229. baleful

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.”

− Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”

This past April, I was delighted to reconnect with a friend from college, Noelle, who is currently documenting the rebuilding her life after leaving fundamentalist Christianity:

https://noellemarieblog.wordpress.com

She writes with such elegant frankness and vivid detail of her early experiences as a young Evangelical. In one of her recent blog entries, she recounts when her father sat her down to explain the facts of life: that is, that we are disgusting, perverted sinners who deserve an eternity in Hell for the heinous crime of being born (because Adam and Eve, y’all); whose only worth is the fact that Jesus loves us in spite of our hideous, evil selves.

Noelle’s Jesus is not the Jesus of recent evangelical Christianity, the deity that Richard Dawkins pointedly describes in his controversial 2006 book. She believes in a loving God that bears no resemblance to the hateful, spiteful, malevolent deity we were taught to believe in, love, and fear as children. Though we aren’t geographically close, it’s been an honor to renew our friendship and to be able to encourage her in whatever way I can in her journey towards rebuilding a life based on truth and authenticity.

It’s an interesting time to reconnect as I’m essentially doing the same work of rebuilding my own life after living adrift for so long. It’s daunting work, especially the further down the rabbit hole I get into therapy, as I realize how many unhealthy fundamentalist Christian scripts there are still rattling around in my mind.

In talking with other ex-Evangelicals, one experience we’ve all had in common is how ingrained mask-wearing was to our upbringing and daily lives as Christians. It’s a curious phenomenon, especially in a culture that supposedly holds honesty as a virtue. From an early age, we were inadvertently taught that there are certain faces you wear to church, our in public, at home, and with different social groups.

There’s a lot of pressure to appear spiritual, godly, and pure. Shame is employed as a means of policing behavior in the church under various guises, usually as concern for someone’s spiritual well-being. Prayers would be offered, sometimes publicly, for people who were known to be “struggling” with certain sins. “Helpful” advice would be proffered, with corresponding Bible verses to justify behavior that would otherwise be considered intrusive and even offensive.

“Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and thereby fulfill the law of Christ. For if anyone thinks he is something when he is nothing, he deceives himself.” (Galatians 6:1-3)

As I grew up, I developed personas (even different personalities) for various situations and people. I knew which face to wear at church, at Bible study, at choir practice, at youth group, at church band rehearsal, and out at the bar with friends. When I came out gay, I was one person when out with friends and another just a few hours later when I’d go to church. I even went to service one day after having had phone sex with my first boyfriend the previous night.

It was schizophrenic.

And none of this would be were it not for the culture of externalized self worth and affirmation that’s central to the fundamentalist Christian worldview. Every desire and action for the evangelical Christian is subject to the approval of God via the Bible — that is, the approval of those “qualified” to interpret the Bible based on their personal beliefs and prejudices.

The result is that for many years, even after coming out gay and then atheist, was that I was constantly and unconsciously looking for the approval and affirmation of others who I looked up to and considered authority figures.

“We destroy arguments and every lofty opinion raised against the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ.” (2 Corinthians 10:5)

I didn’t trust myself or my own desires. After all: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). It took almost an entire decade to accept that my same-sex desires weren’t pathological, or evidence of my rebellion against God’s will.

To an extent, I still don’t trust myself. I struggle with the worry that I spent too many years ultimately pursuing the wrong career and educational path for me, having allowed other people’s ideas about what I should want for a career trump my own desires; that I lack the practical experience to make informed opinions about everything from dating to job searching; that, after everything, I’m just a poor imitation of a real human being.

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.” (Philippians 2:3-4, ESV)

An insidious effect of these early formational lessons was coming to believe that what I wanted didn’t matter. To have personal desires was to be selfish. “Dying to self” was the chief ambition of the Christian. “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.”

I’ve often said that fundamentalist Christianity relies heavily on Stockholm syndrome—of teaching people to be their own jailers and tormentors. And the system only works so long as you believe in it. The moment that you stop, it all falls apart, emotionally and psychologically.

Until a few months ago, my personal desires were virtually indistinguishable from the desires of people around me. Understandably, this had profound effects on friendships and romantic relationships.

More on this next time…

201. confutation

Yesterday was Darwin’s birthday, so I watched an HBO documentary called Questioning Darwin, a look at the Creationist movement in the United States and its fierce opposition to the theory of evolution by natural selection. It’s basically a dissection of everything I was taught as a child about myself, the origin of life, and my purpose on Earth.

