My first pastor was a mulleted woman by the last name of Kreis. Unable to make an “st” sound, my step-father pronounced her name the same way he pronounced the name of the Savior. Chrisss. I thought that was hilarious, even though the only time they were in the same room together for me to enjoy it was when she was performing my mother’s and Mike’s wedding ceremony. Mike French-kissed my mother at the end of the vows. I didn’t think that was so hilarious.
Pastor Kreis was Lutheran, as was my family in its own limited way. We didn’t go to church often, but I have two early memories of our brief stints there. I can’t remember which one preceded the other so I’ll go ahead and give both.
One of them involves me sitting in the back pew with my brother Bryan, chewing the fat before the sermon. I can’t remember what we were talking about, although I was always anxious about which of us should put the money in the collection plate, so it was probably about that. An old woman sitting in front of us (who, I still remember had gray hair she had tried to dye some damn color, but which ended up coming out a horrendous shade of blue) turned around and told us that if we didn’t shut up we were going to go to hell. So we shut up.
The second memory is of being sent out into the hall during Sunday school because I couldn’t understand how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were all the same person and I couldn’t drop it. Unless maybe they were all born different people and ran into each other so fast that they fused, just like in all the crappy television shows I used to watch. That thought was what got me sent to the hall. The trinity always confused me, so I sat out in the hall and thought about it.
I knew a song called “I am my own Grandpa” that used to send me into fits of giggles as I swung from branch to branch of the described family tree. But I didn’t have an idea in hell as to how someone could be their own father. So I sat in the hall, looked at a crucifix, and came to the same conclusion I came to every time I went to church. That Jesus guy had some terrific abdominal muscles, and that nothing else really seemed to make sense.
The family gave up all pretense of religion by the time I was in first grade. We were all wore out on being a part of the community. I only encountered religion indirectly after that. My sister was sent to a private Catholic school during junior high probably in hopes that the nuns could “scare the bitch right out of her.” That didn’t work so well.
I thought it was funny that my grandpa, who I had assumed wasn’t afraid of anything, human or otherwise, refused to go near the school. I guess some nun had beat the shit out of him enough when he was young that the terror was too massive to simply blow away with the passing of time. Watching my grandfather make up an excuse not to pick up Rachel, I decided that if a nun ever hit me I was going to go ahead and hit the bitch right back. For a while, that was that.
I didn’t step foot in a church again (mom and Mike got married at something called “The Rotary Log Pavilion” so that doesn’t count) until the seventh grade. My friend DJ had found out that I was an atheist so he invited me to his youth group. He couldn’t figure out how someone so smart could “think something so dumb.”
“It’s all about fun and the community” he assured me. “No preaching at all.” DJ and his mom swung by my house later that evening to pick me up.
My first thoughts of the rectory where the youth group met was that if cinnamon was a middle aged man with gas, then the room smelled like his asshole. I don’t know where the hell the scent came from, but I felt like I was in a spice mine on Arrakis when I sat down in those porous wooden pews. I don’t know how I stopped myself from sneezing every three breaths, but I did.
The youth minister was a fat man who liked to chew gum. You could see it back on his molars every time he spoke, shaped like a shriveled white vagina. He offered to let me fill out my name, address, and telephone number on a 5×7 note-card in exchange for an “entire” King Size Reese’s Pieces. I declined. He tried to entice me with the Hershey. I declined.
I wasn’t so dumb I didn’t know I could have the same amount of chocolate at any time for less than two bucks without having to sacrifice my privacy.
He started in on his “lecture,” which was basically “God makes us all good people, because his son died for us, and this is why we don’t have to sacrifice stuff anymore.” It made me want to ask if I could live on as an atheist if I promised to just knock off a cow every once and a while, but I kept my mouth shut out of respect to DJ.
Things started to get scary after that. He started crying, and holding his hands up in the air. I looked around. At some point everyone else had started crying, and they were holding their hands up in the air. I elected to put my face in my hands, sigh, and mumble “oh shit.” I think everyone thought I was praying.
When the preacher told everyone who loved and accepted Jesus into their hearts to come up to the front of the room and be saved, I was the only person left in the pews. I got the collective “stink eye” of the congregation for about a solid thirty seconds. I promised myself to never ever accept another offer to go to church with someone after that.
In time I learned to see communion as pseudo-cannabalism, circumcision as pseudo-mutiliation, and Jesus as a pseudo-Zombie. Congregations struck me as mindless fanatic mobs, which I disliked for the same reason I disliked the idea of being hypnotized. There’s not a person on Earth I trust enough that I want to lose control of myself while standing next to them. That probably sounds judgmental, but remember, I’m an odd duck. I don’t fit in anywhere social. You should hear my thoughts on circuses, school carnivals, and Chuck E. Cheese. They’re much worse. God damn do I hate Chuck E. Cheese.
