167. decathect

“Perhaps I have been wrong to keep so much of my mind from you,” said Mr Norrell, knotting his fingers together. “I am almost certain I have been wrong. But I decided long ago that Great Britain’s best interests were served by absolute silence on these subjects and old habits are hard to break. But surely you see the task before us, Mr Strange? Yours and mine? Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England. We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

Happy 2013 everyone! Here’s hoping this year is better for everyone than the previous one.

Second, in the past couple of days I’ve had an odd but pleasant series of encounters with old friends I haven’t seen or heard from in a while.

Friday night while picking up a game piece from a local store at one of the malls near my house, I heard someone calling my name. I looked up and saw that it was Dawn, a woman I knew from my old church, the one I’d grown up in from age 10 until leaving it at about age 24. It had been almost six years since our last meeting. She and I were in the choir there for many years, and had done some acting together too. I even directed her daughter as the White Witch in my adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe we performed one year.

We exchanged some of the usual pleasantries about the newest developments, and talked about mutual acquaintances we’d bumped into randomly while out and about, as we were doing then. Turns out she’d been following me somewhat on Facebook, so it wasn’t necessary to fill her in on the biggest developments — namely, that I’m gay and an atheist.

“You don’t exactly hide it!” she joked.

And it’s true. I explained, as I do for everyone, that I try to live my journey as publicly as possible to be an advocate for others who feel isolated or powerless. If anyone can benefit from my story and experience and not go through the same struggles, it’s worth it.

The other day, Leah, a friend of mine from London popped on Facebook and we ended up having a delightful conversation along the same lines. I met her at Northwestern College about ten years ago when she was spending a year studying abroad. Why there and not somewhere else? I don’t know, but whatever the reason I’m grateful for the friendship.

In the course of catching up she asked about my dad, and I said I hadn’t talked to him in about a year. I told her a bit about the split with my family, and the reasons, and the struggle that’s been. Though she’s a Christian, she was at a loss to understand how they could refuse to accept me. Hers is a god of love and acceptance rather than one of rules and strict regulations.

It’s funny, there are so many people from that period of my life who I haven’t talked about my sexuality or loss of faith with, either because we’ve drifted apart and lost contact, or because the occasion hasn’t arisen. I suppose, for whatever reason, there’s some hesitation to share who I am now with who I was then.

Just a few months ago, before I started going to therapy, I would’ve found the notion of either friend offering to pray for me offensive. Depending on how spiteful I felt at the moment, the offer might even be thrown back in their face. I don’t believe that there is any evidence that anyone is listening to their prayers, or that they have any tangible effect on the physical world. But the curious thing is that I’ve learned to look past the religious undertones and hear that they are thinking of me when they pray for my immortal soul. Dawn said whenever I popped up on Facebook that she would talk to God about me. How often do we really keep in mind the people we care about, take an interest in their welfare, and go out of our way to be a positive change for them?

The past week or so I’ve been listening to Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. Part of it is Simon Prebble’s captivating performance, but it’s such a good story. The other night while running some errands I was struck by the above-quoted passage.

“Magic cannot wait upon the pleasure of a King who no longer cares what happens to England,” says Mr Norrell. “We must break English magicians of their dependence on him. We must make them forget John Uskglass as completely as he has forgotten us.”

I realized that this has been my attitude towards God and religion since 2011. We must break people’s dependence on the supernatural. The first flash of my atheism showed itself on 9/11. In watching the towers fall, it suddenly seemed to me that no one was minding the store and that bad things happen solely because of people’s choices, not because some higher power willed anything. In the following years I began to rely more on evidence and reason for my beliefs than on the teachings of thousand-year old religions.

If evidence could be found for the existence of God, I’d gladly consider it. But the more we look at the universe, the more we see the workings of a wholly natural one, processes we’re just beginning to grasp. We don’t need a higher power, and for me that doesn’t lessen its beauty or importance. If anything, it makes every moment I’m alive that much more breathtaking for its transience and ephemeralness.

“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born.”

To live at all is miracle enough.

160. pidgeonhole

A few days ago in the New York Times there was a 5,700-word piece about Ashlyn Blocker, a.k.a. “the girl who feels no pain.” She was born with a rare condition called congenital analgesia, better known as “congenital insensitivity to pain.” It never occurred to me how important pain really is to social animals like ourselves, who are in almost constant danger from even the moment we are conceived.