First, some quotes from Creationists in the film:

• “We believe in Creation, because of our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and God’s word, the holy Bible.”
• “If the theory of evolution is a fact, the Bible must be false, so we’re all stupid ignoramuses.”
• “I do not believe that we’re some sort of highly evolved primate.”
• “The Bible says we are created a little lower than angels, which is much more noble and majestic than the explanation that evolution gives for who we are.”
• “I don’t know how someone could observe humans and miss the dignity that’s put there by God alone.”
• “To put man down as just an animal, that we’re no different than a dog, is preposterous. God made us in His image, and so to say that man is an animal, and God created man in his own image… does one come back and say God is nothing more than an animal?”
• “If we are just a product of this random mutation process, where does morality come from? Where does hope come from? Where does love come from?”
• “If that’s the way the world works, then you believe in a God that doesn’t intervene. That takes away any possibility of miracles, any possibility of answered prayer, any possibility of the resurrection.”
• “To think I have no communication with God would be so devastating. I can’t even imagine adopting such a view just to make peace with Darwin.”
• “I can’t imagine life without knowing that God has a plan, and that that plan is not just for the here-and-now, but that plan includes a hope and a future, and a future way beyond whatever we’ll face here on Earth but a future with Him in heaven.”

What I hear in these voices is fear, thinly masked by certainty in a belief that promises to deliver both answers and purpose. These are people terrified by an existence that’s marked by uncertainty and danger. In a way, they’re right to be afraid, irrational as that fear is.

The beginning of my journey to atheism was indeed in finally accepting the theory of evolution by natural selection. I’m not sure when that happened, exactly—somewhere in the years after graduating from Northwestern College. The more I considered the fossil and genetic evidence that all life on Earth is related, and for the age of the universe and the Earth itself, the less likely it seemed that it was designed. For a while I flirted with the idea of theistic evolution, that God put everything in motion. Then something Julia Sweeney says in Letting Go of God stuck with me:

Intelligent design gets everything backwards. It’s like saying that our hands are miraculous because they fit so perfectly into our gloves: “Look at that! Four fingers and a thumb! That can’t have been an accident!’

Fact is, far from “fearfully and wonderfully made,” we more seem to be haphazardly assembled.

This view of a naturalistic universe had real implications for the beliefs my parents had handed me as a child, beliefs that mirrored the sentiments offered by the quotations above. How could a loving God allow such a world to exist? If I, a being made in the image of God, wanted to prevent suffering, how could an all-powerful being then not banish it completely?

At one point, several individuals talk about surviving substance abuse and how their addiction turned to Christianity. This is a popular talking point: without God we’re just animals, slaves to our darker impulses and passions—that we’ll tear ourselves apart. I don’t know how many presentations I sat through growing up: of “recovering sinners” warning us how bad it was on the outside, and that our only hope for overcoming sin and temptation was Jesus.

A fellow from Answers in Genesis sums it up at one point: “When asked what is the primary reason I believe evolution is incompatible with Biblical Christianity, I can sum it up in one word: death. Whether we’re young or old, death is inevitable.”

In the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham last week, this issue also came up. Ham said something to the effect of: “Bill Nye can’t tell us what happens after we die.” And that’s true. We don’t know. I don’t know. Yet somehow this becomes a talking point for Creationists to insert a Gospel pitch of salvation through Jesus Christ. You cannot talk to a Creationist who won’t do this at some point.

Their response to the news that we’re essentially alone in an amoral and indifferent universe is to try to shut their eyes tight and stop their ears. For them, if evolution is true, that means that life is pointless, aimless, meaningless. I love how Julia Sweeney puts it in Letting Go of God: “What’s going to stop me from rushing out and murdering people?”

For me, accepting evolution was liberating. For years, I agonized over the struggle between my “earthly” desires and my supposed divine purpose on Earth. The news that I’m an animal, with the same origins and subject to the same needs and forces as other creature on this planet, was a relief. It meant there’s nothing wrong with me, the opposite of what Christianity taught.

It’s futile to argue with Creationists. Their arguments are based on emotion, and apparently fear of death and spontaneously becoming murderers or kleptomaniacs. Or gay. Thus, they can easily dismiss threatening, rational evidence in favor of the Bible.

Darwin wrote: “Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work, worthy the interposition of a deity, more humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals.”

198. Le Jugement

This was a card that came up yesterday, reversed, in the ninth position on the Celtic cross spread. It reminds me just how steeped the Rider-Waite-Smith deck is in Judeo-Christian mythology.

The imagery evokes the Resurrection before the Last Judgement from 1 Corinthians: “The trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

In Pamela Coleman Smith’s artwork, the archangel Gabriel awakens the dead with a trumpet blast, who gesture reverently and welcomingly with open arms. The figures below are grey and ashen, while everything above bursts with color.

The banner on the trumpet is likely the Saint George’s Cross, which could be a reference to overcoming the dragon (Revelation 12:8). There’s also a connection in the red and white to the Magician’s clothing. The ocean swelling in the background could be a reference to the sea giving up its dead (Revelation 20:13), but there’s also the connection to the river that seems to flow throughout the Major Arcana cards, starting with the Empress. It mirrors the swelling waves in the foreground of the Fool, the river flowing through Death, and the water in Temperance, The Star, and The Moon. One could say that there’s also a connection to the High Priestess, with her blue robes flowing like water.

