(no subject)
I've been debating between doing a proper DH post and a religion/atheism post this evening and have come to the conclusion that I'd rather write about the latter right now. This is partly because the National Post has been doing a religion series discussing different viewpoints all week, which has sparked a lively debate in their Letters to the Editor (and has me thinking about why I consider myself an atheist) and partly because I still need to do some HP fact checking before I finish completely developing a few opinions.
Mostly, though, it is because I came up with a wonderfully accurate metaphor today whilst sitting behind a line-up of cars in the parkade that involved comparing the Harry Potter series to a rent boy and I'm still developing it.
Therefore, this is going to be a weirdly personal post which has the potential to offend people (although that is certainly not it's purpose). Mostly thoughts on atheist stigma/why it took so bloody long to work all this out/please stop indoctrinating the children. Erm... cut because it's much longer than I meant to make it.
Religion and I have an odd, dysfunctional sort of relationship. My father's family is, in essence, a long line of fiercely Protestant ministers and their wives (or, in the case of one of my great aunts, women who fought for the right to be educated and ordained as Protestant ministers), while my mother's family redefines the word 'redneck', complete with deep feelings of anti-Semitism on my grandfather's part (the irony has not escaped me that the only part of my heritage that is not German happens to be Jewish, although I don't think he's aware of this) and the necessary born-again Christian uncle (I am grateful that my mother and aunt came out of their respective childhoods relatively unscathed). Hence and therefore, in spite of the fact that my father has almost as many issues with organised religion as I and that I can probably count without much effort the number of times I have been in a church, we are Protestant and Fiercely Proud of It.
Add to this that I grew up in the heartland of Canadian Family Values, where the notion that homosexuality can be 'fixed' isn't all that rare and some schools teach that masturbation will cause your hands to grow fur (this was, fortunately for me, the Catholic district, so I didn't have to encounter it directly), and you have a girl with a tiny complex.
Oddly enough, the first time that I questioned religion on anything more than a superficial level was at a summer camp run by one of the many Protestant denominations (if you wanted to go to summer camp, you had the option of going to a Boy Scout camp or a religions camp; I did both), when they spent the week trying to convince us to invite Jesus into our hearts to forgive our sins and rewarded us when we came to them and said that we had prayed to Jesus to save us. Now, I would look on that as a form of indoctrination, largely because of the level of pressure placed on us at an age where individual decisions are practically unheard of (we were ten years old at the time) and, even then, it didn't quite sit right with me. I asked about Darwin and evolution and how that fit into biblical teaching and was told that it didn't. According to my camp counsellor, Darwin had confessed on his deathbed to making up evolution.
My ten year old mind, fortunately, was clever enough to recognise this for what it was: bullshit with some desperation mixed in. During that week, I did not invite Jesus into my heart.
At that same camp, there was a girl who was an atheist (which was spoken as though it was more disapproved of than 'fuck'), who had apparently had enough of being told what she should believe (like me, I think that she was at the camp because it included horseback riding lessons) and ended up having something of a tantrum. So, although I wasn't quite ready to accept what I was being told about morality and God, I was also having it firmly reinforced that 'atheist' was a dirty word that perhaps carried a connotation of eating babies and burning books and, oh no, anything but pre-marital sex. The shock. The horror.
After that, I took a break from religious camps, even when they did involve horses, and went to the aforementioned Boy Scout camps, which involved sailing (a far superior endeavour).
During Junior High and High School, I was heavily involved in athletics (an unfortunate turn of events in many ways, but it meant that I had the second-most CAS hours in my year), which meant that summer was not a relaxation period but, rather, a myriad of triathlons and basketball camps. Unfortunately, the best camp skill-wise, was, you guessed it, deeply religious. Days were devoted to drills and games, which was all fun and enjoyable (and fucking exhausting), but in the evenings we had to listen to various people tell us motivational stories about finding God and discussing the joys of waiting until marriage for sex. They tried to make me sign an abstinence contract every night for one week of the year for three years.
A fucking abstinence card.
By my last year there, I had discovered that I liked sex quite a lot actually, thankyouverymuch, and very possibly laughed at the person who suggested I sign it (I suppose that was... two years ago, now? Don't regret that decision). Needless to say, they didn't like me, my liberal thoughts, or my opinionated self-expression very much. Ironically, that was the one week a year where I allowed myself to openly admit that the things I was being told about religion, belief, and morality were not things that I agreed with. (By this point, a science teacher somewhere along the line had told me that Darwin certainly had not negated his theory on his deathbed.)
