Religious Insomnia

At nearly two in the morning, in the middle of a blizzard, after reading some very challenging things entirely too late in the evening, I think I've managed my very first round of religious-anxiety-induced-insomnia.

Questions keep chasing themselves around in my brain. Am I for real? Do I really believe all this? Am I the only one; is my religion really horribly passe and everyone else has moved past it into something more "mature"? Am I really just a fluffy bunny at heart (and is that just a word we use when we're too attatched to our scientific viewpoint to give it up) (and who am I to be dismissing a scientific viewpoint, anyway)? Am I turning into some kind of mad Pagan fundamentalist who other people look at with a combination of awe and surprise and oh-my-god-sane-people-aren't-like-that-are-they?

Does it really matter what anybody else thinks? (Of course it does. And of course it doesn't.) Am I really just doing this to watch what other people do? Do I really believe any of it myself even, or is this all some kind of grand wish-fulfillment that comes of reading too many fantasy novels as a preteen? And what's so wrong with that, anyway? Why do we all have to take ourselves so seriously all the time?

Rinse. Cycle. Repeat.

I read somewhere once that skepticism and self-doubt are a sign you're doing magic right, that it's just your empirical training kicking in in self-defense, which seems a little pat to me. And I read somewhere else once -- it was Harlan Ellison, I'm sure -- that you never like the people who make you ask real questions. Which is true. I don't like anything about this right now.