Bear with me for a bit of meandering? Excellent, I knew you were the adventurous sort.
Nifty little fact-nugget: boundless as the brain’s capacity for information may be, the manner in which it processes and files that information is not without its hiccups. Physiology and chemical high-tailing are a mite bit restrictive and, like bouncers at a night-club, they are quick to shut the door on the metaphoric trouble-maker.
“You. Yeah, you with the velvet suit. Sorry, pal, but there’s no room for you in this club. Better luck next time.”
Velvet Suit Guy is harmless, of course. But they don’t know that, nor do they care to. Because they’ve formed a belief, you see; and once that belief has been accepted as an accurate truth, the brain handles it in a rather miserly way: by sticking it in a cement of sorts, where there is no room for debate. (By belief, it’s important to understand that I do not mean the hesitant, “yeah, I think so” sort; but rather a firmly-held impression of reality. The belief that you are alive, for example.) Thanks to its needy nature, our brain cannot hold two opposing beliefs simultaneously, with equal regards to their truthfulness. For instance, bouncers one and two cannot believe our VSG is at once harmful and harmless. He may be harmful on some occasions or in certain regards, and harmless on others, but he cannot be both at the same time. The existence of one inherently diminishes the other. The brain may accept mid-points. It may alternate between beliefs. It may even replace an existing belief with an opposing one, but only if it can make room for the possibility that a belief may potentially be incorrect. If it cannot, your mind will automatically discard the outside notions that contradict it for as long as that belief is active. This is why we see such amusing political discussions on primetime television, with pundits talking AT one another, rather than TO one another. And why I hold nothing against those who do their best to avoid me.
From here, mom’s inspiring statement should rightly take an evolutionary turn. For the question should no longer be simply whether a belief is inherited, but whether it has any foundation whatsoever. Those many years ago, I'd placed my belief on the table, given it a scrupulous thrice-over, and walked away empty-handed. Those who’ve taken that first step, at least, and given themselves the leeway to doubt are not typically threatened by my label. To everyone else, I’ve become the opposing belief. My every word is indecipherable.
But anyway, back to the matter at hand…
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Friday, January 23, 2009
6. And dog-gone-it... people hate me.
From an outsider’s viewpoint, horrific acts committed in the name of God are made all the more terrible by the knowledge that those committing them would have next to no reason to do so, absent theology. I say "next to", because we silly humans are in so many ways primed for exclusivity, and a sometimes ruthless sense of tribalism. Wars will occur, crime, even hate – and all at the slightest provocation. But rarely are average citizens pressed into violence as unanimously or with as much zeal as when they are backed by divine inspiration. That in mind, I knew I’d set a cast for myself. So even approaching the idea of calling myself an atheist took time, and a little more chutzpa than one might expect.
To many, the word itself is uncomfortable; surrounded in notions of immorality, of self-centeredness, and the token similitude to “a sinful sort of self-destruction”. A non-spiritual person will go unquestioned. An agnostic can be tolerated. But an atheist? It is probably the only method of self-labeling that is inherently offensive to the American masses. No surprise that my first tentative use of the word as a personal description came anonymously, in an MMO. (That’s right, I’m a geek. Live with it.) A response to what I’d assumed was a benign and casual question, it was not well received. At the same time, seeing it printed there on the screen and knowing that I was the one who’d written it, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride. I’d owned up to who I was – not openly, mind you, but it was a start. Eventually, I was able to write it again. And then again. And the more I wrote it, the more liberated I felt. It grew to the point that I was dropping the term into average (written) conversation, unprompted, for no other reason than to expand my associated comfort level by impractical way of gross overuse. Until one day, I was able to voice it aloud, and my non-religious label became a concrete, familiar possession. The problem then became one of coming to terms with the place that the label had carved for me in our world – more specifically, our nation; with our nation’s current view of religiosity.
As you now know, my first experimental blurting went poorly. The same can be said for most that followed; much to the chagrin of my social life. Reactions ranged from disdainful to detached, with looks that said (sometimes simultaneously) “Oh you poor, stupid girl”, “How sad your life must be”, and “You’ve an in with Hell, do you? You corrupt little...”