The rest of the year involved a lot of confusion, uncertainty, and high levels of guilt that I was disappointing people whose opinions I valued, while still being unable to reconcile what my uncle was saying about gay people and bestiality and what my infinitely more moderate mother was still judging with my own world view that there are certain fundamental aspects of a person that simply are, for whatever reason and that religion, a largely subjective area has not place in government, which ideally ought to be objective. I couldn't wrap my head around how there could be holy wars, crusades, jihads, purges/cleansing, and pogroms, yet religion was still perceived to be a Good Thing.
And, then, I came to the obvious conclusion that religion was, in many ways, my abusive, controlling boyfriend who was trying to restrict my rights and repress my ability to question and reach conclusions and that maybe it was time to dump him.* (Hey, if religion gets to be conveniently metaphorical, so do I.) None of it, at any point, had anything to do with my belief in a deity (pick a deity, any deity); I was more focussed on the things inherent in believing than whether or not I believed anything in the first place.
This question surprised me, and I didn't answer it lightly. I listened to music by a minister's daughter that attacked the repressive patriarchal values while forming metaphors that encompassed everything from the sexual to the 'pure', discovered the wisdom in Joseph Campbell's theology where myth doesn't reflect some sort of greater presence but the divine patterns in our own lives**, and, finally, read some Dawkins and felt, for the first time, that atheism wasn't quite what it had been made out to be when I was ten (although, really, once I'd worked out that Darwin was for real, I ought to have used some deduction skills to work this out). In fact, the ritual consumption of babies is apparently quite rare. Pre-marital sex, happily, is not.
When I first read The God Delusion, I was fully prepared to disagree with it and was rather surprised to find myself nodding along, giggling, and generally in agreement. In an opinion piece that I read this week, I saw it described as an atheist 'bible', which I thought rather defeated the point that was being made. Debate is, I think, healthy and necessary for forming opinions, even if it only serves the purpose of cementing one's original beliefs. The only people whom I cannot respect are those who attempt to squash differing opinions or aimlessly discount them; belief is a many-layered and complex thing that can only exist when challenged, otherwise there is simply no point.
---
*For the curious, I am now involved in a healthy, reciprocal (albeit sinful) relationship with a lovely lad who feels comfortable staying up until three am debating atheism vs. everything else, judicial systems, and human rights and, at the end of it, we're okay with disagreeing. Unlike Religion, he also doesn't view me as a breeding machine, passive, or weepy (except for one week of the month, during which time I am given many gifts of chocolate so that I shall not turn my fiery temper onto him). For some unknown reason, he is not comfortable being referred to as a 'lovely lad', but I find it amusing and so it stays.
**I still love religious metaphors - journey, death, resurrection, etc - even if I don't believe in any sort of literal manifestation of them. ETA: I obviously can't spell tonight. Blah.
Mostly, though, it is because I came up with a wonderfully accurate metaphor today whilst sitting behind a line-up of cars in the parkade that involved comparing the Harry Potter series to a rent boy and I'm still developing it.
Therefore, this is going to be a weirdly personal post which has the potential to offend people (although that is certainly not it's purpose). Mostly thoughts on atheist stigma/why it took so bloody long to work all this out/please stop indoctrinating the children. Erm... cut because it's much longer than I meant to make it.
Religion and I have an odd, dysfunctional sort of relationship. My father's family is, in essence, a long line of fiercely Protestant ministers and their wives (or, in the case of one of my great aunts, women who fought for the right to be educated and ordained as Protestant ministers), while my mother's family redefines the word 'redneck', complete with deep feelings of anti-Semitism on my grandfather's part (the irony has not escaped me that the only part of my heritage that is not German happens to be Jewish, although I don't think he's aware of this) and the necessary born-again Christian uncle (I am grateful that my mother and aunt came out of their respective childhoods relatively unscathed). Hence and therefore, in spite of the fact that my father has almost as many issues with organised religion as I and that I can probably count without much effort the number of times I have been in a church, we are Protestant and Fiercely Proud of It.
Add to this that I grew up in the heartland of Canadian Family Values, where the notion that homosexuality can be 'fixed' isn't all that rare and some schools teach that masturbation will cause your hands to grow fur (this was, fortunately for me, the Catholic district, so I didn't have to encounter it directly), and you have a girl with a tiny complex.
Oddly enough, the first time that I questioned religion on anything more than a superficial level was at a summer camp run by one of the many Protestant denominations (if you wanted to go to summer camp, you had the option of going to a Boy Scout camp or a religions camp; I did both), when they spent the week trying to convince us to invite Jesus into our hearts to forgive our sins and rewarded us when we came to them and said that we had prayed to Jesus to save us. Now, I would look on that as a form of indoctrination, largely because of the level of pressure placed on us at an age where individual decisions are practically unheard of (we were ten years old at the time) and, even then, it didn't quite sit right with me. I asked about Darwin and evolution and how that fit into biblical teaching and was told that it didn't. According to my camp counsellor, Darwin had confessed on his deathbed to making up evolution.