Grey is a masculine color in Tarot. The Emperor’s throne, the Hierophant’s church and Justice’s temple; the Chariot, the Hermit, the overcast sky in Death; the Devil’s wings, and the towers in The Tower card and The Moon are all grey (and, dare I say, phallic). The pillars in the High Priestess are black and grey.

The trumpet here has particular meaning for me, as my father is a professional trumpeter.

Some keywords that Waite associated with this card in its upright position are Judgement, Rebirth, Inner Calling, and Absolution. Reversed, it can suggest self-doubt and self-judgement.

Reversed, the Judgement card suggests that you may be indulging yourself in doubt and self-judgement. Your deliberation is causing you to miss the new opportunities that await. A certain amount of momentum has accumulated behind what you have achieved, which could propel you further. If actions are taken now, such momentum will not be lost. Therefore now is not the time for being cautious or introverted, rather it is time to move onwards with confidence and pride.

Additionally, this card suggests that you may be overly hard or critical of yourself and not allowing yourself to truly learn from your mistakes. You may have made some mistakes in the past but see these as learning experiences rather than failures or faults. (BiddyTarot.com)

When I laid out this card, it was in the ninth position in the Celtic cross spread, which indicates any hopes and/or fears of the Querent. One of the major reasons I really haven’t gone out or made any progress with the workshop of my one-act opera is this sea of self-doubt that I’ve been awash in the last couple of weeks. So many things life recently haven’t been working. Job interviews I’ve gone on have proven to be disappointments (the last one didn’t even give a reason: just “applicant was not chosen”); the guys I’ve seen on dates haven’t panned out; my grad school applications… well, that whole thing was rushed and poorly done to begin with.

Tarot scholar Tara Miller writes that “Judgment represents the House of Gabriel, the knowing that Judgment Day can come at any moment; live your life to the fullest, as the trumpet of Gabriel is at hand.” (Wikipedia)

It wasn’t until I renounced my Christian faith that I realized how truly precious and rare life is. As a Christian, I was taught from day one that life is a gift from God. To squander it by pursuing our own wants, desires, and pleasure is arrogance, and a sin. “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” (Mark 8:36)

What I was most angry about after becoming an atheist was not that I’d been fooled or that I’d believed lies my whole life. It was that I’d lost so much time and experience. Instead of learning about Creationism, I could’ve been discovering the wonders of science and our world. I could’ve been discovering who I am, what I care about, what my values as a human being are. I could’ve been exploring my sexuality as a gay man, making mistakes early in life (when you’re supposed to make them), all on the way to finding a partner—and more importantly, a groundedness in who I am as a person. My parents and teachers were wrong: our rock is not Christ. We have to become our own rocks that can weather the storms and arrows of life.

So if life is so short, why do I keep allowing these petty, negative scripts to dominate mine?

Why do I superimpose an inner monologue on everyone, assuming they’re thinking how unattractive, unoriginal, neurotic, unfit, unsuitable, incomplete, and poorly trained I am?

This is why I often stay at home—because, no matter how irrational I know it is, my lizard brain interprets every stray glance or comment as betraying what people really think of me. And the thoughts cascade into self-doubt, self-hate, and self-judgement.

Of course they rejected your grad school applications. You’re a poor excuse for a competent adult and musician.

Of course no one wants to date you. You’re complicated, selfish, difficult to live with, and you don’t enjoy going out to gay bars.

Why bother going anywhere when you’ll just feel like an outsider? No one understands you. Other people know instinctively how to interact with other humans. You? You’re broken, damaged, and worthless.

And so I shut down, retreat and hide myself away. I let my potential stagnate rather than risk having to confront these messages.

The inherent meaning in the Judgement card is transition, one of awakening from death to “new life.” But I need to face the illumination my subconscious is shining on these issues.

189. bordereau

There was a time, not too long ago, when I could never picture myself moving away from Minnesota, from my family, and from my friends who in some ways became more like family than the one I inherited.

Before coming to Minnesota, my family lived in a small college town in central Kansas from about 1986 until 1993, when we moved to Minnesota (20 years ago this past August) after my dad accepted a teaching post at a Christian liberal arts college in Saint Paul.

It’s amazing how quickly a place can become your home. I was never too crazy about living in Kansas as a kid, although in retrospect, summers of running through wheat fields, exploring creeks, and discovering “secret” places that seem forbidden and mysterious to a child’s eyes were pretty idyllic. It was in Kansas, with few other distractions or entertainments, that I first learned to employ my imagination and creativity.

Once in Minnesota, though, all of that was swept from my mind. I’d found my home in the big city. I loved both how big and how small it was. It was an hour and fifteen minute drive to the nearest big city from where we lived in Kansas, so visits there were rare. In Minneapolis, most everything was within a twenty minute distance. (It is curious how Minnesotans measure distance in minutes or hours. We all do it.)