Again, I can’t really blame them. I remember the outlook. Specifically, the utter impossibility of comprehending what the person in question was trying to say. Not that they were inadequate in terms of communication; quite the contrary, atheists as a whole tend to be fairly eloquent (I’m not much of an example in this department, I know). No, the roadblock was all in my head. Literally.
To many, the word itself is uncomfortable; surrounded in notions of immorality, of self-centeredness, and the token similitude to “a sinful sort of self-destruction”. A non-spiritual person will go unquestioned. An agnostic can be tolerated. But an atheist? It is probably the only method of self-labeling that is inherently offensive to the American masses. No surprise that my first tentative use of the word as a personal description came anonymously, in an MMO. (That’s right, I’m a geek. Live with it.) A response to what I’d assumed was a benign and casual question, it was not well received. At the same time, seeing it printed there on the screen and knowing that I was the one who’d written it, I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pride. I’d owned up to who I was – not openly, mind you, but it was a start. Eventually, I was able to write it again. And then again. And the more I wrote it, the more liberated I felt. It grew to the point that I was dropping the term into average (written) conversation, unprompted, for no other reason than to expand my associated comfort level by impractical way of gross overuse. Until one day, I was able to voice it aloud, and my non-religious label became a concrete, familiar possession. The problem then became one of coming to terms with the place that the label had carved for me in our world – more specifically, our nation; with our nation’s current view of religiosity.
As you now know, my first experimental blurting went poorly. The same can be said for most that followed; much to the chagrin of my social life. Reactions ranged from disdainful to detached, with looks that said (sometimes simultaneously) “Oh you poor, stupid girl”, “How sad your life must be”, and “You’ve an in with Hell, do you? You corrupt little...”
Again, I can’t really blame them. I remember the outlook. Specifically, the utter impossibility of comprehending what the person in question was trying to say. Not that they were inadequate in terms of communication; quite the contrary, atheists as a whole tend to be fairly eloquent (I’m not much of an example in this department, I know). No, the roadblock was all in my head. Literally.
5. Because I'm good enough, I'm smart enough...
In the years that followed without a cure-all three-letter deity to fill the gaps in my understanding, I learned more of science and physics, of human nature and social interaction, even of theology than I ever thought could be known. I treated people with greater respect and decency, because I’d come to realize that we’re all we’ve got. I sorted through the scattered bits of myself and made use of the ones that mattered, because I knew that time for me was not infinite; and that we deserve better than to wait for the ending of ourselves to be ourselves. I realized that broken wings are mended with time; but a broken spirit is only ever healed when you are able to stand on the stone that brought you down and know that the view from there is better than any view on earth, if for no other reason than because it is yours alone, born from a unique triumph over that which many will say cannot, or should not, be conquered.
I found peace, cliché and metaphoric as it comes, wrapped and delivered to my front door on a godless platter.
Rather than perish – as more than one person swore to me it would – my happiness with life as it was, flourished. Moreover, I discovered that my sociological and political views were decidedly different than those thrust upon me by the tenets of Christianity. Some former ideas didn’t square up with my personal sense of morality. Some out rightly defied it. As a result, I often find myself wondering if the different sects of American civilization – with their even more divergent ideologies – would have come to the same conclusions on their own. If you could go back in time to strip Israelis and Palestinians of their respective faiths, would you have restored these many centuries lost to war and malevolence? If you could detract a handful of scriptures from a religious book, would you save a minority population from oppression? How far might science have already come, had it not been caught for so very long in the countering mire of institutionalized piety?
What would the world look like?
That of course, led to the more selfish and pressing question: how was the world now going to look at me?
I found peace, cliché and metaphoric as it comes, wrapped and delivered to my front door on a godless platter.