My ten year old mind, fortunately, was clever enough to recognise this for what it was: bullshit with some desperation mixed in. During that week, I did not invite Jesus into my heart.
At that same camp, there was a girl who was an atheist (which was spoken as though it was more disapproved of than 'fuck'), who had apparently had enough of being told what she should believe (like me, I think that she was at the camp because it included horseback riding lessons) and ended up having something of a tantrum. So, although I wasn't quite ready to accept what I was being told about morality and God, I was also having it firmly reinforced that 'atheist' was a dirty word that perhaps carried a connotation of eating babies and burning books and, oh no, anything but pre-marital sex. The shock. The horror.
After that, I took a break from religious camps, even when they did involve horses, and went to the aforementioned Boy Scout camps, which involved sailing (a far superior endeavour).
During Junior High and High School, I was heavily involved in athletics (an unfortunate turn of events in many ways, but it meant that I had the second-most CAS hours in my year), which meant that summer was not a relaxation period but, rather, a myriad of triathlons and basketball camps. Unfortunately, the best camp skill-wise, was, you guessed it, deeply religious. Days were devoted to drills and games, which was all fun and enjoyable (and fucking exhausting), but in the evenings we had to listen to various people tell us motivational stories about finding God and discussing the joys of waiting until marriage for sex. They tried to make me sign an abstinence contract every night for one week of the year for three years.
A fucking abstinence card.
By my last year there, I had discovered that I liked sex quite a lot actually, thankyouverymuch, and very possibly laughed at the person who suggested I sign it (I suppose that was... two years ago, now? Don't regret that decision). Needless to say, they didn't like me, my liberal thoughts, or my opinionated self-expression very much. Ironically, that was the one week a year where I allowed myself to openly admit that the things I was being told about religion, belief, and morality were not things that I agreed with. (By this point, a science teacher somewhere along the line had told me that Darwin certainly had not negated his theory on his deathbed.)
The rest of the year involved a lot of confusion, uncertainty, and high levels of guilt that I was disappointing people whose opinions I valued, while still being unable to reconcile what my uncle was saying about gay people and bestiality and what my infinitely more moderate mother was still judging with my own world view that there are certain fundamental aspects of a person that simply are, for whatever reason and that religion, a largely subjective area has not place in government, which ideally ought to be objective. I couldn't wrap my head around how there could be holy wars, crusades, jihads, purges/cleansing, and pogroms, yet religion was still perceived to be a Good Thing.
And, then, I came to the obvious conclusion that religion was, in many ways, my abusive, controlling boyfriend who was trying to restrict my rights and repress my ability to question and reach conclusions and that maybe it was time to dump him.* (Hey, if religion gets to be conveniently metaphorical, so do I.) None of it, at any point, had anything to do with my belief in a deity (pick a deity, any deity); I was more focussed on the things inherent in believing than whether or not I believed anything in the first place.
This question surprised me, and I didn't answer it lightly. I listened to music by a minister's daughter that attacked the repressive patriarchal values while forming metaphors that encompassed everything from the sexual to the 'pure', discovered the wisdom in Joseph Campbell's theology where myth doesn't reflect some sort of greater presence but the divine patterns in our own lives**, and, finally, read some Dawkins and felt, for the first time, that atheism wasn't quite what it had been made out to be when I was ten (although, really, once I'd worked out that Darwin was for real, I ought to have used some deduction skills to work this out). In fact, the ritual consumption of babies is apparently quite rare. Pre-marital sex, happily, is not.
When I first read The God Delusion, I was fully prepared to disagree with it and was rather surprised to find myself nodding along, giggling, and generally in agreement. In an opinion piece that I read this week, I saw it described as an atheist 'bible', which I thought rather defeated the point that was being made. Debate is, I think, healthy and necessary for forming opinions, even if it only serves the purpose of cementing one's original beliefs. The only people whom I cannot respect are those who attempt to squash differing opinions or aimlessly discount them; belief is a many-layered and complex thing that can only exist when challenged, otherwise there is simply no point.
---
*For the curious, I am now involved in a healthy, reciprocal (albeit sinful) relationship with a lovely lad who feels comfortable staying up until three am debating atheism vs. everything else, judicial systems, and human rights and, at the end of it, we're okay with disagreeing. Unlike Religion, he also doesn't view me as a breeding machine, passive, or weepy (except for one week of the month, during which time I am given many gifts of chocolate so that I shall not turn my fiery temper onto him). For some unknown reason, he is not comfortable being referred to as a 'lovely lad', but I find it amusing and so it stays.
**I still love religious metaphors - journey, death, resurrection, etc - even if I don't believe in any sort of literal manifestation of them. ETA: I obviously can't spell tonight. Blah.