Dear christianity, I'm sorry for breaking up with you online.
It's been a lot of years since I set foot in a church. I was loosely raised protestant, but we were a church on easter and christmas kind of family, and then only till I was about 9. Since that time I've developed my own views of the world, my own sense of morality and truth. But in all those years of pondering, I never told the church why exactly it didn't work out between us, why we had to break up.
I don't dislike the bible, as a book that's meant to teach people how to be good. I'm a fan of goodness. I think there are some hateful words that exist within the bible, specifically those bits that are sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant of other religions, etc. I don't know how those passages were allowed in, but I know that they have caused a lot of grief for many groups of people over the years. Because those passages exist, I have to believe that the bible is flawed. If the bible is flawed, that calls a whole lot about christianity into question.
The bible was written by people. People are fallible. Sometimes people have their own agenda. Sometimes people lose important things in translation, and sometimes translation can change the meaning of words entirely. If the bible is the actual word of god, it's still the word of god as transcribed and translated by humans, who, even in the bible, have a tendency to screw things up royally. So, how do you know what to trust? I can look at the bible from an objective place and say what I believe promotes good values, and what doesn't. "Thou shalt not kill." - I like that one. That one's great. Good job, god. "A man shall not lie with another man." - Ooh, wow you guys really missed the mark there. See, because those eight words have actually destroyed entire lives. That statement seeks only to spread hatred and intolerance. Maybe that one could have been cut, yeah?
So, as far as I know, a lot of the bible is people's accounts of some religious stuff that went down a long time ago. But some if it is supposed to be the actual word of god, who appeared to people in different forms at different times and spoke to them. And this must be how we know that god was a man. Because when god talked, he must have sounded like a dude. Was it like James Earl Jones, d'ya think? Big and booming?
And, if we go way back, once god made light and firmament and whales and everything, he had the whole world set up, he decided to make a man, in his image. And then he made a woman, to hang out with the man. And he talked to those two all the time. And eve could look at adam and say, "yep, that's the spitting image of god alright." And adam could look at eve and say, "yeah, you sort of look like him too, but curvier and stuff."
So, here's my issue. Our world keeps itself going because of gender. With a few exceptions - some frogs and the dinosaurs in jurassic park and what have you - everything that grows or walks or swims or flies needs male parts and female parts to further the population. This is why we have names for genders - male, female. We need both, and we need to be able to identify which is which.
God made everything without a partner. We are products of his whimsy, not his sperm. So, why is god male? Gender inherently implies a need for another gender. Otherwise, there's just the one. There's nothing to distinguish between.
If god is male, god must have male parts. Why does he need male parts if he's not sticking them into lady parts? Or is he like a ken doll? Maybe he looks male with clothes on, but underneath that white robe there's just nothing there. I mean, he probably doesn't ever have to pee. None of it makes sense. And I can't stand it when people say that god is a woman, for the exact same reasons. God cannot have a gender, because gender requires an other, and if god requires an other, god is not an all perfect being...and he's also got to be really frustrated, being the only god up there.
The language bit I understand - that's where human error comes into the writing. We've lived in patriarchal societies for thousands of years. Our language is sexist. It just is. And even with all of our political correctness, it's difficult to avoid. The word "mankind" says it all. So, perhaps some forward thinking religious folk could argue that the bible calls god Him in the way that we sometimes still defer to the male gender when we write. "He" looked better on paper than "s/he" or "it." But I've never actually heard anyone give this argument. And I'd wager that almost all christians imagine god to be the male he is described as.
So, god is a dude, and he looks like us. How old does he look? Is he middle-aged? Old enough to be respected, but young enough to have only a few wrinkles, just a bit of grey at the temples. Like an ideal presidential candidate. Or is he older? A wise, ancient looking man with a long white beard. But, here on Earth, age means our bodies are slowing down. Long white beards come with bald heads and hunched backs and big hairy ears that can't hear very well. God couldn't exist in this state of human decay. So would he be a spry, old bearded guy? He could do backflips if he wanted? And let's not even get into the debate about what color his skin would be...
On Earth, we long for explanations of what lies beyond. Why are we here? What else is there? If we got to heaven, is that the end all be all of truth within everything that exists? An omnipotent man in the clouds? What happens if whatever lies beyond still demands an explanation? It seems like it would never be enough. Even if our existence could be explained, why did god exist to create us? Who created god?