Rather than perish – as more than one person swore to me it would – my happiness with life as it was, flourished. Moreover, I discovered that my sociological and political views were decidedly different than those thrust upon me by the tenets of Christianity. Some former ideas didn’t square up with my personal sense of morality. Some out rightly defied it. As a result, I often find myself wondering if the different sects of American civilization – with their even more divergent ideologies – would have come to the same conclusions on their own. If you could go back in time to strip Israelis and Palestinians of their respective faiths, would you have restored these many centuries lost to war and malevolence? If you could detract a handful of scriptures from a religious book, would you save a minority population from oppression? How far might science have already come, had it not been caught for so very long in the countering mire of institutionalized piety?
What would the world look like?
That of course, led to the more selfish and pressing question: how was the world now going to look at me?
4. Rx: Dawkins... or lots and lots of booze.
Jump past a run through the Book of Mormon (complete with the Pearl of Great Price and the Doctrine and Covenants – pretty please, don’t ever waste your time there), the Koran (lots of death and mutilation, but it recognizes women’s right to vote, so that’s something), the Dhammapada (highly recommended, if a little trite), the writings of the Baha’u’llah (huh?), and several more shots at the Bible (you know where we stand on that) and it became glaringly obvious that religion was out altogether. Even so, I hung on to the god hypothesis for a long time after that. All those tidbits listed in my last post do make it a sometimes beautiful thing, after all. And as lies go, you can’t ask for more than that. Unfortunately, there comes a point when wanting to believe, for no other reason than the sake of belief itself, just isn’t enough.
So a godless life it was to be.
What do I do with that? What does anyone do?
I have to say, it was an odd thing to look around at our self-help-riddled, expert-addicted, support-group society and realize that there aren’t many resources for someone trying to detox from decades of indoctrination fed direct to the brain on a turbo-charged-evangelical iv. (Aww, you’re stuck on the slots – such a shame! And you lost your mortgage, too?... Well I lost my God, you casino troll, so move over on that couch and make some room for my sorry ass!) Since going to a psychiatrist over a deeply disturbing case of atheism seemed too far outside American culture, I found the next best thing in books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Martha Beck, and too many others to count. (Well, you probably could count them – but you’d have to go through Donald Rumsfeld for that. Be sure to thank the Patriot Act when yer good and sated.)
Though their brilliant words helped me in reaffirming that I wasn’t taking a barmy leap off the high-board of lunacy, I knew that starting over was a task all my own. A sticky proposition, to say the least. I could scarcely count myself above a fledgling in her first flight. Worse than that, the job ahead of me was one of an old bird glaring up at the sky with two broken wings, and a broken spirit to match. I was sad. I was daunted. I was, all in all, pathetic.
By the time the dust settled, however, I’d discovered an amazing thing. I was able to pick myself up from the wreckage and look around at a world that hadn’t collapsed, hadn’t cracked, and hadn’t even hiccupped, with more wonder and more appreciation than ever before.
So a godless life it was to be.
What do I do with that? What does anyone do?
I have to say, it was an odd thing to look around at our self-help-riddled, expert-addicted, support-group society and realize that there aren’t many resources for someone trying to detox from decades of indoctrination fed direct to the brain on a turbo-charged-evangelical iv. (Aww, you’re stuck on the slots – such a shame! And you lost your mortgage, too?... Well I lost my God, you casino troll, so move over on that couch and make some room for my sorry ass!) Since going to a psychiatrist over a deeply disturbing case of atheism seemed too far outside American culture, I found the next best thing in books by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Bart Ehrman, Martha Beck, and too many others to count. (Well, you probably could count them – but you’d have to go through Donald Rumsfeld for that. Be sure to thank the Patriot Act when yer good and sated.)
Though their brilliant words helped me in reaffirming that I wasn’t taking a barmy leap off the high-board of lunacy, I knew that starting over was a task all my own. A sticky proposition, to say the least. I could scarcely count myself above a fledgling in her first flight. Worse than that, the job ahead of me was one of an old bird glaring up at the sky with two broken wings, and a broken spirit to match. I was sad. I was daunted. I was, all in all, pathetic.
By the time the dust settled, however, I’d discovered an amazing thing. I was able to pick myself up from the wreckage and look around at a world that hadn’t collapsed, hadn’t cracked, and hadn’t even hiccupped, with more wonder and more appreciation than ever before.
