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.
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