If god really did speak to his children way back in the day, people who hadn't been around for very long, people who had yet to develop history and science, people who had no choice but to take the world at face value...how could he explain to them all of the complex details of the universe? If he started going on about cells and atoms, about neutron stars and black holes, about dinosaurs and meteors, about anything that exists on a microscopic or a telescopic or a historic level, or even about things that exist over long periods of time...like evolution...they would have been like, "Fuck, this guy is crazy. We were created by a crazy man. Our existence is therefore meaningless. And listen to him, still rambling on." It would have been like if you realized the guy rocking back and forth and yelling to himself on the subway was god. Yikes.
So maybe god had to find a way to explain things to people in a manner that their little undeveloped brains could understand. LIke the way you would tell a 3 year old where babies come from. You don't lie to them, you just leave out a whole lot of detail, and make it all sound real nice and pretty.
Personally, I don't think that it happened that way. I think people wrote the bible in an effort to make sense of their existence and their surroundings and the meaning of their lives. That's what all religions attempt to do. And to create some sort of code to live by, so people would feel like even if their deeds had no consequences here, there was a higher power judging, ready to reward a life well lived, and ready to make with punishment if they fell out of line. That's not a bad thing. That's a beautiful thing. I think, sometimes, that it is a simple thing. That it's harder to live by your own sense of right and wrong, that it's harder to police yourself if you don't believe that your actions have any further effect that what happens in the here and now.
I don't, and I can't, believe in hell. If god made us the way we are, then he botched a few of the jobs. Some people are just plain evil, and if we give him credit for everything else, we need to pin that on him too. And I could maybe, maybe, accept this idea if hell was reserved special for people like hitler. Like if god really made something so wrong and he didn't have a clue how to make it right, he would have a place to stick it. But so many christians get hell-happy. Everybody who breaks any little rule seems to be up for eternal damnation unless appropriate religious penance is made. I'm pretty sure I'd be in hell for judging people, taking the lord's name in vain, having fun out of wedlock, coveting my neighbor's wife, being a woman who covets neighbors' wives, stealing the occasional bowl of mushroom and brie and mmm toffee cookies...
But the catch is, I hear, no matter how much you fuck up, if you accept god and jesus and christianity and you ask for forgiveness, you're good to go. So I can live the most truly good and humble life possible, but if I don't accept jesus, I suffer eternally. Whereas a christian who commits murder can ask the lord for forgiveness, and he gets his very own plot of fluffy white cloud. I can commit a sin, like homosexuality, that harms absolutely no one, and suffer for it unless I renounce it as something immoral. Nope. If I'm going to give god credit for making me, it's going to be for making me into the beautiful and unique snowflake that I am.
I also, obviously at this point, refuse to accept that christianity is the only true religion. I believe in the power of faith. I believe that if a group of people, or even one single person, believes something whole-heartedly, there is power in that. But I don't believe that the power of christianity is greater than the power of any other religion practiced on earth. Why should someone give up the life and traditions passed down to them through their family and their culture for generations, longer than anyone can remember, because some white guy shows up with a bible and says, "Oh, hey, you didn't know? This is what we're all believing in now. You don't have to, but I've read this book, and it turns out pretty crappy for you in the end if you refuse." Why does faith in a higher power have to be so exclusive? Why can't mutual respect for each other's beliefs be enough? Stop trying to convert everybody, embrace diversity, and just be glad people are believing in something bigger than themselves.
I have a thing about numbers. Any combination of the numbers of my birth date usually read to me as a sign of good luck. I'm hardly alone in this. Most people have lucky numbers. My friend started telling me once that there is a reason why we think our lucky numbers pop up all the time, why we notice specific patterns in numbers, the science behind it, etc... We never finished the conversation. But I thought today that I didn't want to know the science. That knowing that the reason why my brain picks certain things out is just a fluke in an entirely random universe...that knowing this would destroy my faith in something that brings me a little bit of joy on the daily.
I actually had to stop what I was doing because it made me understand why people have such a difficult time merging christianity and science. I mean, I always understood it, but not ever from the faith side of the equation. It honestly might have given me a little more compassion for some of these people, who are just trying to hold on to their beliefs and their culture and their family history, while Darwin comes over with The Origin of Species and says, "Oh, hey, you didn't know? This is what we're all believing in now."