3. "She's gonna feel that one in the morning."
Doubtless, she regrets that statement; knowing now the result of having made it. But I can’t thank her enough. This had been building up since childhood, after all – though initially buried in the benign, little wonderings of a Sunday-School student. “Cain’s wife?” I’d ask, eyes wide; conditioned to accept whatever response I received as the unequivocal truth. The grown-ups knew what they were talking about, didn’t they? Of course they did. They were older. They were wiser. And I was just the girl whose harmless ignorance was tolerated, if only for her youth. (“Ain’t those questions just adorable?”)
Not that there wasn’t an upstart now and again. More than a few situations arose, each seeming bent on either putting my little mind into a tailspin, or my parent’s rueful eyes to rolling with irritation. One fine Sunday afternoon had the preacher quoting a verse, and thereafter saying something along the lines of, “When John wrote this…” Wait, what?!? When John wrote…? Confused, I tugged at the sleeves of mom and pop, “I thought God wrote the bible.” Even putting aside my impressions, one would think that an omnipotent being would be more than capable of penning a manifesto himself, right? Well he did, they told me. He just did it through other people. “But how do we know that?” The response that followed became the standard for nearly every question thereafter: “Because the bible says so, and because we have faith in the word”.
Circular logic, for the win. Though it was enough to shut me up for a time, the situation itself had highlighted a particularly startling realization – holding something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe my perspective wasn’t as accurate as I’d thought. Maybe the world wasn’t so transparent.
The coming years would yield the same results time and again. From the countless contradictions in the word itself, each of them brushed aside as unimportant by anyone and everyone willing to discuss them. To the bible-camp scenes of teenagers in packed pews falling over themselves and mumbling in “tongues”, imbued with the Holy Spirit’s *cough* distinctive grace. (For the sake of full disclosure, I can’t objectively say that the image described here wasn’t a big reason for my religious exodus. It was fairly traumatizing, you know. Going through that, you never really look at consonants the same way again.) When discussing the experiences later in our cots, I couldn’t find a single soul who claimed to have had a genuine encounter with the wispy critter. Not one. They’d each been faking it for the sake of their neighbors. The recognition of the similarities between the biblical and the Babylonian stories of creation, the tale of Jacob and Esau (aka, Horus and Set), the overall realization that most of the Old Testament and even much of the New had existed as fables from older and sparser religions centuries, even millennia before they were ever noted to have taken place, were the bible to be taken as a literal, historical text – the list of examples between then and now is so lengthy; I could turn this short bit of honesty into a volume. Maybe someday I’ll be so ambitious as to cover that. Maybe not. Either way, you get the idea.
All that history. All those little grains of sand, momentary crises of faith, adding up to an avalanche – one that was bound to fall that day in the car when I took that first step away from faith. And fall it did.
Segue to the intriguing part. For if a tale is founded in truth, the more one sorts through the sand, the more evidence one should find to support the account. It’s worth mentioning that you may well have a mistaken notion or two about this portion of my wayward choice.
Many have said that you find what you look for. Fill your noggin with a bias and, however false, you will see it manifested in a dozen everyday ways. The sand-sorting be damned, evidence is all too easy to ignore, given the inclination. (Prime example: scientist – term is loosely applied here – finds what he believes must, must, must be remaining bits of wood from Noah’s unlikely masterpiece. Despite his unfounded certainty, carbon dating determines the age of the planks – another loosely applied term – as being a few hundred years, at most; ruling out the possibility of them having taken part in the fabled jaunt. His response was not to continue searching for remains that might fall into the necessary time frame, but to decide that carbon dating must then be an altogether phony science. Hmm.) But here’s the rub. I didn’t want to disprove the foundation of my faith, as you might call it. I wanted to be able to log the DNA, pat the eye-witness on the back and close the case. I wanted to believe in this beautiful notion of an all-powerful being who was there, watching over me, and loving me, and preparing for me a place that was so much better in justice and in purity than this world had ever been. I wanted to ease my grief with the knowing that I would one day be able to run back into the safe, strong arms of the father I’d lost to a brutal disease. I wanted it to be true. But as my great grandmother always said: you can want in one hand and shit in th’other, and see which one gets filled first. The more I dug, the more questions I asked, the more facts I learned, and the more facts that weren’t there to know at all; the more I realized what the evidence was saying – what it had been saying all along: “It’s not true. None of this is true.”