My great uncle Johnny (he looks like Super Mario got fed so many mushroom that he jumped out of the television. When you see the guy you expect him to start jumping on people’s heads and shooting dinosaurs with turtle shells) used to drink his paycheck away every two weeks until he found Jesus. Now he lives by the dictum that he must do good because “The Bible tells him to” which I think is inestimably aided by the fact that he’s never read the Bible.
I don’t have the heart to tell him that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and that Lot begat children by his own daughters. Or that Lot offered his daughters to the folk of Sodom when they wanted to fuck some angels in the asshole so bad they were rioting, and that Lot was throwing female orifices at them like a man throwing water on a fire. Uncle John’s taken religion and turned it into something that helps him lead a better life. I’m not so big an asshole I can’t tip my cap to that.
I know all kinds of criminals. Drug-dealers. Prostitutes. A couple of murderers. I even know a guy that killed his own baby, although he’s schizophrenic so it’s not like he did it on purpose. Not a one of them wouldn’t lose their collective minds if they knew I was an atheist. Not believing in God at all? That’s what bad people do! Sweet Jesus the only true son of God Christ, is that annoying.
Not that I think being a religious person makes you bad anymore than being an atheist makes you good. Having a naturalistic interpretation of the universe is pretty much only indicative of having a naturalistic interpretation of the universe. All the science in the world isn’t going to make you a better person if you’ve made up your mind to be an asshole, just like religion isn’t going to make you a better person once you’ve decided to be asshole.
You know what assholes have in common at the end of the day, when you adjust for all variables? Being assholes.
I suppose religion only bothers me when it makes people do something dumb. Like decide that their children can’t have blood transfusions because some obscure passage in the Bible says something that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Or that gay people can’t get married, because all knowing all powerful God is very concerned with where we stick our genitals more so than he’s concerned about how we treat our spouses. Or that we have to go off and form a cult because we’re the only people who really know what’s going on. Oh, and adding to the list of things that are abominations: shellfish, and your wife kicking some guy in the nadges while you’re fighting with him.
But religion doesn’t do anything more than annoy me because I know it’s not going anywhere. No one is going to stand up and decide to be an atheist because I show them all their dogma doesn’t hold up to the scientific model. Mormons aren’t going to stop being Mormons because Native Americans are descended from Asian people and not Jewish people. No one is going to stop going to church because I explain to them how collectives do nothing but destroy diversity of thought. It’s been with us too long, and if there’s anything I hope for, it’s avirulent dogma.
A good argument I give to my religious acquaintances is this: imagine a machine with the intellect of God. It knows the location of every molecule in the universe, and where they have been and where they are going. The machine is sentient, and has a complete understanding of both itself and human psychology. It holds the secrets to our happiness. Now, suppose we asked it how to form the best possible society. In the instruction manual it prints out to answer our question, how many pages do you think would have to do with treating others with respect, and how many pages would have to do with affirming dogma?
Like I said, I don’t have any great illusions that religion is going anywhere, but I think the day might come when the God of dogma goes the way of the Dodo bird and we’re left with “Grand Compelling Warm Cosmic Fuzziness.” Grand because it sweeps the universe, compelling because it supports all natural law, warm because the previous two descriptors give us very good reasons to be nice to one another, Cosmic because we can’t understand it entirely, and Fuzzy because we all want to interact with it. See? An amorphous God that doesn’t do a whole lot to fuck up your life. Not such a bad idea. The Grand Compelling Warm Cosmic Fuzziness. I like the sound of that.
So, dear Reader, on this Christmas those are my thoughts on religion. At present, I believe only that there is something called Being, and that for some reason Being has won out over Oblivion (try imagining the perfect clarity of class extending in all directions some time. Not white, not black. Just clear as far as you can look in any direction. Now imagine, that there are no dimensions. Just the clear sitting in null space. I can’t do it, but then again I’ve never been drunk or high, which is what people usually are when they sit down to start wondering about this stuff) and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten on the subject.
I don’t understand the nature of consciousness, although I’ve come to understand that no one else really does either. I don’t know why the universe appears to be intelligible, although my guess is that it is intelligible. I don’t know how far back you can go with deduction before you run up against the causeless cause. But I do know that Zeus, Odin, Rama, Buddha, and Jesus don’t really seem to know either. As long as we keep trying to figure it out and we don’t make up reasons along the way, it’s all good.
In closing, I believe in the Spirit of Christmas and don’t care how many carols people want to sing about Jesus or where they want to sing them. I’ve never met a person of any religion who doesn’t think Christmas is the greatest Holiday ever invented, and I don’t care if it’s called TheOneTrueSonofGodwhoistheOnlyPathtoSalvationMas, because it’s entirely about making a point of being nice to people. Being nice to people is very seldom a bad thing. I also believe if there is a God he doesn’t speak in words, but in music and that if there’s one thing that makes life worth living its the ability to laugh. That may not be much, but its what gets me through the nights.