But I have to believe that there's room in our lives for both religion and science, for both faith and fact. This is why that courtroom scene in Inherit the Wind still holds such a place in my heart. The best way to convince people of science is to find a way to merge their beliefs. Sure, god created the earth in seven days; it just so happens that the first day took about ten million years.
What amazes me is why more people can't find reasons for faith in science. A few thousand years ago, people were just beginning to grasp the complexity of the world. They could see an earth filled with plants and animals and people, around which the sun and the moon and the stars rotated...and this was so astounding that they couldn't believe it could have existed without a hand to create and design it. And so they wrote about it and prayed about it and worshipped and praised it.
Now, we see so much more. We can look at the tiniest little building blocks that compose everything in our world. We are still discovering new species every year. We have been to the top of the highest mountain and to the bottom of the deepest ocean. We can fly. We can fly out of the Earth's atmosphere. We've been to the moon. We've seen the planets in our solar system. We've seen other solar systems. Scientists are measuring all the way to the edge of the universe, and do you know what they think lies beyond? More universes! Every new discovery, every detail witnessed more closely, every further explanation of how this all came into being proves this place to be even more beautiful and grand and complex and wonderful than we ever imagined. If you are a person of faith, how can knowing all of this science not make you even more proud of your god that created all of it? Why is he less of a god if he also made dinosaurs, and he took sometime to kill them off before he made people, so the dinosaurs wouldn't go and eat everybody? If his method of the creation of the human race happened to be evolution, why is that so wrong? The understanding of all of the beautiful intricacies of the universe should give us so much more to be thankful for. This understanding may mean that we have to adjust the way we view the ancient, written stories of creation that exist in all religions. That doesn't make those ancient words any less powerful, but we must understand that they were written by people who were restrained by the limitations of time. We cannot allow ourselves to then, in turn, be limited by their restraints.
For the record, I am currently agnostic. I believe in something bigger than myself and the world that my senses can perceive. I don't know what that something is. I don't think I will ever have the audacity to believe that I know exactly who and what is responsible for my own existence and the existence of all that surrounds me. Under this amount of uncertainty, I still believe that I am a good person, that I have things to be thankful for, and that I will not fear death more than anyone whose faith is more detailed than mine.
For now, this is enough.
I don't dislike the bible, as a book that's meant to teach people how to be good. I'm a fan of goodness. I think there are some hateful words that exist within the bible, specifically those bits that are sexist, homophobic, ethnocentric, intolerant of other religions, etc. I don't know how those passages were allowed in, but I know that they have caused a lot of grief for many groups of people over the years. Because those passages exist, I have to believe that the bible is flawed. If the bible is flawed, that calls a whole lot about christianity into question.
The bible was written by people. People are fallible. Sometimes people have their own agenda. Sometimes people lose important things in translation, and sometimes translation can change the meaning of words entirely. If the bible is the actual word of god, it's still the word of god as transcribed and translated by humans, who, even in the bible, have a tendency to screw things up royally. So, how do you know what to trust? I can look at the bible from an objective place and say what I believe promotes good values, and what doesn't. "Thou shalt not kill." - I like that one. That one's great. Good job, god. "A man shall not lie with another man." - Ooh, wow you guys really missed the mark there. See, because those eight words have actually destroyed entire lives. That statement seeks only to spread hatred and intolerance. Maybe that one could have been cut, yeah?
So, as far as I know, a lot of the bible is people's accounts of some religious stuff that went down a long time ago. But some if it is supposed to be the actual word of god, who appeared to people in different forms at different times and spoke to them. And this must be how we know that god was a man. Because when god talked, he must have sounded like a dude. Was it like James Earl Jones, d'ya think? Big and booming?
And, if we go way back, once god made light and firmament and whales and everything, he had the whole world set up, he decided to make a man, in his image. And then he made a woman, to hang out with the man. And he talked to those two all the time. And eve could look at adam and say, "yep, that's the spitting image of god alright." And adam could look at eve and say, "yeah, you sort of look like him too, but curvier and stuff."
So, here's my issue. Our world keeps itself going because of gender. With a few exceptions - some frogs and the dinosaurs in jurassic park and what have you - everything that grows or walks or swims or flies needs male parts and female parts to further the population. This is why we have names for genders - male, female. We need both, and we need to be able to identify which is which.