Not even a little?
“Not even at all.”
Oh… Ouch.
Not that there wasn’t an upstart now and again. More than a few situations arose, each seeming bent on either putting my little mind into a tailspin, or my parent’s rueful eyes to rolling with irritation. One fine Sunday afternoon had the preacher quoting a verse, and thereafter saying something along the lines of, “When John wrote this…” Wait, what?!? When John wrote…? Confused, I tugged at the sleeves of mom and pop, “I thought God wrote the bible.” Even putting aside my impressions, one would think that an omnipotent being would be more than capable of penning a manifesto himself, right? Well he did, they told me. He just did it through other people. “But how do we know that?” The response that followed became the standard for nearly every question thereafter: “Because the bible says so, and because we have faith in the word”.
Circular logic, for the win. Though it was enough to shut me up for a time, the situation itself had highlighted a particularly startling realization – holding something to be true doesn’t necessarily make it so. Maybe my perspective wasn’t as accurate as I’d thought. Maybe the world wasn’t so transparent.
The coming years would yield the same results time and again. From the countless contradictions in the word itself, each of them brushed aside as unimportant by anyone and everyone willing to discuss them. To the bible-camp scenes of teenagers in packed pews falling over themselves and mumbling in “tongues”, imbued with the Holy Spirit’s *cough* distinctive grace. (For the sake of full disclosure, I can’t objectively say that the image described here wasn’t a big reason for my religious exodus. It was fairly traumatizing, you know. Going through that, you never really look at consonants the same way again.) When discussing the experiences later in our cots, I couldn’t find a single soul who claimed to have had a genuine encounter with the wispy critter. Not one. They’d each been faking it for the sake of their neighbors. The recognition of the similarities between the biblical and the Babylonian stories of creation, the tale of Jacob and Esau (aka, Horus and Set), the overall realization that most of the Old Testament and even much of the New had existed as fables from older and sparser religions centuries, even millennia before they were ever noted to have taken place, were the bible to be taken as a literal, historical text – the list of examples between then and now is so lengthy; I could turn this short bit of honesty into a volume. Maybe someday I’ll be so ambitious as to cover that. Maybe not. Either way, you get the idea.
All that history. All those little grains of sand, momentary crises of faith, adding up to an avalanche – one that was bound to fall that day in the car when I took that first step away from faith. And fall it did.
Segue to the intriguing part. For if a tale is founded in truth, the more one sorts through the sand, the more evidence one should find to support the account. It’s worth mentioning that you may well have a mistaken notion or two about this portion of my wayward choice.
Many have said that you find what you look for. Fill your noggin with a bias and, however false, you will see it manifested in a dozen everyday ways. The sand-sorting be damned, evidence is all too easy to ignore, given the inclination. (Prime example: scientist – term is loosely applied here – finds what he believes must, must, must be remaining bits of wood from Noah’s unlikely masterpiece. Despite his unfounded certainty, carbon dating determines the age of the planks – another loosely applied term – as being a few hundred years, at most; ruling out the possibility of them having taken part in the fabled jaunt. His response was not to continue searching for remains that might fall into the necessary time frame, but to decide that carbon dating must then be an altogether phony science. Hmm.) But here’s the rub. I didn’t want to disprove the foundation of my faith, as you might call it. I wanted to be able to log the DNA, pat the eye-witness on the back and close the case. I wanted to believe in this beautiful notion of an all-powerful being who was there, watching over me, and loving me, and preparing for me a place that was so much better in justice and in purity than this world had ever been. I wanted to ease my grief with the knowing that I would one day be able to run back into the safe, strong arms of the father I’d lost to a brutal disease. I wanted it to be true. But as my great grandmother always said: you can want in one hand and shit in th’other, and see which one gets filled first. The more I dug, the more questions I asked, the more facts I learned, and the more facts that weren’t there to know at all; the more I realized what the evidence was saying – what it had been saying all along: “It’s not true. None of this is true.”
