ciroccoj | Confessions of a Lapsed Atheist

I started to reply to an entry about faith by

jenniferjames in private, but by the time I was done, I had a huge monstrous e-mail on my hands and it had gone way beyond what I meant to send to her. I guess there was a lot inside me, trying to get out. So at the risk of alienating even more people, here it is:

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I. Background

I said to

jenniferjames on her lj that my own musings about faith are not meant as a general put-down towards people of faith. Maybe a background thingy would be helpful here.

I was raised mostly atheist. My father had little or no respect for belief of any kind. My mother did, but although we usually lived on a different continent than my father, he had a very strong presence, so the bulk of my upbringing was staunchly atheist. And when I say he had little or no respect for belief, that's putting it mildly. To him, it was obvious that there was nobody Up There, no Creator, no life after death, no God, no soul, etc etc. He honestly believed, and would say at the drop of a hat, that anybody who believed in a higher power/being must be brain dead or crazy.

And I have to say, on a purely logical level, I still agree with what I was taught as a child. Humans have held such a huge variety of contradictory beliefs throughout history. The world was fashioned by a god of pottery; no, it was vomited from a god's mouth; no, the Earth Mother was impregnated by the Sun Father and gave birth to all creatures and humans; no, God created Heaven and Earth in six days; etc. As for afterlife, we've believed that the dead go on to heaven, or hell, or purgatory, or Valhalla if they were good warriors, or another (human) life, or another (human or nonhuman) life, or the Celestial Bureaucracy, or sail to the next life only if their earthly body is carefully preserved, etc etc.

When I look at all of that, it's hard (for me) not to feel that since not all of the above can be true, maybe they're all delusions of some sort.

My mother didn't say much about her beliefs, other than to state that she didn't belong to any religion and to occasionally put down organized religions when they showed blatant hypocrisy, small-mindedness, hatred, etc. However, she also occasionally pointed out things that were hard to explain without recourse to a higher power. Priests and nuns risking their lives to help political prisoners in Chile. People surviving incredible hardships like the Holocaust through the strength of their faith. Sunsets. Babies. Poetry. You get the point.

I did grow up with a healthy respect for the teachings of Christ, whether he was the son of God or not. My father told me once that he and my mother tried "to be good Christians, without believing in Christ." I took that as my motto for a long, long time - and perhaps it still is my motto, who knows. My sigfile on my yahoo mail right now says, "If his words hold wisdom, and his philosophy is honourable... what does it matter if he returns? What is important is that we follow his teachings. Perhaps the words are more important than the man."

The quote is from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the person spoken of is Kahless (the Klingon prophet) and not Christ, but the sentiment is true to what I believe about Christ as well.

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II. Me and Religion

I've always wondered what it must be like to wholeheartedly believe in anything. I've always been on the outside, looking in. I've sung in choirs in churches, even belonged to St. Mary's Cathedral Choir in Kingston for a while, listened to sermons and prayers in churches, public events, weddings and funerals. I stand next to people who obviously feel something while all of this is going on... and mostly feel absolutely nothing, myself. Nothing spiritual, that is. Singing in Christmas concerts and singing Negro Spirituals are what bring me closest to belief of any kind. Every year that I'm involved in Christmas concerts, it seems to me that that much love and devotion to Christ and God can't be wrong. That much beauty can't come from nowhere. There has to be somebody inspiring it, and giving it back.

And then the concerts are over, and I go back to doubt.

This sounds somewhat sad and forlorn, and it's really not. I'm interested in faith, and I wonder about it, and I often think it would be nice to feel reassurance of the otherworldly kind, but I really don't normally feel like I'm missing anything. I love my family, I have deep moral and ethical beliefs, I am (mostly) happy with my life, and all (mostly) without God. My curiosity about faith is more of an intellectual and sociological than a personal nature.

I mean, faith can be a force for so much good. Christmas music and spirituals aside, there's also all that my mother pointed out to me as a child, and much more.