These kids walk barefoot over broken glass, touch hot stoves, break bones, chew off parts of their tongues, all without feeling pain. When Ashlyn was very young, her parents brought her to bed with them, with her mother holding her hands “so [Ashlyn] wouldn’t chew on her skin or rub her eyes during the night.” The article begins with a story of her reaching into boiling water to retrieve a spoon. These children can lose limbs but only experience the fear of seeing that part of their body gone — but not feel a thing.

Last night I had a heated argument with my boyfriend, Jason. As most fights go, it was over something relatively minor. While cleaning his room he’d found a necklace that his grandmother had given him. This necklace has a cross dangling from it. When I saw that he had hung it up in his bedroom, I asked him if he had to have it there. He said that he did, as it carries importance to him as an artifact of his grandmother’s, who is still alive and very close to him. He’s had close calls with death, having survived a brain tumor and related medical complications, so I understand its significance to him.

However, I objected to the cross since for me it’s a symbol of oppression and torture, both in the historical and personal sense. Virtually since it was adopted by the Church as its emblem about 600 years after Jesus was supposedly nailed to it, it has gone before Crusader armies and presided over Inquisitions, both Catholic and Protestant. Ignoring the fact that the common form of the crux romanus was in the shape of a letter T, with a cross-piece attached to a stake, countless saviors have been crucified in myths throughout history: Krishna, Wittoba, the Celtic god Hesus, the Mexican god Quetzalcoatl, and the Persian god Mithras — to name a few.

Moreover, it’s a hideous torture and execution device. For those who say that it represents the love of God (John 3:16), it’s curious to me that it was so necessary for God to have himself murdered by the imperfect people he created as a sacrifice to himself to make up for how imperfect the people he made were — and are. Why not just forgive sins instead of literally making a martyr of yourself?

Of course, that presumes a major assumption that there are any sins to forgive. The so-called “original sin” committed by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden never took place because the Garden of Eden is fictional, just as Adam and Eve are mythical. According to Christian teachings, that first sin was imputed to the entire human race, therefore precipitating the need for Jesus’ supposed sacrifice. However, if there was no original sin to forgive, what was the need, exactly?

The real reason I find the cross so offensive though is that it represents for me 25 years of agonizing over my sexuality, and 28 years of desperately trying to believe what I believed the Bible, my church and my family told me I needed to believe. There were so many nights I was kept awake by the anguish I felt over my doubts and my perceived lack of belief, and as I got older the abhorrent sexual feelings for other men that were stirring within me. For Jason that cross represents his loved ones and his connection to his family. For me, it represents everything I’ve lost, and all of the time that I wasted trying to be a good Christian — time I’ll never get back.

I had a long talk last night at home with my friend Emily about the fight, and what it was really over. She asked a question that both Jason and my therapist Sarah have asked: do you blame yourself for not leaving sooner? Yes, I do blame myself for lacking the courage to come out earlier. But this is how Richard Dawkins opens The God Delusion, with a story about his wife:

As a child, my wife hated her school and wished she could leave. Years later, when she was in her twenties, she disclosed this unhappy fact to her parents, and her mother was aghast: ‘But darling, why didn’t you come to us and tell us?’ Lalla’s reply is my text for today: ‘But I didn’t know I could.’

Here’s the crux: I didn’t know that I could have left Christianity, or come out as a gay man. Yes, I had doubts and there were numerous red flags raised over the years that I learned to think my way around or ignore; but it was either follow the Bible, or go to Hell. More than eternal damnation, I was terrified of my parents’ rejection and the reprisal of my church community. It wasn’t until I’d drifted away from those relationships and the fear of losing them and God had faded sufficiently that I was able to speak my mind and admit that I didn’t believe in God.

Yes, religion is a tool that can be used for good or evil. Trouble is, there’s no one to be angry at. My parents were brainwashed, just as were the other adults in my life growing up were. Their only concern is for my soul, not my feelings.

Just as Ashlyn Blocker has no idea what pain feels like, those who haven’t suffered abuse at the hands of religious people can’t understand what the cross looks like to those who have. It’s beautiful to them, but a putrid symbol of hatred to me.