Not even a little?
“Not even at all.”
Oh… Ouch.
2. Trains, planes, and stupid metaphors.
Years ago, following the birth of my son, I penned a story just for him. The long and short (mostly short) of it, was the journey of a little train who tired of running the tracks that had been placed for him, culminating in an eventual and extreme adaptation in his route to include flight, even space travel. My sweet boy actually loved the tale, with its quaint little meter and Seuss-like aspirations. It may have been a bit on the corny side, if we’re being honest, but still… Looking back on it now, there are things about it that seem strangely applicable. (Cue tasteless “mama always said life was like a train ride” gag. Don’t worry, I won’t take it quite that far. But seriously… Life… Train… You can see it, can’t you? Shutting up now.)
In life, though, it isn’t about the train itself so much as the track it travels. Take a glance in the mirror at who you are today. I’ll lay odds that you can pinpoint each life-altering event – every major crisis, uplifting seminar, or reckless discovery (it was just that one time in college) – connect them like dots in an activity book, and (good or bad) determine exactly how it was that you arrived where you are. But which one of them would you call the Oprah-form “aha” moment? The instant where the switch got flipped and the previous course couldn’t be recovered, no matter how you tried? Which single memory can you turn all the others across?
Now I couldn’t tell you why it is I like the rain as intensely as I do. I’m not entirely sure what led me to decide that cheesecake is the true meaning of happiness. But I can paint a giant red spot on the point of no return in at least one matter...
It was an afternoon conversation with my mother. I find myself getting all silly kinds of whimsical, thinking about it now. We rarely talk these days. Something that we will both attribute to my afore-mentioned affliction of faithlessness. I was seventeen, and we (as we frequently did back then) had gone for a drive in the nearby canyon; where the dry and distant scenery did wonders for amplifying teenage angst into full-blown dissociative ideas. Something had been brewing in the backward corner of my mind. Something I’d spent ages dismissing, because it smacked at my well-nurtured sense of guilt and self-doubt. Haven’t the foggiest idea just what caused it to finally surface after having marinated for so long, but gripping the wheel and taking a long hard look at a particularly dry and distant rock, I glanced warily at my mother and asked, “So… I don’t know how to put this, but… I’ve been having… doubts.” With a bit more dodging, I eventually opened up to the fact that these doubts were of the spiritual sort. It wasn’t that I was looking for her to allay my qualms with the truthfulness of a religion that had been the centerpiece of our home from the beginning of my thereto-short existence. I didn’t need a pep-talk, and to her credit she didn’t offer one. She knew that the question was really of a different nature. I wanted to know if the doubts were okay. I wanted to know that my budding uncertainty didn’t make me a bad person.
Her response is something I would put on page one of Things My Mother Taught Me, were I ever to write a book on the subject. (Edging out other such top-runners as: Never return a dish empty; and Wear your learning as you wear your pocket watch, on the inside of your coat. Never pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.) She took a long look out the front window and said, “It can’t be a bad thing to question. If you never question your belief, you’ll never really know whether it’s yours – or whether it’s just one that someone else gave to you.”
It’s okay.
Her words opened a door in my mind; one that I couldn’t have closed even if I’d wanted to. At that moment, every question that I’d never asked, every mental whisper that I’d ever silenced – a lifetime of wonderings – all coalesced and snowballed and took a shuddering lurch to the forefront of my brain. That was it. Many years would pass before religious doubt would become the ultimate evolution of outright disbelief. But that was the moment where the train jumped the track.