God made everything without a partner. We are products of his whimsy, not his sperm. So, why is god male? Gender inherently implies a need for another gender. Otherwise, there's just the one. There's nothing to distinguish between.
If god is male, god must have male parts. Why does he need male parts if he's not sticking them into lady parts? Or is he like a ken doll? Maybe he looks male with clothes on, but underneath that white robe there's just nothing there. I mean, he probably doesn't ever have to pee. None of it makes sense. And I can't stand it when people say that god is a woman, for the exact same reasons. God cannot have a gender, because gender requires an other, and if god requires an other, god is not an all perfect being...and he's also got to be really frustrated, being the only god up there.
The language bit I understand - that's where human error comes into the writing. We've lived in patriarchal societies for thousands of years. Our language is sexist. It just is. And even with all of our political correctness, it's difficult to avoid. The word "mankind" says it all. So, perhaps some forward thinking religious folk could argue that the bible calls god Him in the way that we sometimes still defer to the male gender when we write. "He" looked better on paper than "s/he" or "it." But I've never actually heard anyone give this argument. And I'd wager that almost all christians imagine god to be the male he is described as.
So, god is a dude, and he looks like us. How old does he look? Is he middle-aged? Old enough to be respected, but young enough to have only a few wrinkles, just a bit of grey at the temples. Like an ideal presidential candidate. Or is he older? A wise, ancient looking man with a long white beard. But, here on Earth, age means our bodies are slowing down. Long white beards come with bald heads and hunched backs and big hairy ears that can't hear very well. God couldn't exist in this state of human decay. So would he be a spry, old bearded guy? He could do backflips if he wanted? And let's not even get into the debate about what color his skin would be...
On Earth, we long for explanations of what lies beyond. Why are we here? What else is there? If we got to heaven, is that the end all be all of truth within everything that exists? An omnipotent man in the clouds? What happens if whatever lies beyond still demands an explanation? It seems like it would never be enough. Even if our existence could be explained, why did god exist to create us? Who created god?
If god really did speak to his children way back in the day, people who hadn't been around for very long, people who had yet to develop history and science, people who had no choice but to take the world at face value...how could he explain to them all of the complex details of the universe? If he started going on about cells and atoms, about neutron stars and black holes, about dinosaurs and meteors, about anything that exists on a microscopic or a telescopic or a historic level, or even about things that exist over long periods of time...like evolution...they would have been like, "Fuck, this guy is crazy. We were created by a crazy man. Our existence is therefore meaningless. And listen to him, still rambling on." It would have been like if you realized the guy rocking back and forth and yelling to himself on the subway was god. Yikes.
So maybe god had to find a way to explain things to people in a manner that their little undeveloped brains could understand. LIke the way you would tell a 3 year old where babies come from. You don't lie to them, you just leave out a whole lot of detail, and make it all sound real nice and pretty.
Personally, I don't think that it happened that way. I think people wrote the bible in an effort to make sense of their existence and their surroundings and the meaning of their lives. That's what all religions attempt to do. And to create some sort of code to live by, so people would feel like even if their deeds had no consequences here, there was a higher power judging, ready to reward a life well lived, and ready to make with punishment if they fell out of line. That's not a bad thing. That's a beautiful thing. I think, sometimes, that it is a simple thing. That it's harder to live by your own sense of right and wrong, that it's harder to police yourself if you don't believe that your actions have any further effect that what happens in the here and now.
I don't, and I can't, believe in hell. If god made us the way we are, then he botched a few of the jobs. Some people are just plain evil, and if we give him credit for everything else, we need to pin that on him too. And I could maybe, maybe, accept this idea if hell was reserved special for people like hitler. Like if god really made something so wrong and he didn't have a clue how to make it right, he would have a place to stick it. But so many christians get hell-happy. Everybody who breaks any little rule seems to be up for eternal damnation unless appropriate religious penance is made. I'm pretty sure I'd be in hell for judging people, taking the lord's name in vain, having fun out of wedlock, coveting my neighbor's wife, being a woman who covets neighbors' wives, stealing the occasional bowl of mushroom and brie and mmm toffee cookies...