More than that, we found a church in Roseville that was a great fit for our family. My dad quickly got involved with both the music and teaching ministries, my mom was drawn to the children’s ministry (she’d taught third grade at our church in Kansas), and my sisters and I finally found friends in our Sunday school classes. We didn’t have many friends prior to Minnesota, and we enjoyed the community and the camaraderie.

I too got involved with the music ministry at church, first singing in the children’s choir, playing piano in the youth orchestra and later with the adult orchestra, joining the adult choir at age fifteen or so, and later playing percussion with the orchestra. I was also heavily involved in the youth group, so the church was essentially my home for most of my teenage years.

When I started college, my involvement at church lessened as my community focus shifted to a new group of friends and responsibilities. My connection there lessened even more once the senior pastor left and a new cadre took over to “grow” the church, so my reliance on the friends I’d made at college for community deepened. And for a while we formed a very tight-knit group that felt more like family than anything I’d ever known.

As often happens with twentysomethings, people started getting married, having children, and moving away. Our close little family broke up, and it felt as if I’d been set adrift. During this time I’d also left the church I’d grown up in, moved to a different church, but was beginning to really question my beliefs—and my sexuality. That was in 2008, the year that I also came out gay.

It was around this time that I found myself amongst a group of friends from my old church who I’d got to know in a new context. We were “spiritual refugees,” of sorts, dissatisfied with the Evangelical fundamentalism we’d been raised with. I was still trying to get a handle on my new identity as a gay man, and they were planning to start a church geared towards gay Christians and others who’d been rejected by mainstream Christianity.

And, of course, there was Seth. That’s a story I shan’t rehash again. If you want, you can go read about it here, if you don’t already know the story.

Basically, after the events of my birthday on 2011, I felt abandoned by most everyone in my life. Many of my Christian friends stopped talking to me after I came out gay and made it clear that I saw nothing wrong with that. Virtually all of them stopped talking to me after I came out atheist and proceeded to declare war on religion. To be fair, I didn’t make it easy for anyone who had a belief in anything to stay friends with me.

After I was outed to my entire family on 16 November 2009, my relationship with them changed dramatically. I’d never been close to them to begin with, but knowing that they thought of me as broken and mentally ill (which is the general consensus of the Christian community concerning homosexuality—it’s either demonic, rebellion, or a “gender disorder”) put even more of a wedge between us.

I was driving up towards Minneapolis one afternoon when a thought popped into my head: This isn’t my home anymore. It was the same thought I’d had one Sunday while listening to the new senior pastor give a glib sermon with flashy PowerPoint slides: I don’t belong here. For years, I couldn’t imagine leaving my family and the people and places that had meant so much to me. After the Seth fiasco and being thrown out of orbit in my own world, I realized that there wasn’t much of anything holding me there anymore.

The reason this has been in my thoughts is that I’m contemplating starting my Master’s in music composition. To do so, I’ll have to move somewhere—hopefully the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. The last time I contemplated this was in 2006, and the thought of moving away was terrifying. Now it excites me.

I’m tired of working dead-end office temp jobs, answering phones, doing filing and data entry, and watching everyone around me have a life, or at least what looks like a life. My passion, what truly drives and ignites me, is music. The only times I felt truly alive was college, and when I was working on music for shows.

One of my professors once said to me: “You need to go away.” For school, she meant. And I think I’m finally ready to do that.

172. leeward

Several weeks ago I discovered that a friend of mine had never seen the 1964 film version of Lerner and Lowe’s My Fair Lady, with Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. It was rather shocking because A) I grew up with it and can’t imagine anyone else not having seen it; and B) he’s gay… and, well, musicals seem the particular purview of the gays. Hell, it’s one of the qualities that all but gave me away back in the day. (My friend Emily said, “You got way too excited about Sondheim to be straight.”)

My friend and I were talking about the moment that language goes from being merely parroting to true acquisition, when words go from sounds to meaning, and I brought up this iconic scene:

He had a percipient observation about the show: namely, that it’s a picture of imperialism. Eliza Doolittle is taken from the gutter by the chauvinistic Henry Higgins, dressed in the garb of the upper class, and taught how to speak and behave “properly.” In the same way, Native American children were taken from their homes by Christian missionaries and taught how to speak, behave and dress like proper Christians (i.e., Western Caucasian culture).

The reason we were talking about this scene, and this song in particular, is that it illustrates that “light bulb” moment. My college French teacher told my class that her’s took place one semester while studying abroad. She was reading in a tree one day, she said, and all of a sudden everything just snapped into place. She didn’t have to translate from French into English anymore. The words carries meaning.

Writer David Sedaris describes a similar moment in Me Talk Pretty One Day, from the essay collection of the same name:

It was mid-October when the teacher singled me out, saying, “Every day spent with you is like having a cesarean section.” And it struck me that, for the first time since arriving in France, I could understand every word that someone was saying.