112. codification

One of the great things about living in a city is the inordinate proximity and access to basically everything. There are a gadzillion restaurants to choose from and sample; opportunities to attend arts events; and stores of every size and niche to find whatever you happen to be looking for.

One of the downsides of living in the city is being surrounded by a gadzillion people, but still feeling completely alone. Even for those of us who have a ton of friends, we still run the risk of feeling rather isolated. I was talking with a friend about this yesterday; that we have friends who we rarely get a chance to see because we all have so much going on. We have jobs that take up most of our day; errands to run and things to do; then some of us have families and significant others to attend to; and seeing everyone becomes a scheduling nightmare, so we may go months (or years) between seeing certain people.

This is one of the good things about the church that I miss probably more than anything: the built-in, readily available social network. You can get together on Sunday morning for a couple of hours every week and see all of your friends in one place. You can even see them several times a week, at bible studies, choir/band practice, potluck dinners, etc. That sort of thing simply doesn’t exist in the atheist/skeptic community, and it does make me sad.

I’ve been feeling dissatisfied lately with that lack of community in my life. As much as I enjoy the company of my Christian friends (some of whom I’ve known for over ten years, and with whom I have had many wonderful experiences and memories), being with them now isn’t the same as it is being with nontheists. This is something they don’t tell you when you’re first deconverting from Christianity, that your world is about to go topsy-turvy; or if they do tell you, you can’t imagine how extensively everything gets re-written. It’s a bit like going to summer camp or Europe, having an incredibly life-changing experience, and then going home and not feeling like you belong anymore; or that you returned home only to find that your childhood home had been magicked away by a wicked fairy (sorry, I’m nearly done with Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell and am rather concerned about fairies). It’s what Frodo experiences coming back to the Shire after going to Mordor, when you long to be amongst those who have been on the same journey. As nice as some of my Christian friends are, they simply can’t understand how differently the world looks once you no longer believe in god.

A while ago a friend asked me why it mattered that I needed atheist friends. After all, I have friends who love and care about me. To me, this rather sounds like conservatives asking gays why they want gay marriage instead of civil unions. To those who already have a place of belonging, surrounded by people who (mostly) believe the same things that they do (i.e., believe in god, that this personal god is the “author of human life,” etc), it may sound like atheists are just whining. After all, we chose to leave the church—right? We chose to stop believing in god—right?

We are primates—pretty advanced primates, but primates nevertheless. Like our close cousins, we have a complex social structure based on our belonging to and our place within the tribe. With our larger brain size and capacity for higher intelligence comes self-awareness, and all of the perennial problems associated with it. Instead of sniffing each other’s butts, belonging is more like complex mathematical algorithms now, with a long matching checklist of beliefs, social class, media preferences and so on.

Being a nontheist is a unique experience in humankind today. A thousand years from now our descendants may look back with quaint curiosity at their primitive ancestors embroiled in stupid squabbles over religion and belief. Perhaps in a thousand years belief in gods will have died out, just as the Neanderthals died out 30,000 years ago or so. What must it have been like for the first tribe of homo sapiens to be living amongst their Neanderthal kin, alike but different? For the first time in recent geological human history, there are those amongst us who do not hold belief in gods or the supernatural. We are a small tribe living amongst those who still believe very strongly and very fervently.

But we are growing.

As Richard Dawkins writes in the preface to The God Delusion,

Indeed, organizing atheists has been compared to herding cats, because they tend to think independently and will not conform to authority. But a good first step would be to build up a critical mass of those willing to ‘come out’, thereby encouraging others to do so. Even if they can’t be herded, cats in sufficient numbers can make a lot of noise and they cannot be ignored.

It’s one of the reasons why this year I’m planning to get more “activist” about my atheism, and engage in more volunteering in order to start finding and building community.

But how to re-create the community that I enjoyed in the church as a Christian? Is it even possible? And what might it look like? Atheists don’t really believe anything. We have no codified tenets. Some of us had abusive church backgrounds, while some of us (like myself) knew wonderful people; and some of us grew up in secular homes where god was rarely (if ever) mentioned. All that unites us is our non-belief in gods and the supernatural, and our shared humanity.

A few years ago I lived with several friends in an apartment complex. Myself and two guy friends lived in one unit, while three of our girl friends lived next door. Ours became a central “gathering spot” for everyone. I wish our community as atheists and nontheists could look like that.

