms and modes of perception of their time. I am not a fundamentalist. I have never felt any obligation to believe that events happened in many parts of scripture exactly as they are reported. I regard the Bible as a witness in its various forms: narrative, psalms, wisdom, letters. It has authority for me, but I still regard it as an imperfect document. All witness is flawed. All witness is human.

So I have given up a lot, too, Helen, but here our paths diverge one final time. My journey, so similar to yours in at least some respects, has taken me deeper into faith. The more I realize that seeing the world as "an arena of divine intention" is a choice, the more I am aware that it must be nurtured. And for me it has been. Before I came to the point in my life where I could meaningfully choose to use religious interpretation, a choice had already been made for me by those who raised me and exposed me to religious culture. I need to be with people of faith if my own faith is to thrive.

I can imagine someone saying, "What a puny faith if you have to go to church all the time to keep it going!" My response to that is that I have a hunger for God that will not quit. Were I never to read or hear read another passage of scripture or darken the door of another house of worship, I would still have that hunger. Not a day passes but that the God question does not come to me as both a blessing and a torment-a blessing because it is to me profoundly meaningful and satisfying to ask that question, a torment because I know that it will never get resolved to the level of certainty that I would like.

So I keep going to church not because I am afraid I will lose my faith if I don't, but to be with those who carry on the witness-my faith ancestors and contemporaries.

Contact: budhayes@sbcglobal.net