Understanding doesn’t mean that you can suddenly speak the language. Far from it. It’s a small step, nothing more, yet its rewards are intoxicating and deceptive. The teacher continued her diatribe and I settled back, bathing in the subtle beauty of each new curse and insult. . .

The world opened up, and it was with great joy that I responded, “I know the thing that you speak exact now. Talk me more, you, plus, please, plus.”

These moments came to mind because several weeks ago I finally stopped believing in God. That’s not to say that I haven’t been an atheist these past two years. I still see no evidence or reason now to continue believing in God. The difference is that, a couple of weeks ago, I finally stopped missing God. It’s like that moment when you finally get over someone you’ve held a torch for, and one day, for whatever reason, those feelings stop. The memory of the love and the feeling is still there, but the gravitational pull doesn’t yank you out of your own orbit every time it wheels around.

Walking to work one morning a couple of weeks ago, the part of me that missed having a God to believe in went away. I’m not sure why it happened just then, but it was as if a balloon had popped, or a string were, and I wasn’t tethered to those feelings anymore. I didn’t feel the need to get angry or mean when someone talked about God or faith. I still get upset when hearing about someone being hurt by Christians, but then I get upset when anyone is hurt by anybody, for any reason.

I’m still passionate about the separation of church and state, about promoting secular and humanist values in society and throughout the world, and encouraging people to think for themselves instead of letting their thinking be done for them by those who want to fetter everyone in the world to a 2,000-year-old book. But I’m not doing it out of some revenge fixation, like a jilted lover railing against an ex.

None of us had a choice about being born in the proverbial Christian missionary school and taught the clean, holy Christian ways of the White Man. Neither did any of us have a choice about being attracted to members of the same sex. Eliza Doolittle chose to become the pupil of Henry Higgins, and accept his narrative of being a “proper lady.” But in the process she maintained her sense of self, and at the end of George Bernard Shaw’s original play, Pygmalion, she does indeed go off to marry Freddy and become a teacher of phonetics. Her final words to Higgins in the play show her to be a truly emancipated woman, unlike the chauvinistic ending of Lerner and Lowe’s musical: “Buy them yourself.”

I didn’t have a choice about being raised a Christian and saddled with all the negativity. But I’ll be damned if my parents’ choices are going to steer the course of the rest of my life.

You dear friend who talk so well: you can go to Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire.

137. fugitive

It’s a cold, wet day in Minneapolis. I was greeted upon leaving the house today by a disgusting, freezing mixture of rain and snow. It’s the kind of thing that makes you want to turn around, call in sick and go back to bed.

This morning I was going through my email inbox and decided to clean out some subscriptions that have been cluttering things up. At some point I signed up for the Google and Amazon offers, but for some time I’ve just been deleting them as they tend to be things that most of us never end up using.

The cruelest offers for me are the ones for “couple weekends” or “____ for two.” It’s egocentric, of course, to assume that the universe would conspire against me in this way. It’s my subjective experience superimposing a narrative over arbitrary events and happenstances that causes the bile to rise in my stomach at the thought that Google is mocking my continued and miserable single existence. But I have a hard time not taking it somewhat personally.

A few months ago I cleaned out my childhood bedroom at my parents’ house, shortly after the events of Christmas day when I cut ties with them completely. They were going to be out of town for a few days and asked me to come by and finish moving all of my stuff out while they were gone. The results were about eight full paper shopping bags of recycling, four large trash bags, several bins that I took to the local Goodwill, and a large box of Christian fundamentalist books I’d amassed over the years. It made me realize just how much stuff we hold on to for purely sentimental, irrational reasons. There were magazines I still have memories reading and enjoying; notebooks of math homework and past assignments; papers I wanted to store for future reference that I hadn’t looked at in years. These were things I had no reason to keep and was just taking up unnecessary space, but felt uneasy and even defensive about getting rid of. It’s anal-retentive, yes, but it still felt comforting to know that a record of my past was in a box somewhere. Needless to say, feeling the weight of nearly twenty-five years-worth of paper and finally putting those bags in the recycling bin was surreal. But it felt good to be free of it at the same time.

The same could be said of my religious beliefs. This past weekend we had a bi-monthly former fundamentalists gathering at a coffee shop near Loring Park in downtown Minneapolis, where part of the gathering is going around and telling our stories of how we left religion. Part of the reason for that is because we generally have someone new at the meeting every time, so we want to give them an opportunity to tell their own story and have their own experience affirmed, as well as to hear our stories. It helps to hear these stories as it reminds us that we’re not alone, even though it often feels like that in a culture where one of the most-often-asked questions is, “Where do you go to church?” and where references to god or to prayer are too common.