84. genuflect

“God is love. I mean, can’t it be that simple for me? You hear it all the time, “God is love.” God is love. God is… a force of love. God is a force of love… in the universe!”
– Julia Sweeney, Letting Go of God

Last night I was chatting on the Facebook with a friend of mine who is a pastor. Now I’m trying to be cognizant of being the “belligerent atheist” and not attack my friends who have religious belief. That is not a good way to hold onto friends, or make friends; and it’s not how I want people to see me either. Plus, I’m all for people questioning my beliefs and picking them apart. One of the tenets I try to live my life by is holding no belief so sacred that I wouldn’t throw it out immediately if it were contradicted by facts or evidence.

And I’d hope it would be one of my friends proving me wrong. And I’d love them for it.

At one point my pastor friend and I were discussing how there are agnostics and even atheists at his church, and how during prayers these people substitute “Love” for “God,” which smacks of disingenuousness to me. It’s utterly perplexing how an atheist could attend church at all. I can understand valuing the community aspect. That is something that is sorely lacking in my own life, and I could almost entertain the idea of attending a church were it not for the religious aspect of it.

I could never pray to “Love.” Even the idea of it makes me uneasy because I’d know what we really meant was “God,” and I don’t really believe in any “higher power” or “supreme being.” He asked if I believe in “Love” and I said that no, I don’t, not in that way. I believe in a wholly natural universe, and that love is a chemical state within the brain, but that this doesn’t diminish its importance by being animal. Love is a many-splendored thing, but not worthy of divine enthroning in our hearts (though Love and the Divine are equally capable of horrors as they are of wonders). You could really substitute anything for “God” in that case, so I’m flummoxed why we’d bother praying to “Love” at all and instead focus on being loving.

What sprang to mind immediately when I heard this was the above-quoted excerpt from Julia Sweeney’s story, Letting Go of God, in which she talks about being raised Catholic as a teenager during the Vatican II changes:

In my senior year of high school they had us go on a special retreat, called a “Search.” And they took us off to a retreat house and they put these big blankets over the windows so you didn’t know what time it was and they didn’t let you sleep for two days and of course everyone kept breaking down, crying, and saying, “God is love. God is love.” Only we were actually saying, “Fred is love. Fred is love.” Because they asked us to call God “Fred” instead of God, because the name God was too off-putting for a lot of people and Fred felt… friendlier!

In my last entry I started to ponder what might be wrong with recognizing Christianity (especially liberal “progressive” Christianity) as essentially sexed-up humanism.

Liberal Christianity is admirable in many ways. It tries to be a haven for those who have been abused by traditional, conservative and/or fundamentalist Christianity, taking the positive aspects of the faith and institution and rejecting the rigidity and dogmatism of its older sibling. Some movements such as the Emergent Church advocate a return to the original tenets and principles of the early church: living a communal lifestyle, focusing on “being” rather than “doing,” and de-emphasizing traditional evangelism and systematic theology. Some believe in learning from the faiths (“narratives”) of others, and stress authenticity and conversation. They also believe strongly in morality and social justice.

It is essentially Christianity viewed through a post-modernist lens of deconstructionism and any other academic or philosophical idée du jour. It’s a theological smörgåsbord: Take what works, ignore the rest, or explain away what you don’t like. On the surface it seems a huge improvement over the dogmatism of fundamentalism. One of the things that ultimately turned me off to fundamentalist Christianity was how much mental gymnastics had to be done in order to make it work—God’s love vs. God’s wrath; human free will vs. divine omniscience; divine revelation vs. human understanding. We wrestle with questions like, “Why can God be jealous, but people can’t be jealous?” Oh, because God is God, and God is the only perfect being in existence. (If you’d like a real mind-bender, read Jonathan Edwards’ 1749 dissertation, Concerning The End For Which God Created the World, a vigorous critique of the purpose for the entire universe using Enlightenment reasoning.)

However, hasn’t progressive Christianity gone the opposite direction from fundamentalism, so open to internal criticism to the point that one might wonder why they even call themselves Christian. You don’t believe in the virgin birth? The miracles of Christ weren’t literal? The bible isn’t literal? What… do you believe in then? That God is a force of… love in the universe?