In life, though, it isn’t about the train itself so much as the track it travels. Take a glance in the mirror at who you are today. I’ll lay odds that you can pinpoint each life-altering event – every major crisis, uplifting seminar, or reckless discovery (it was just that one time in college) – connect them like dots in an activity book, and (good or bad) determine exactly how it was that you arrived where you are. But which one of them would you call the Oprah-form “aha” moment? The instant where the switch got flipped and the previous course couldn’t be recovered, no matter how you tried? Which single memory can you turn all the others across?
Now I couldn’t tell you why it is I like the rain as intensely as I do. I’m not entirely sure what led me to decide that cheesecake is the true meaning of happiness. But I can paint a giant red spot on the point of no return in at least one matter...
It was an afternoon conversation with my mother. I find myself getting all silly kinds of whimsical, thinking about it now. We rarely talk these days. Something that we will both attribute to my afore-mentioned affliction of faithlessness. I was seventeen, and we (as we frequently did back then) had gone for a drive in the nearby canyon; where the dry and distant scenery did wonders for amplifying teenage angst into full-blown dissociative ideas. Something had been brewing in the backward corner of my mind. Something I’d spent ages dismissing, because it smacked at my well-nurtured sense of guilt and self-doubt. Haven’t the foggiest idea just what caused it to finally surface after having marinated for so long, but gripping the wheel and taking a long hard look at a particularly dry and distant rock, I glanced warily at my mother and asked, “So… I don’t know how to put this, but… I’ve been having… doubts.” With a bit more dodging, I eventually opened up to the fact that these doubts were of the spiritual sort. It wasn’t that I was looking for her to allay my qualms with the truthfulness of a religion that had been the centerpiece of our home from the beginning of my thereto-short existence. I didn’t need a pep-talk, and to her credit she didn’t offer one. She knew that the question was really of a different nature. I wanted to know if the doubts were okay. I wanted to know that my budding uncertainty didn’t make me a bad person.
Her response is something I would put on page one of Things My Mother Taught Me, were I ever to write a book on the subject. (Edging out other such top-runners as: Never return a dish empty; and Wear your learning as you wear your pocket watch, on the inside of your coat. Never pull it out and strike it merely to show that you have one.) She took a long look out the front window and said, “It can’t be a bad thing to question. If you never question your belief, you’ll never really know whether it’s yours – or whether it’s just one that someone else gave to you.”
It’s okay.
Her words opened a door in my mind; one that I couldn’t have closed even if I’d wanted to. At that moment, every question that I’d never asked, every mental whisper that I’d ever silenced – a lifetime of wonderings – all coalesced and snowballed and took a shuddering lurch to the forefront of my brain. That was it. Many years would pass before religious doubt would become the ultimate evolution of outright disbelief. But that was the moment where the train jumped the track.
Thursday, January 22, 2009
1. Hello.
Skeptic. Disbeliever. Godless.
Call me alone. It’s shorter and it’s easier to spell.
Contrary to what you’re probably thinking I’m not a person whose view of the world has been reduced to some Quasimodo-ed shadow of yours – horribly disfigured and despised by comparison – all for the absence of biblical influence. I’m a wife and a mother. A woman who pays her bills (on time, for the most part), files her taxes (truthfully, for the most part), and even (occasionally) mows her lawn. I don’t litter, I don’t eat babies, and I don’t secretly hope the world will fall into an all-consuming chaos so that disarray such as the one by which I apparently lead my life will take over your existence. I’m quiet. I’m average. I’m so normal I could even be your neighbor, scary as that thought may be. And I’m an atheist.
Of course, you already knew that. Assuming you took note of the disclaimer, that is. But it bears being said if for no other reason than... I don’t often get the chance to say it. Exposing that aspect of little-ole-me generally shuts down the conversation – a bummer to anyone, especially a former-librarian who thrives on information. (What do you think and why? Give me more! A book, an index, an outline! – It’s a desperate, sick need. One that I find can only be curbed by massive, interchanging doses of caffeine and chocolate.) Long-time friends and strangers alike have walked away mid-sentence at the drop of that one word; wiping me from their mental list of “people whose opinions have even the slightest bearing” with little more than a backward twitch of their hand.
I can’t blame them. Not really.