For years I held on to my religious beliefs for largely the same reason as I held on to all that stuff. It was comforting and familiar, and I had strong emotional attachments to it. It was my past and my present; my family and my community. But they were gathering dust, and I hadn’t really looked at them in years, and if I had to be totally honest with myself it wasn’t likely that I was going to look at them again any time soon. I hadn’t truly believed in years, even when doing all the research to prove that the bible wasn’t really incompatible with homosexuality—that it was the religious leaders and translators who were prejudiced and bigoted. In reality I was just trying to find reasons to continue pretending that I was a Christian after all. In retrospect, I’m not sure if I ever believed at all, even as a child.

After a couple of moves, my attitude towards “stuff” has changed radically. Whereas ten years ago I couldn’t imagine being able to let go of anything, now I look at all of my possessions with the knowledge that someday I’m going to have to pack all of this stuff up into boxes—and do I really want to lug this downstairs to the truck, haul it across country and then lug it all the way up into my new apartment? It’s just not worth it.

As an atheist now, I view my beliefs largely the same. Knowing that we are finite beings, with an afterlife highly unlikely and this life being all there is, I now treat my beliefs with the same economical thriftiness as I do my belongings. Belief in god and all of the suppositions that go along with that when there is little to no evidence for belief in such a being now feels like lugging a heavy box around.

One of the tenets of Buddhism is renunciation of possessions and the hold that they have on the self. While I don’t believe in any sort of universal consciousness or spirituality, there’s a lot of wisdom in that. It takes work and energy to hold on to things, and they inevitably weigh us down through upkeep and the effort it takes to retain them. One website I looked at said this about Buddhist philosophy: “The quest for comfort is also futile as it is the nature of our mind that the feeling of happiness when our desire is satisfied is only temporary… Thus we spend our lives in the vain and futile quest for possessions, experiences, relationships and more and we are never satisfied. We are forever projecting outward.”

If we’re ever going to be free, our perception towards “stuff” needs to change.

136. caparison

Dunno about anyone else, but I’m always relieved whenever a religious holiday finally passes. Christmas and Easter are probably the toughest to get through, mainly because they’re the two holidays that have entered our national consciousness. Even non-Christians observe them, though for them it’s more about the family gatherings, the food and the gift giving at Christmastime than it is about the birth and death of Jesus Christ, who doubles as a swear word for those of us who don’t accept his deityhood.

I’m often asked, “If it isn’t true, if we’re just deluding ourselves why does it bother you so much?” And it’s a fair question. We don’t begrudge the people who think that they’re Napoleon, or that nefarious government agencies are secretly plotting against them. To be safe, of course, we give them a wide berth, but thankfully we’re past the days when we persecuted people for their delusions. Today we acknowledge that these are symptoms of a malfunctioning mind, and hope for recovery and that the affected individual will someday be a fully-functioning and productive member of society again.

That’s mental illness. In most cases it’s a matter of genetics that comes down to a chemical imbalance in the brain, or even some kind of damage to the brain itself (in the case of something like post-traumatic stress disorder), and people can’t be faulted for that. You’re not going to blame someone for hearing voices or experiencing severe depression. There are drugs and treatment programs to help.

In the case of religion, though, we accept behavior that would normally get a person locked up. We think it’s acceptable to mutilate the genitalia of male infants because a 2,000-year-old book commands it. We tolerate street preachers standing on sidewalks and telling people that they’re wicked and awful and going to hell unless they say a magic prayer to an imaginary god and stop drinking, swearing, and having sex. We allow children to be taught that the earth is 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs and humans co-existed, and that some deity in the sky is watching their every move and can read their thoughts (especially when they reach adolescence). We permit parents to deny their children medical attention because of the belief that to intervene is to interfere in the will of their god, dooming the child to a life of otherwise preventable but excruciating suffering and even death.

Of course, not everyone holds such extreme beliefs. Not every religious person goes around openly judging everyone who doesn’t believe what they do. Not every religious person rejects scientific evidence or proof. Not every religious parent circumcises their male children because of their beliefs (and if they do, it’s often in the interest of hygiene). Nor does every religious parent believe that god would send them and their children to hell for going to the doctor. It’s wrong to generalize, no matter how tempting it is to do so.

My problem with Easter is that it stands for two appalling lies. The first is that Easter itself is really a pagan fertility festival. The name can be traced to several ancient gods and goddesses, including Ēostre, the Saxon-Germanic goddess of the dawn, whose festival fell around the end of March and early April, and her observances involved both hares and eggs. Other possible candidates include the Greek goddess Demeter and the Assyrian fertility goddess Ishtar.

The second lie is that Christ’s death was a noble sacrifice. Noble sacrifice? As if having yourself butchered up for an imaginary sin that you invented in the first place is noble! It’s a bit like creating an imaginary virus, telling everybody that they were in terrible danger and then waving your hands over them in order to cure them of said virus. But this is something that people truly, sincerely, deeply believe! They think that, as John 3:16 states, “god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son; that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (I can still quote it in the King James Version.)