Recently I moved into a friend’s house and immediately set about ordering my bedroom. As far as layout and design principles go, I generally prefer to go with feng shui, or at least what makes its way onto the Internet. I placed my bed so that it wouldn’t be parallel with the door; used earth tones in decorating; don’t have a television in there (although with my bedroom there isn’t room!); have an air purifier to circulate air and keep it fresh; have several levels of lighting, including candles; and have images up on the walls of things I want to see happen in my life. Do I do this because I believe in an energy that flows through all things (an élan vital, if you will), or that arbitrary direction should determine which way a room faces? Hardly. I favor feng shui because I recognize the psychological power that aesthetics has on people. A cluttered space is going to make me feel less relaxed and settled. Having fresh air in the room promotes respiratory health. Earth tones are visually soothing. And so on.

Likewise, I haven’t entirely thrown out the Christian principles I was raised with as a child. Things like “Do unto others” and “Don’t worry about things you can’t change” are good principles to live by. What I’ve done away with is, like feng shui energies, the metaphysical and tried to take away what good can be gleaned from the practice. If it works in principle, why reinvent the wheel? But I don’t have to believe that it’s “true” to use it.

In substituting “Love” for “God,” I hear the same intellectual dishonesty displayed in the Intellectual Design movement, which takes out “God” and replaces it with an unknown force that is behind the structuring and creation of the universe – and all life, simple, complex; animal, human. But instead of delving into exploration behind the mysteries of the universe, as science is supposed to do, it elevates mystery and discourages true and vigorous inquiry. Dawkins in Chapter 4 of The God Delusion:

Here is the message that an imaginary ‘intelligent design theorist’ might broadcast to scientists: ‘If you don’t understand how something works, never mind: just give up and say God did it. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries, for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. We need those glorious gaps as a last refuge for God.’ St Augustine said it quite openly: ‘There is another form of temptation, even more fraught with danger. This is the disease of curiosity. It is this which drives us to try and discover the secrets of nature, those secrets which are beyond our understanding, which can avail us nothing and which man should not wish to learn’ (quoted in Freeman 2002).

This is a rather simplistic reduction of ID by Dawkins (and rather condescending, in my opinion), but this is the same intellectual pitfall that progressive Christianity falls into. No matter how much questioning Christians do of their faith, how affirming they are of human diversity and towards the GLBT community, or how passionate they are about social justice, there will always come a point where the Christian mind “gives up” and accepts the ineffableness of divine mystery. God is always right; Man is always subject.

More later. I’m all thought-out.

80. crowns

“Religion can endanger the life of the pious individual, as well as the lives of others. Thousands of people have been tortured for their loyalty to a religion, persecuted by zealots for what is in many cases a scarcely distinguishable alternative faith. Religion devours resources, sometimes on a massive scale. A medieval cathedral could consume a hundred mancenturies in its construction, yet was never used as a dwelling, or for any recognizably useful purpose. Was it some kind of architectural peacock’s tail? If so, at whom was the advertisement aimed? Sacred music and devotional paintings largely monopolized medieval and Renaissance talent. Devout people have died for their gods and killed for them; whipped blood from their backs, sworn themselves to a lifetime of celibacy or to lonely silence, all in the service of religion. What is it all for? What is the benefit of religion?”

– Richard Dawkins, “The God Delusion”

Last night I was at Starbucks, finishing work on a large proofing project for work. Dawkins’ words had a particularly congruous ring to them at that point, as I was spending time outside of work on something that was for work instead of on the rather pressing writing projects I need to be plugging away at. (Hmmm. Maybe that does make me a writer.) Researchers estimate that we spend over a third of our lives at work, and I’ve written in the past about the necessity of being invested in a career or line of work or activity that is driven by deep passion. Life is too short to waste it on so paltry a thing as a job.

Oh god, I sound like a Hippie.

Oh well.

The other day I was asked about the themes that I write about, and my off-the-cuff answer was something about the pursuit of truth in whatever circumstance you find yourself in; but the next morning in the shower I realized that religion is a dominating theme in my writing, and specifically, people living in its awful and haunting shadow. To be clear, religion has done positive things for the world and for society. It provides comfort, direction and meaning to billions of people throughout the world. Some of the greatest relief organizations have been founded and steered by Christians and people of faith. Without Christianity, we might not be as compassionate or charitable a culture as we are now, though other cultures and worldviews have developed both attributes independent of Christianity, which happens to have been the historical vehicle of transmission in the West.

