Religion and Me

Apparently, I’ve recently offended a friend by making a smartass crack about the hypocrisy of the Christians running the government.  I admit, I should have put quotation marks around “Christian,” but assumed the irony was obvious.  Of course, I wasn’t referring to all those good, moral Christians out there.  But in fact, I do have an anti-religion bias, and sometimes it gets away from me.  Maybe it is because I get tired of the self-importance, the way my own atheism is considered to be an anomaly, and the belief that if you don't believe in God you have no moral compass.  Maybe the NRA's success at jamming Jesus into the 2nd Amendment has put me over the edge.  Or the fabrication that goes into taking holy books as fact instead of historical documents, while rejecting the parts they disagree with -- and then breaking into factions to argue about which interpretation is true.

I don’t know much about my father’s history; he didn’t share much and he wasn’t easy to talk to.  But I do know that in Italy, as he was being held as a prisoner of war, a Catholic priest came to his cell to try to convince him that he should fight for Mussolini.  For him, so the story goes, that was the end of his belief in religion, if not in God.  At my First Communion or maybe my Confirmation, he was taking a home movie as the monsignor of the church came down the stairs at the procession at the end.  He held out the ring and advanced toward my father, at which time the movie goes haywire as he turns around and tears out of there.

As a child, I tended to be an overachiever.  Not very popular, I went from wanting to be a nun, to wanting to be a saint.  And then, around age 16, when I fell in love with Paul McCartney and said a failed prayer to God that Paul would find me and fall in love with me, I lost my belief, completely.  And that, folks, is something I have never, ever shared.  Not quite the dramatic come-to-atheism moment as my father, but there it is.

Catholicism for me was having to go to church every Sunday.  But somewhere in my life, probably in elementary school, I was taught the Golden Rule, which seems to me today something we could all get back to.  Back in the 50’s in Rhode Island, as far as morality was concerned, they didn’t talk about “Christianity,” but of the “Judeo-Christian ethic.”  This despite the fact that there weren’t too many Jews in my neighborhood.  We only knew who they were because they were absent on the Jewish holidays.  But the message was that both those religions conveyed the ethical rules by which we should all live.  Still, it seemed to me to be the Golden Rule in a different wrapping paper.

I have toyed with belief in God a few times since then, but I keep coming back to how silly all the religions are.  The rules beyond the Golden one are silly; the ideas about afterlife are silly.  And yet, if that is what it takes to help a person deal with mortality, I respect that.  I am proud of the fact that, as a psychologist many years ago, I had a number of clients that were Jehovah's Witness, referred by one another.  They never preached their religion to me, and I in turn respected it as an integral part of their lives.

A few years ago, my daughter told me with some trepidation that when she married she had promised to raise their children in her husband's Catholic faith.  I was surprised that she thought that I would object.  Likewise, my son's agnosticism has been a thorn in the side of his girlfriend's mom.  Unnecessary man-made miseries.  Everyone trying to define -- for everyone else -- what life is all about.

My own belief is that mortality is what this is all about:  what motivates us, what forges our perceptions and our emotions.  What makes us make rules about how we live.

Up until my husband died just three years ago, I tortured myself over the thought of my mortality.  I couldn’t imagine being here and then just not.  I am an older parent, and when my kids were born and through their young lives I did the math thing:  when they are this age, I will be that age.  It drove me crazy.

When Stephan died, I did some soul-searching, some reading and some therapy.  I ended up finding peace in the greater picture of the universe, the one in which we humans are not the center.  I began to feel some of the excitement that Neil deGrasse Tyson conveys.  Look at the sky and the stars, we are minute immeasurable particles of the universe, those particles are here today and somewhere else entirely tomorrow.  Our minds haven’t come anywhere near the ability to understand the complexities of time and the vastness of space.  But, man, isn’t it great that we have the consciousness and the intellect to try?!  And aren't each of those discoveries miraculous?

It is a shame that religion constrains the potential we have to be excited by our existence, to make the most of our time here.  It is really shameful that in this country that they keep telling me is great, our leaders and too many of our fellow citizens have rejected science that was accepted when I was a teenager in the last century.  Politicians have warped religious belief to twist it into a fight to make women less free, to defend their racist ideologies, to lead us to war, to frighten people into accepting jealous and fearful rules that hurt us.  They make rules that in the end hurt those who accept them as well as those who are attacked by them.

Personally, I find talk of religion, at best, boring.  I have no need to understand different theologies; to my mind, they are rationalizations of a pretense that some people are more important than others, that some have the right rules and the rest do not.  That some will reap reward and some won’t.  When I am with people who begin to talk about religion, I space out.  And let me be clear about this:  I am not an intellectual, I don’t like ideas that go off into the stratosphere.  Philosophy too often seems to be an auto-erotic exercise.  I am just as bored hearing justifications for atheism.  I would much rather talk about science than atheology.  Science is fun.  Science is us.

The recent eclipse brought to light the idiotic hypocrisy of the people currently running our country, and those who support them.  There you had the idiot-in-chief and the idiot-general along with all those other anti-science freaks donning their special glasses at the exact time that scientists predicted that the moon would block the sun.

Granted, the idiot-in-chief had to be persuaded to wear the glasses,

but still.  No one at the White House was saying that they wouldn’t go blind because God wouldn’t let them.

The same is true for medicine.  Those jackasses that bring the bottom fraction of a percent of physicians to testify against abortion would never go to the bottom of the barrel for cancer treatment.  They want the best physicians, and they want the best treatment by consensus.  And damn, they may pray for that tumor to go away, but they do it while they are getting surgery and chemo.  I guarantee, when they choose their doc, they aren't as concerned with religious belief as with medical expertise.

This week we are watching the double whammy of Harvey followed by Irma.  We are trying to determine the best course of action by following the reports of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),  an organization for which the current administration will be cutting funding.  Sadly, there are those in the path of Irma who are saying God will take care of them, using God to rationalize the fact that they don’t want to leave their homes, and possibly putting rescuers at risk.  At least come out from behind God and take the responsibility for your own stupid choices.  Even the God-fearing Florida Governor Rick Scott  isn’t telling you to listen to God to decide whether to evacuate.

I don’t do the math thing where I wonder where I will be in so many years anymore.  My mother died at 63, and for years I thought I would not outlive her, and now I am 66.  I am healthy today, and instead of being afraid of dying, I try to look at today, to appreciate my good friends, and I try to contribute through my writing to make days and lives a little better for someone, somewhere.  I don’t take offense as often as I once did; I don’t carry the anger with me that my father carried all his life and that he passed on to his three daughters.  There just isn’t time, and in the end it is just going to drain the pleasure that could be here each day.

It saddens me to see how difficult we all make our lives.  How we choose our leaders for stupid or selfish reasons.  How we categorize and judge each other.  Sure, I do it.  I’m human.  But in the back of my mind is the awareness that I am a gazillion particles that come and go in the universe, and maybe beyond the universe.  That we all wrestle with our mortality, and that in the end, one day our consciousness leaves us and we die.  And that is fine.

My sarcasm and flippancy helps me cope with my anger and frustration at those who use religion to manipulate people, to block progress, to rein in our potential rather than celebrate it.  So, to those who are offended by my flippant attitude toward religion, I hope that at some point you will be able to understand that when we are all said and done, my attitude doesn’t matter at all who you have chosen to be.