So I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and will go on to have a Happy New Year!
“If there is a Being, He’s Unknowable at best.” I am told that this sounds a bit like Omar Khayyam. If you are curious, I will let you know when I pick up a translation of his work given that I don’t read and write Persian or Arabic yet.
After reading this I am curious about something. You seem to have a way of thinking that mirrors my own in many ways, so who do you think was the most evil witch in the Wizard of Oz and why?
@AngelKnight
I would actually very much like to know your impressions of Khayyam’s work, and if you have any recommendations of other philosophers in the same region I would like to hear them. I am lamentably ignorant of Middle Eastern philosophy and theology.
@CM
Well let’s see, we’ve got Glenda, the Wicked Witch of the West, and She Who Was Crushed Before we Knew Her. Now, if we go by the movie’s interpretation of events, obviously the Wicked Witch of the West because she wears black and we all know wearing black = evil (I one time had an idea to write a story in which all the common fashion tropes of the good and bad guys were reversed i.e. Lord Evil wore black leather, but was actually a big fan of Republican government and individual liberty)
Going by the representation in Wicked I’d have to say Glenda, even though I am madly in love with Kristen Chenoweth. She drove the Wicked Witch to run away by being a snooty uptight bitch who couldn’t see that being born with green skin might cause someone to suffer from psychological trauma.
I’ve never read the original books, so I can’t speak as to that… but… well does that get anywhere close to your question? What’s your answer?
Heres to the godless hordes!
(I’m a proud member of that group)
Oh, and I started dating a cute little hippy girl in Aberdeen, any suggestions of something to do next time I see her?
If you want to keep her I would recommend taking her somewhere outside of Grays Harbor county. But if at all possible avoid the Bowling Alley, the Harborina, and most of the local eatery with the exception of Mazatlan.
If you two go to the mall and take a picture in front of the Tom Cruise wall (it’s next to the theater in the food court) please send me a picture to post. I think people always get the idea that I made that up.
There’s nothing pseudo about the mutilation that is circumcision.
It’s unbelievable that in this time of (rightly) condemning another culture’s practices of (female) genital mutilation, we blandly smile and nod at our OWN culture’s habit of ritual male genital mutilation.
Beyond the pale.
Where I develop religion problems is when it comes to the Christians, the Muslims, and the Jewish. All their books are written of each other, and it\\\’s all the same god, but with different Prophets, except for the Jewish.
Yet they want to fight amongst themselves in the name of their God, which is the same God for all three religions.
I find it hard to believe that God wants them to exterminate each other with extreme prejudice. When they all follow the same God.
I have a problem with those who have a problem with science. It has a method, it can be repeated and proven. There are some things beyond science\\\’s understanding yet. I guess that\\\’s where I give in to a little bit of magic.
We don\\\’t know what put things together, it kinda happened. Magic. Interchangeable with God and Religion. Or maybe a technology so far beyond our understanding that it\\\’s, for all purposes, magic.
I think the original idea of \\
So I’ve been struggling with a way to retort to my annoying (recently saved and uber proud of it) co-worker. She insists she will never tell her children about Santa because he’s not the real reason for Christmas, he’s not real, and it’s stupid. I think you just gave me some fodder, thanks!
I was in a situation a lot like you described about being in the youth group with your friend DJ – voluntarily. It was weird at the time and even weirder looking back. I used to be a religious person, but even then I noticed the worrisome group/mob mentality that was so obviously rampant.
I supposed I was technically, in a sense \
uh .. damn, got cut off.
I supposed I was technically, in a sense “saved” but that’s not actually a Catholic rite of passage. I went all out with it, though. I prayed every morning and night, read the Bible every day, tried to squeeze in a Rosary at least once a day, and made every good deed or thought a prayer. I stopped cursing, wouldn’t drink, decided not to have sex before marriage. I’d get into theological debates with my atheist friends, and although they never knew it, I prayed for them all the time.
Most of what I remember from my religious days was a feeling of comfort and safety, but in a numb sort of .. instinctual way. Every problem had a clear-cut answer at the bottom line. Every question could be answered by God, every worry would be listened to by God, God cried when I cried. The best part, the part I miss but wouldn’t take back now was that I was never alone. If I ever got lonely or felt isolated or different, I had an omniscient father figure who understood and loved me always by my side. It was a good feeling.
The other feeling though, mostly present at these youth group meeting and similar events was a feeling of total emptiness of whatever all of these people were feeling. People would be crying and waving their hands in the air and I’d watch their lives change right in front of me, and I’d wonder what was wrong with me that I was being left out of this collective consciousness of divine intervention. Now looking back, I think probably there were others who felt the same way at the same time .. and maybe a lot of it is an act.