What I object to is the fundamental belief that many Christians have of the certainty of the existence of god. Sure, some atheists may be certain that there is no god—but how can you be sure of something for which there is no evidence? Atheists can’t disprove god any more than theists can prove it, so what does it really matter?

I don’t have much of a problem with religious people who shrug and admit that they don’t know, that they want to believe, and refuse to force that belief on others. That I can at least respect. Sometimes you can’t help who you love, as I should well know, and that probably extends to belief as well.

What I object to the kind of mindless bible thumping that’s been going on lately in conservative circles, especially where women’s and gay rights are concerned. I object to the kind of magical thinking that allows religious people to retreat into their places of worship and leave the fate of the world and their fellow human beings to their imaginary god. I object to the kind of extremist, political, dominionist ideology that leads them to think that this world is theirs to take back; that we all ought to strap ourselves into their subjective straight jackets; and that, by virtue of their birth, all children ought to be likewise fettered as well before they have a chance to learn to think for themselves. I object to the kind of theist who looks at evidence and rejects it based on the fact that it contradicts something in their holy book written thousands of years ago by pre-scientific people.

I object to living an unexamined life, to never questioning what you’re taught or what you believe, and to not being true to the essence of who you are as a person. At best, we live a hundred years, and a life is a terrible thing to waste.

132. adroit

“Back before election day, there was a part of me—the part of myself I don’t like—that harbored a secret, perverse desire that Bush would defeat Gore. Because a Bush victory, I thought, would offer me four illustrious years of taking the high road. I would be wise. Unlike my Republican brethren, who pooh-poohed Bill Clinton’s legitimacy from the get-go . . . I would be a bigger person . . . In my preelection daydream of what a Bush presidency might be like, I imagined that I would criticize his policies and lambaste his statements with a civics-minded nobility. All my venom, spite, and, as long as we’re dreaming, impeccable logic, would be directed at our president. As in “Look how our president is wrecking our country.”

– Sarah Vowell. “The Nerd Voice.” The Partly Cloudy Patriot

As the results of the Louisiana primary are rolling in tonight, I’m looking over the revised scoreboard for the GOP race for the Republican presidential nomination (which looks to me like a choice of being either drawn and quartered or raked over the breaking wheel) and considering the real possibility of one of these lunatics being elected president.

The likelihood of me actually voting for either of these guys (and, let’s face it kids, it’s down to Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum now) is as high as someone actually developing a warp drive engine next week to take us to the nearest star. However, the Evangelical base is nonetheless highly motivated, and that has left me kind of skittish and uneasy. My thoughts when contemplating the phrase “President Rick Santorum” include things like getting my passport renewed before it expires next year, and wondering what would be involved in obtaining a visa to Canada for four years. Tonight this actually led me to do a bit of reading on Canada’s immigration website blithely and (in appropriate Canadian fashion) understatedly titled, “Come to Canada,” in which I discovered that a passport claiming to have been issued by Somalia is not considered valid documentation for the Canadian government.

Of course, it’s still early in the game. The Republicans haven’t even chosen their David to go up against the liberal Goliath of Obama, and with all of the biblical rhetoric being thrown around, the analogy are inevitable. November is still a long ways away, and in an election year even the month before Election Day can seem like an entire year, with the barrage of campaign attack ads and relentless buttonholing of aggressively enthusiastic campaign workers.

Now, like Vowell, there is a perverse part of me that rather enjoys playing the part of the aggrieved contrarian antagonist. I enjoy the satisfaction of being justifiably outraged, especially when I find myself in the position of underdog. In 2008, I voted for Libertarian candidate Bob Barr in an act composed of one half protest and one half dreamy idealism. I knew that a third party candidate stood little chance of ever being elected, but goddammit if I was going to vote my values anyway.

And then Barack Obama was elected president, and for months I went on angry tirades about how stupid Americans were and how bad things were going to get under his malevolent socialist gaze. The socialist in sheep’s clothing had been elected by the dumb sheep of the country, but at least I wasn’t responsible. I could sit back and happily scowl at the grinning, snickering Obama supporters in that first year on whose heads the blood of the nation would eventually fall. And the angry part of me actually still can’t bring myself to refer to him as the president, and in the four years that he’s been in office I haven’t slipped once. For a while I even used the snide epithets “You-Know-Who” and “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” to talk about him.

And wouldn’t you know it, four years later, I’m thinking that universal health care might not be such a bad thing after all now that I’ve been uninsured for almost two years.

So is it fair to characterize Rick Santorum as a religious fanatic, and Mitt Romney as a religious nutcase? I don’t need to expound much further on my opinions about Santorum, but Romney worries me precisely because we don’t talk about his religious views.

