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The Cat Is Alive. Please Stop Asking Questions.

The Cat Is Alive. Please Stop Asking Questions.

Last updated on: October 14, 2026 at 1:28 pm by Stuart Delony

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The Cat Is Alive. Please Stop Asking Questions. 2026-10-14T13:28:41-04:00 Stuart Delony

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A worn cardboard box labeled “QUESTIONS WELCOME*” sits in the center aisle of a small, older church sanctuary. The box is scuffed, repeatedly taped shut, and surrounded by plain wooden pews under fluorescent lights.

image created with OpenAI

Seal a cat in a box with a mechanism that may or may not kill it. Until you open it, you don’t know which.

Religion gave me a box too.

The label was already printed on the outside: God is good. The Bible is true. Prayer works. Hell is just. God has a plan. The church can be trusted. Jesus is the answer.

We knew what was inside before anyone opened anything.

That was the point.

The Approved Search

I spent a long time in churches that said they welcomed questions. Bring your doubts. Wrestle with the hard stuff. God is big enough to handle it.

And there was usually some room to move. You could ask how Genesis should be read. You could wrestle with suffering. You could wonder why the church seemed so consistently attracted to power. There was room to roam, but there was also an invisible fence.

You could struggle with hell, provided you eventually found a way to make eternal punishment compatible with a loving God. You could wonder why prayer seemed random, but “maybe prayer does not work the way we keep saying it does” was not generally where the Bible study guide was headed.

Churches rarely put an asterisk after “We welcome questions,” but one would save everyone some time.

Questions welcome.*

*Final answers subject to approval.

We called it seeking truth, but most of the largest conclusions had been settled before the search began. God exists. Jesus is God. Scripture is authoritative. Christianity is true. Now go investigate.

Just don’t come back with anything weird.

I know because I taught inside that system. I helped people work through doubts, recommended books, explained difficult passages, and knew how to take a troublesome question on a long enough walk that it eventually returned home housebroken. The point was rarely to discover what was in the box. The label had already told us.

Keeping the Machine Running

There is a strange amount of upkeep required for beliefs we describe as eternally settled.

A difficult verse gets an explanation. Then the explanation needs another explanation because it appears to conflict with a different verse. Somebody writes a book resolving the conflict. Another theologian writes a book explaining what the first book missed. Then come the conference talks, podcasts, study Bibles, YouTube debates, and sermon series with titles like Hard Questions, Honest Answers, where the answers arrive exactly where the church was standing before anyone asked.

Christian apologetics has built an industry around keeping those repairs moving. That does not make every apologetic argument dishonest. Plenty are thoughtful attempts to deal with real problems. But watch what happens when one of the load-bearing doctrines starts to creak.

Take hell.

God is perfectly loving, and hell is eternal conscious torment. There is an obvious tension there, so the maintenance begins.

God does not send anyone to hell — people choose it. And they choose it without fully understanding what they are choosing. And God allows that choice to remain fixed forever. And infinite punishment is still just despite a finite human life. And the punishment is infinite because the offense is against an infinite God. And this is loving because God is holy. And justice requires punishment. And somehow mercy remains central to the whole arrangement.

At some point, you can forget which question started the repair.

That was harder for me to recognize than any single theological argument. I had spent years helping keep the whole thing coherent, tightening one explanation after another whenever something started rattling. Eventually the upkeep was the only part I could still verify.

Faith was supposed to be alive, but what sat inside the box increasingly looked like a machine everyone was servicing while insisting we could hear it breathing. You can exhaust yourself performing CPR on something everyone keeps insisting is doing fine. Somewhere in there you stop preserving faith.

You’re maintaining machinery.

Schrödinger’s Dogma

A doctrine can remain both unquestionably true and largely unexamined as long as nobody looks too closely at what is happening inside.

Prayer works until you start counting the prayers that didn’t. God protects his people until you have to explain the people he apparently didn’t. The church cares about victims until protecting a victim threatens the ministry. The Bible is perfectly clear until five Bible-believing Christians enter a room and emerge with seven interpretations and a new denomination.

None of this proves the opposite. It does mean the machine was making noise before anyone lifted the lid.

Something Was Already Smelling

People rarely pull apart their beliefs for kicks.

Opening that box can cost family, friendships, community, identity, work, marriage, and the entire mental map that told you where you were standing in the universe. Nobody picks that up as a hobby.

Usually something had been wrong for a while. A prayer went unanswered and then another one did. A doctrine stopped making moral sense. A pastor’s private behavior bore little resemblance to his public authority. A church preached sacrifice downward and demanded accountability upward. A supposedly timeless truth kept developing oddly convenient exceptions whenever reality became inconvenient.

Opening the box did not cause the unanswered prayers. It did not put abusive leaders behind pulpits. It did not teach institutions to protect themselves before protecting wounded people. Those things were already there. Opening the box ended the agreement not to look directly at them.

That is why so many stories about “losing faith” get told backward.

Questions did not destroy the faith. Questions arrived because the faith was already failing.

Why Were You Looking?

Once someone opens the box, the conversation often moves away from what they found. Now the important question is why they were looking.

You became cynical. You got too intellectual. You read the wrong authors. You listened to the wrong podcasts. College got to you. Politics corrupted you. You were hurt by the church. You wanted permission to sin. You became bitter.

There is no shortage of explanations for the person who starts asking the wrong questions. If the observer is defective, then the contents remain untouched. The church is healthy. The doctrine is sound. The machinery is working. Somebody ignored the warning label and started poking around where they didn’t belong.

People do bring wounds, politics, desires, resentment, ego, and blind spots into their beliefs. Pastors, theologians, and the people who wrote the doctrinal statement brought theirs too.

None of that answers the question that matters: what was in the box?

If you were the problem, we can pray for you.

If the contents are the problem, we have paperwork.

Stop Paying for the Upkeep

This version of the experiment was never about the cat. It was about the claim of life.

The box could remain closed indefinitely as long as everyone agreed that whatever was inside was alive, healthy, and functioning exactly as advertised. Meanwhile, the explanations accumulated, the repairs continued, and somebody was always underneath the thing with a wrench.

Maybe God is still in there. Maybe faith is too. I have no interest in pretending this metaphor can settle questions that large.

But I can say something about the machinery.

If keeping it alive requires you to stop counting, stop noticing, stop asking, and keep supplying one more explanation for why the last explanation failed, you are allowed to put down the tools.

You do not owe endless maintenance to something simply because everyone around you keeps calling it alive.

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About Stuart Delony

I’m Stuart Delony, a former pastor who walked out of the church but couldn’t shake the ways of Jesus. These days, I host Snarky Faith—a podcast and platform that wrestles with faith, culture, and meaning from the fringe. I’m not here to fix Christianity. I’m here to name what’s broken, find what’s still worth keeping, and hold space for the questions that don’t have clean answers. If you’ve been burned, disillusioned, or just done with the noise—welcome. You’re in good company. You can read more about the author here.

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