That's me in the corner...

Well, since religion seems to be the topic of the week, thanks to Jane's post inspired by Jonathan and picked up by several people (--W-- and Sarah, at least, and those are just the ones that come readily to mind), I figure I might as well put cursor to screen and tap out some thoughts on the subject myself. If there's one thing that's been obvious from the posts and comments I've seen, it's that we're a pretty diverse group 'round here in Blog-City, but that at the same time we seem awfully fond even of people whose ideas are radically different from our own. And that's no mean thing.

Anyway, as Jane warned: LONG POST

For myself, I was raised in a very religious household. We went to church every Sunday, we did a lot of extra church stuff (volunteering around the community, doing maintainence work at the church, working at church fundraisers (mostly things like pork-chop dinners, the annual "lawn social," etc)), and we took church pretty seriously. It wasn't exactly that church-going was compulsory, though it was: it was just what we did every Sunday and there was really no question about it. I did what I needed to do in Sunday school to learn the lessons and excell: I've long been sort of a "natural student": learning stuff has always come easily and though I haven't always worked hard but I've generally worked well. Granted that there wasn't much competition, but I was always the one who knew what was going on, who knew "the right answer."

I should probably talk a little about the church I went to. It wasn't, by any means, fire and brimstone. The preachers there didn't spend a lot of time telling you what you were going to burn in hell for or how you were a terrible person that needed all sorts of fixing. Oh sure, it's an inescapable part of Christianity that human beings are flawed and we need God, but the church I grew up in didn't make a big deal out of it: it just was what it was. And part of the reason for this was the relative stability of the church. We weren't constantly looking for new members and bringing them in: new people came in if they wanted to, but the preacher's time wasn't really spent taking people from square one of Christianity (excecpt for the children). All the souls in the church's care were pretty well assumed to know certain things and just sort of need encouragement and maybe a little more detailed explanation of this point or that point to live a better life. The denomination was the United Church of Christ, a pretty liberal denomination. They're a very tolerant bunch, all in all: in fact, I remember hearing while in graduate school that they'd not only declared the homosexuality was fine, they'd established scholarships for gays to attend seminary. At the same time, the UCC on the national level is often rather different from the UCC on the local level, because the basic premise of the church is that there are certain core beliefs that one needs to be a Christian and that the rest are just details for which there's room for agreement, and thus these things are left to individuals and individual congregations. So the church I grew up in was more conservative than the denomination as a whole, and that's not surprising, as we are a rural church, largely farmers and working-class folks.

Looking back on it, religion was a pretty good thing for me when I was growing up. It was a real community, where everyone knew everyone and were mostly good to one another, though occasional nastiness broke out, as seems almost inevitable in any community (except Blog-City, of course). It made music part of my life. It forced a certain amount of discipline upon me (you have to sit still, be quiet and respectful; you have certain obligations to meet). And it gave me a serious box in which to exercise my mind. There's a lot to think about in religion, and by its very nature it claims to be pretty important stuff to think about. You're not thinking for amusement but because it's vitally important, and thus it demands some seriousness and rigor. My church, at least, was very opening to this sort of questioning, as long as you stayed within a certain intellectual box. It was, thankfully, a broad box. Almost large enough that you didn't notice it as a box, in fact. It explained a lot of things and helped guide your thinking. And I did a lot of thinking in this box. I was a committed believer into my college years. Starting in high school, I began questioning many things about my faith, but it wasn't until I was well into college that I stopped being so certain that all of my questions would be answered satisfactorily by religion and that I would ultimately have a stronger faith because of it.

Nope. Instead, the more I questioned religion, the weaker the answers seemed to become. I justified religion for a long time and argued on the side of belief for a long time, but at some point the accumulation of evidence to the contrary became overwhelming and I gradually revised my understanding of the world, eventually to the point where it no longer included religion.

This came about through the study of a large number of fields, from comparative religion to philosophy to the physical sciences and social sciences, even to literature. And most importantly, I approached it all with a good deal of serious thought. In that one way, at least, the habit of youth endured: religion was still something to think about seriously, but then that serious thought led me away from religion. Interestingly enough, one thing or another happened: either one of the ministers in my church when I was growing up confused it or I did, but there's a passage from the Bible that was often used as a benediction which I mis-remembered for a long time. It was "Test all things, hold fast to that which is good," but I always remembered it as "Test all things, hold fast to that which is true."

All that said, even though it's come to seem to me that religion is false, I try to maintain an open mind on these matters. If history and observation teach us only one thing, it must be human fallibility, particularly fallibility masked by our own sense of being absolutely right. We all believe whatever it is that we believe: if we didn't, we'd believe something else, right? But our ideas about things can and do change, and we can see times when we've been wrong and--even more easily--times when other people have been wrong. Thus, I consider myself basically an agnostic, because I don't claim to have "the truth." I don't ever expect wholly to find it, but I try not to let that stop me from looking either, from getting closer. It could be that at some point in my life, someone or some experience will convince me that there is a God, however unlikely I find that prospect to be at this precise moment. There's the thing about being an agnostic: literally it means "I don't know," and on the practical level it's a statement about how certain we can be about God's or gods' existence rather than an actual statement about whether God exists. For all intents and purposes, I live my life as an atheist while leaving open the possibility of changing my mind should circumstances warrant.

Of course, all this is just to say what I don't believe. But I've already taken up a lot of time. I'll try to get to "what I believe" on another day. Like maybe tomorrow; we'll see.

tags: "serious"  

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