Now I am agnostic-to-atheist and happy about it. My whole family still thinks I’m as ferverently religious as I once was, and I can’t bring myself to contradict them. One of my best friendships is/was based on our mutual love of God, and she doesn’t know either. The only habit I took from my religious days was a healthy respect for altruism and not yelling “Jesus!” when I break a dish. I also still really like nuns – I’ve met quite a few in my day, and was kind of on the road to becoming one. All that being said, I’m glad I had those days. They, at least, make an interesting story to tell.
I\’m not going to touch this topic with a 10 foot pole. But BC is right. Be nice to people. Or he will go upside your head.
I know you didnt say the upside your head part but I can read between the lines.
“grand compelling warm cosmic fuzziness” makes me puke the way the book of leviticus makes you puke.
i’m just speaking as someone who does as much spiritual sweet fuckall as the rest of you, but i know what i really want and what i should really be seeking with all my “heart, soul, mind and strength” is a God who looks me in the eyes, demands my everything and gives me all of Himself in return.
i think you and most everyone else would LOVE the machine God. the God of love is fucking terrifying. sometimes i really wish God was just some safe huggy cloud sitting off being totally complacent about whatever we do to eachother, but i really don’t think that god would’ve got off his ass to make people like you or me in the first place.
p.s. sorry bout the outburst, i’m pmsing and spiritually struggling. glad you posted again.
I knew you would see it the right way. Glenda is a manipulative bitch. She dragged an innocent farm girl and her house to a far away land. She used the girls house to kill one part of her competition and then sent the girl on a mission or \
I knew you would see it the right way. Glenda is a manipulative bitch. She dragged an innocent farm girl and her house to a far away land. She used the girls house to kill one part of her competition and then sent the girl on a mission or “quest to find the wizard to send her home”. She had her put on the slippers so the wicked witch would be after her and Dorothy could do her dirty work for her and kill some more of her competition. And finally she sent her to the wizard not for help, but to expose him as the fraud that he was and leave Glenda with all of the power in Oz. To top off all of her manipulations she closed by telling Dorothy that she could have gone home anytime if she just clicked her heals together.
Glenda was hot, but it is always the hot ones that are the most manipulative. The bitch.
J, I would say that being religious does make you unreasonable and irrational, but I would also say that that in no way makes atheists reasonable or rational. Nobody’s mind is a perfect reflection of reality. Also, why is your conception of spirituality the definitive one?
@Javert
I don’t know if it has a huge impact on the kid later in life though. I mean, if you lose half your brain before you’re three, your brain will rewire so you have full neurological function by the time you’re an adult.
Is losing foreskin comparable to losing the entire clitoris? I’m curious.
@Jake
I am sorry your comment got cut off, but yeah, I don’t know why the Abrahamic triad gets into it so much considering their shared history.
As for the Magic thing… I always feel it’s best to say “I don’t know” when science can supply no ready answers. But if what you fill in genuinely has no explanation and you’re willing to accept a non-magical explanation when one presents itself, then I don’t have a problem with that.
@Jessica
There’s pretty good reason to believe that Jesus isn’t real, or at least was co-opted from several different figures and had a new mythology laid on him.
Santa never told anyone to deny their children medical care either.
@J
Who you are as a person tends to be independent of religion, except that religion provides an easy excuse to do something that is immoral (like tell gay people they can’t get married). That’s my only real problem with it, because I live with lowered expectations on what I expect from people.
@Maria
My grandma gets this look of despair on her face every time we discuss religion, so I don’t bring it up around her. Which I think is only civil. So I can understand your family situation.
@Eric
Boom. Upside your head! Said boom upside your head!
What song is that from? And why do I seem to remember it coming out of the early 90′s?
@Erin
I forgive you, because we are like two people who know each other fairly well over the internet and like each other otherwise.
Yes, that is an appropriate analogy.
@CM
Glenda is smoking hot (i.e. Kristen Chenoweth)
If there was a non offensive way to say that I want to ruin Kristen Chenoweth’s vagina with sex, I would say it. And not even in the inadvertent way I just implied it, but directly.
@Jesse
I agree. People are very compartmentalized about their beliefs. Like that racist guy I knew who loved Obama.
Here’s the comic with the idea I was going to supply along with my setup.
[link]http://abstrusegoose.com/strips/mind_of_god.PNG[/link]
http://www.joethepeacock.com/2008/03/how-to-actually-talk-to-atheists-if.php
This was also part of the missing comment.
Sorry. Scatterbrained today.
sorry about the comment cutting Jake. Hopefully I’ll get a newer version of WordPress soon and it won’t be a problem.
I love you so much for the Dune reference. Also, as always, terrific writing that leaves me laughing until my lungs collapse.