From 1981 to 1994, Mitt Romney was a bishop in the Church of Latter-day Saints. For thirteen years he presided over and conducted meetings and worship services, served as president of the ward’s quorum of priests and acted as a “Judge in Israel.” He was not just a casual attender, like many politicians who attend church just in order to garner the Christian vote and support. The reason that we haven’t heard much about this may be that Mormons aren’t loud-and-proud in the way that Evangelicals are. Maybe more Christians would be understated about their beliefs if they had to do a mission and have doors slammed in their faces while trying to proselytize.

However, in order to be a Mormon you have to accept that the angel Moroni actually appeared to Joseph Smith and showed him the location of the gold plates that were basically buried right in his backyard. You have to actually believe that a Jewish prophet named Lehi brought his family to America in 600 BC (though no archaeological evidence of that exists). You have to believe that the Native Americans are descended from the 12 tribes of Israel (not to mention from a cultural group that was totally evil). You have to believe that if you’re lucky enough to be born male that when you die that you’ll have your own planet. If he’s a serious Mormon, he wears a special kind of underwear.

Unless he’s that two-faced as a politician, Romney really believes those things, which in my opinion is just a step above Scientology, with its teachings about Xenu the evil intergalactic overlord. This qualifies him and any Mormon as a nutcase, but of course in this country we respect irrational beliefs and call them “religion.”

And he wants to be President…

86. smoke

Note: This was written after a rough day and I didn’t feel like doing any carefully articulated writing. Please consider that when reading. Thanks.

One day when we came back from work, we saw three gallows rearing up in the assembly place, three black crows. Roll call. SS all round us, machine guns trained: the traditional ceremony. Three victims in chains—and one of them, the little servant, the sad-eyed angel.

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lip. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

“Where is God? Where is He” someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over.

The march past began. The two adults were no longer alive. Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving; being so light, the child was still alive . . .

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

“Where is God now?”

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

“Where is He? Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows . . .”

– Elie Wiesel, NIGHT.

This was the beginning of the end of my faith and belief in God.

The past couple of days I have had a number of conversations with theists of various persuasions and backgrounds. There is no conversation in particular that stands out— rather, it’s the whole thing. People who hold to belief in a benevolent and loving Creator God—who insist at the end of the day that God is good. All the time (as the song goes).

I used to say that. The thing is, I don’t even know if I believed it then. Did I believe it before I saw planes turned into bombs laced with human beings? Before I saw people jumping out of the Twin Towers rather than slowly burn to death in flames? Before we all saw pictures of the Rwandan genocides? Of the Darfur? Of the charred corpses of school children chained to metal posts and set ablaze?

God is not good.

God is far from good.

God is, at best, a swaggering, apathetic deity who shows up when it’s convenient, or (like a politician kissing babies or volunteering at the soup kitchen when the cameras are on) when it will make Him look good.

The rest of the time He can’t be bothered with the human race He allegedly created and then loosed on this earth—unless, of course, those human beings are picking up straw on the Sabbath, or using His name as a swear word, or loving (in every sense of the word “love”) someone of the same sex.

The best thing to do as concerns God is to stay as far away from Him as possible, and try and not get caught up in the destructive path of that divine tornado. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear that God doesn’t care about you or anyone other than Himself. Why should He be bothered if you are six months unemployed and running out of money, or your mother or grandmother has cancer, or you’re struggling to believe that He even exist— as long as His great Name is spread throughout the world?

God is a God who lets a child grow up in a home dominated by Christian fundamentalist colonialism, to be twisted by obnoxious doctrines such as that God loves sinners but hates sin, and is willing to throw you into an eternity in Hell if you don’t pray a magic prayer to Jesus (who He trussed up and killed as a figurative burnt offering to Himself).

Amongst other things, I learned that God can only accept you if you’re a heterosexual just like everyone else, and that homosexuals are sinners and therefore going to Hell unless they turn around, stop being gay, marry some women and start popping out Christian babies to twist and pervert.

So why am I so angry at Christians who continue to believe in God, or go to Church even though they don’t believe those things? Because they believe in a God who gave me the parents that I had; who doesn’t seem to give a fuck about the Creation; and who remains silent when someone psychologically beaten and bloody begs for just a sign He’s there. And all of the apologies from compassionate progressive Christians who insist that not all Christians believe or behave in the way that I and many other experienced Christianity growing up won’t make up for twenty-eight years of mental abuse I lived through.

Does this make me a “wounded apostate”? Perhaps. I prefer to think of it as having my eyes opened. At a certain age most of us drop our beliefs in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and other imaginary friends once we no longer need them and once our child brain is capable of evaluating evidence. Because I take His silence as a clear indicator of his non-existence.

So go ahead. Tell me I should believe in God. Tell me how much He loves me. Tell me that He’s good. All the time.

Not far from us, flames were leaping up from a ditch, gigantic flames. They were burning something. A lorry drew up at the pit and delivered its load—little children. Babies! Yes, I saw it—saw it with my own eyes . . . those children in the flames.

Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.

Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever.

– Elie Wiesel, NIGHT.