It’s partly a product of location. This is America. One Nation Under God. Where apple pie and baseball go hand-in-hand with Sunday-school and sin. Where fifty percent of the population believes with one hundred percent certainty that Noah ferried copulating creatures (including pairings of the planet’s three hundred and fifty thousand species of beetles) through an anger-induced culling of humanity. It features prominently in our politics – one debate question in the last election’s primaries being, "What stance would Jesus take on the matter of immigration?" Swap the name “Jesus” with “Allah” for a clearer view of that one. It’s on our money, our mail, our buildings. Everything about us says, America is faith, and faith is America.
What of the citizens without it? When George Bush Sr. was asked whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists, he said “No”.
Hmm.
To me, it seems an odd sort of irony that a nation founded on (among other things) religious freedom stands out as one of the most likely to shun me for my religious views, or lack thereof. It bothers me now to even have to make that correlation – isn’t it contrary to the point? But that’s the sad extent of it. Citizens who wouldn’t dream of discriminating against another for their beliefs are more than content to socially persecute someone for having no beliefs at all. Call it prejudice or call it fear, it’s an acceptable thing for you to hate me. I know the view from your side of the river. I lived it, after all. But I’d very much like for you to know the view from mine. And there aren’t many bridges between us under the open scrutiny of American living.
So it’s come down to this. I’m outing myself via typo. Term-paper style.
Call me alone. It’s shorter and it’s easier to spell.
Contrary to what you’re probably thinking I’m not a person whose view of the world has been reduced to some Quasimodo-ed shadow of yours – horribly disfigured and despised by comparison – all for the absence of biblical influence. I’m a wife and a mother. A woman who pays her bills (on time, for the most part), files her taxes (truthfully, for the most part), and even (occasionally) mows her lawn. I don’t litter, I don’t eat babies, and I don’t secretly hope the world will fall into an all-consuming chaos so that disarray such as the one by which I apparently lead my life will take over your existence. I’m quiet. I’m average. I’m so normal I could even be your neighbor, scary as that thought may be. And I’m an atheist.
Of course, you already knew that. Assuming you took note of the disclaimer, that is. But it bears being said if for no other reason than... I don’t often get the chance to say it. Exposing that aspect of little-ole-me generally shuts down the conversation – a bummer to anyone, especially a former-librarian who thrives on information. (What do you think and why? Give me more! A book, an index, an outline! – It’s a desperate, sick need. One that I find can only be curbed by massive, interchanging doses of caffeine and chocolate.) Long-time friends and strangers alike have walked away mid-sentence at the drop of that one word; wiping me from their mental list of “people whose opinions have even the slightest bearing” with little more than a backward twitch of their hand.
I can’t blame them. Not really.
It’s partly a product of location. This is America. One Nation Under God. Where apple pie and baseball go hand-in-hand with Sunday-school and sin. Where fifty percent of the population believes with one hundred percent certainty that Noah ferried copulating creatures (including pairings of the planet’s three hundred and fifty thousand species of beetles) through an anger-induced culling of humanity. It features prominently in our politics – one debate question in the last election’s primaries being, "What stance would Jesus take on the matter of immigration?" Swap the name “Jesus” with “Allah” for a clearer view of that one. It’s on our money, our mail, our buildings. Everything about us says, America is faith, and faith is America.
What of the citizens without it? When George Bush Sr. was asked whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists, he said “No”.
Hmm.
To me, it seems an odd sort of irony that a nation founded on (among other things) religious freedom stands out as one of the most likely to shun me for my religious views, or lack thereof. It bothers me now to even have to make that correlation – isn’t it contrary to the point? But that’s the sad extent of it. Citizens who wouldn’t dream of discriminating against another for their beliefs are more than content to socially persecute someone for having no beliefs at all. Call it prejudice or call it fear, it’s an acceptable thing for you to hate me. I know the view from your side of the river. I lived it, after all. But I’d very much like for you to know the view from mine. And there aren’t many bridges between us under the open scrutiny of American living.
So it’s come down to this. I’m outing myself via typo. Term-paper style.
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