I’ve been devoting a lot of time on this blog to attacking religion, which I guess makes me sound like one of those angry, bitter, cantankerous atheists like Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. If that’s so, I’m flattered and consider myself in good company. In the opinion of myself and many others, religion is one of the most serious problems still plaguing the world today, and it would be great to see the end of pernicious blind faith in my lifetime, though I won’t hold my breath. As long as gay teens are brutalized with toxic theologies about their innate and beautiful sexuality; Muslim women swelter in burqas on hot summer days because their patriarchal culture denigrates their bodies; or gullible churchgoers are duped into throwing their hard-earned money away; and as long as the Rick Perrys, Michele Bachmanns and Rick Santorums of the world are taken with any degree of seriousness, I will rail against religion and the evil that it is doing in the world, and the deeply distasteful, unpleasant and vindictive God looming over all of it.

My friend Adam is one of several people I know who are starting a church together. (I’ve mentioned it on here before in the past, SafeHouse Church.) This morning he posted about “Justice and the love of God,” a call-to-arms of sorts of putting your money where your mouth’s been running in terms of putting your resources to use where they’ll do the most good. Adam is passionate about social justice as an essential Christian virtue, something I find admirable and exemplary. He also rejects the absurd and destructive eschatology at the heart of American Evangelical Christianity; that teaches that the “End Times” are at hand and that God has orchestrated a final showdown between Good and Evil, and all that really matters is “saving souls for Jesus.” Were that more Christians shared Adam’s attitude, the church might not have as great a need for missionaries and it might be the compassionate and world-changing faith it was meant to be.

The other night I was over visiting two friends of mine, Joe and Jenny, who are also on the ground level of starting up SafeHouse. (Joe is one of the pastors, along with Adam.) In the discussion that took place that evening, I was trying to understand his theological and philosophical positions. I’m reminded of a line from an episode of the show Mad Men that I watched last night while finishing up the proofing work, where a Beatnik girl whines, “How come every time we have a party the ladies have to listen to the men talk?” (I imagine it’s what Jenny might have been thinking while Joe and I were talking.) Talking philosophy can be very dry going, but it was really a much more interesting discussion than that. Joe’s an intelligent guy and fun to talk to, but the question I kept coming back around to was, “Why bother with Christ at all? Can’t you do the things you do without dragging God into it?” These are the questions I’m pressing Adam with as well.

Joe is a post-modern (whatever that means anymore), doesn’t believe in absolute truth (at least as far as I understood him), and accepts evolution as the most likely explanation for life on earth. As best I could discern from him, Christianity is the narrative that works best for him and for his church, and that they feel the most connection to. Douglas Adams likens religion to feng shui, an ancient architectural philosophy built around making spaces to suit dragons. “It’s worth remembering,” he said in a speech delivered at Cambridge, “that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it’s worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there.”

Or, as William James said, “It doesn’t work because it’s true: it’s true because it works.”

But still I’m wondering, “Why bother with Jesus or God at all?” If you don’t really believe it’s fundamentally true (and I do think it matters a great deal whether it’s true or not), why not take the positive tenets of religion – altruism, kindness, generosity, love – and jettison the rest? Instead of superimposing a theistic narrative onto everything, throwing your money away on a church building and its ecclesiastical-ish trappings, wasting hours on Sunday morning singing communal songs to God (which is really more of a themed rock show anyway), and fretting about filling seats every week; why not go out and campaign for free speech (or marriage equality and gay rights – take your pick), raise money to go dig wells or medical relief in third world countries, or feed the poor and sick and take care of widows? Those are the things that the Jesus of the bible seemed concerned about.

Just as it’s a waste to spend life working a job, religion ultimately robs humanity of valuable time and energy that could otherwise be devoted to other more worthy pursuits. When I think of the priests who have spent their lives in devoted, celibate service to God; of the men and women who have beat themselves up trying to conform to the bizarre Evangelical Judeo-Christian sexual mores; and of all the people who have gone willingly to a gruesome martyr’s death (to cite just a few examples), it makes me sick with sorrow for humanity. Let’s say what we really mean, not what sounds nice, comforting or convenient. We don’t need to be good for God. I doubt God would be concerned with that anyway.

As the popular Christmas song goes, “be good for goodness sake.”