But the catch is, I hear, no matter how much you fuck up, if you accept god and jesus and christianity and you ask for forgiveness, you're good to go. So I can live the most truly good and humble life possible, but if I don't accept jesus, I suffer eternally. Whereas a christian who commits murder can ask the lord for forgiveness, and he gets his very own plot of fluffy white cloud. I can commit a sin, like homosexuality, that harms absolutely no one, and suffer for it unless I renounce it as something immoral. Nope. If I'm going to give god credit for making me, it's going to be for making me into the beautiful and unique snowflake that I am.
I also, obviously at this point, refuse to accept that christianity is the only true religion. I believe in the power of faith. I believe that if a group of people, or even one single person, believes something whole-heartedly, there is power in that. But I don't believe that the power of christianity is greater than the power of any other religion practiced on earth. Why should someone give up the life and traditions passed down to them through their family and their culture for generations, longer than anyone can remember, because some white guy shows up with a bible and says, "Oh, hey, you didn't know? This is what we're all believing in now. You don't have to, but I've read this book, and it turns out pretty crappy for you in the end if you refuse." Why does faith in a higher power have to be so exclusive? Why can't mutual respect for each other's beliefs be enough? Stop trying to convert everybody, embrace diversity, and just be glad people are believing in something bigger than themselves.
I have a thing about numbers. Any combination of the numbers of my birth date usually read to me as a sign of good luck. I'm hardly alone in this. Most people have lucky numbers. My friend started telling me once that there is a reason why we think our lucky numbers pop up all the time, why we notice specific patterns in numbers, the science behind it, etc... We never finished the conversation. But I thought today that I didn't want to know the science. That knowing that the reason why my brain picks certain things out is just a fluke in an entirely random universe...that knowing this would destroy my faith in something that brings me a little bit of joy on the daily.
I actually had to stop what I was doing because it made me understand why people have such a difficult time merging christianity and science. I mean, I always understood it, but not ever from the faith side of the equation. It honestly might have given me a little more compassion for some of these people, who are just trying to hold on to their beliefs and their culture and their family history, while Darwin comes over with The Origin of Species and says, "Oh, hey, you didn't know? This is what we're all believing in now."
But I have to believe that there's room in our lives for both religion and science, for both faith and fact. This is why that courtroom scene in Inherit the Wind still holds such a place in my heart. The best way to convince people of science is to find a way to merge their beliefs. Sure, god created the earth in seven days; it just so happens that the first day took about ten million years.
What amazes me is why more people can't find reasons for faith in science. A few thousand years ago, people were just beginning to grasp the complexity of the world. They could see an earth filled with plants and animals and people, around which the sun and the moon and the stars rotated...and this was so astounding that they couldn't believe it could have existed without a hand to create and design it. And so they wrote about it and prayed about it and worshipped and praised it.
Now, we see so much more. We can look at the tiniest little building blocks that compose everything in our world. We are still discovering new species every year. We have been to the top of the highest mountain and to the bottom of the deepest ocean. We can fly. We can fly out of the Earth's atmosphere. We've been to the moon. We've seen the planets in our solar system. We've seen other solar systems. Scientists are measuring all the way to the edge of the universe, and do you know what they think lies beyond? More universes! Every new discovery, every detail witnessed more closely, every further explanation of how this all came into being proves this place to be even more beautiful and grand and complex and wonderful than we ever imagined. If you are a person of faith, how can knowing all of this science not make you even more proud of your god that created all of it? Why is he less of a god if he also made dinosaurs, and he took sometime to kill them off before he made people, so the dinosaurs wouldn't go and eat everybody? If his method of the creation of the human race happened to be evolution, why is that so wrong? The understanding of all of the beautiful intricacies of the universe should give us so much more to be thankful for. This understanding may mean that we have to adjust the way we view the ancient, written stories of creation that exist in all religions. That doesn't make those ancient words any less powerful, but we must understand that they were written by people who were restrained by the limitations of time. We cannot allow ourselves to then, in turn, be limited by their restraints.
For the record, I am currently agnostic. I believe in something bigger than myself and the world that my senses can perceive. I don't know what that something is. I don't think I will ever have the audacity to believe that I know exactly who and what is responsible for my own existence and the existence of all that surrounds me. Under this amount of uncertainty, I still believe that I am a good person, that I have things to be thankful for, and that I will not fear death more than anyone whose faith is more detailed than mine.
For now, this is enough.