Unfortunately, faith can also be used for hideous ends, and can justify all sorts of things. Homophobia, racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, child abuse, genocide, terrorism, environmental devastation, wars, etc - all have been fuelled by faith. I know that many of the antidotes to all of the above have been fuelled by faith as well. But when it comes to faith, the good guys don't always win. It's even hard to tell sometimes who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys. Abortion, for example: are the good guys those who staunchly (and sometimes at great risk to themselves) defend a woman's god-given right to control her own body? Or those who risk their own lives to protect those of the unborn? I've heard both sides claim the support of God for their positions.

So, I'm curious. Contrary to what my father taught me, most intelligent people do believe in something beyond the concrete. How can that be? What does that feel like? What does it mean, that most human beings believe in something? Is faith (or at least some belief) necessary to human beings, to human society?

I've thought about it off and on for most of my life, asked questions and observed and thought some more. And when I started writing fanfic, faith was one of the things I wrote about a lot. One of the first characters I latched on to was Rey Curtis from Law & Order. I tend to be drawn to characters who I would probably avoid like the plague if they were real people I had to work with. Rey, much as I love the guy, fills that requirement admirably. But the one thing that really drew me to him was the fact that he was so unapologetic about his religious beliefs. Remember, I was raised to think that nobody with half a brain could possibly believe. So here's this intelligent, educated, fairly down-to-earth guy, who staunchly believes all sorts of things that make no logical sense whatsoever. How can that be? I've spent acres and acres of fanfic exploring that.

Another character I really latched on to was Jack McCoy, who has been shown to have a fairly complex attitude towards faith. He's practical, unsentimental, ruthlessly logical... and yet there are chinks in the logical armour, places where the logic doesn't quite gel with the emotional reaction of a man raised by Jesuits. Yes, I know it's due to the fact that the writers of Law & Order have no character Bible and don't remember from one episode to the next whether a character even has kids or not, but still. It's intriguing. It's real. It's something that's there not just on TV and in fanfic, but in real people as well. And it's something I've tried to explore.

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III. Why the crisis of faith now?

I wrote to

jenniferjames as a comment to her entry that

My own difficulties with belief right now are a personal thing, composed of all sorts of elements: personal mourning, examples of un-Christian acts by supposed Christians, world events, family interactions, lifelong ambivalence, etc. If any of this has hurt you or made you feel that I'm belittling your beliefs, I'm truly sorry.

My mother's death and her funeral have hit me pretty hard in terms of faith. I had always assumed that if I ever had to deal with the death of someone close to me, I'd probably finally admit that I believed in a higher power. Instead, I feel myself almost forcibly driven back to my atheist roots. Religion and faith have surrounded me and sometimes been literally shoved at me, in all manner of ways, great and small, since my mother's death.

Eg #1: about an hour after she died, Justin said something to the palliative care doctor who was there, and she told him, "Well, you don't have to worry about her any more - your Grandma's in Heaven now."

Justin isn't being raised Christian. Chris, who's raising them both Buddhist with my consent but without my active participation, has told him that Grandma has gone on to her next life. So Justin didn't have much of an idea of what the doctor meant by "gone to Heaven". And it never occurred to her to doubt that he wouldn't understand her or agree with her.

Eg #2: Chris has not shoved Buddhism at me, but I do feel a little lonely in a house where the other three members comfort themselves with thinking they'll probably meet her again in another life, or that even if they don't, at least she's not totally gone. I don't feel that assurance. A very large and steadily growing part of me truly believes that all that is left of her are pictures, stories, memories, and an urn full of ashes waiting for me to decide what to do with them at the McGarry Funeral Home.

Eg #3: My father forwarded me an e-mail from a friend of my mother's, with the subject line "Julia's rebirth." My father was the one who was mourning the loss of one of his closest friends - but some guy who was friends with her twenty years ago responded to the news of her death by telling him she wasn't really dead. Whether he meant it as a comfort or not... it just seemed disrespectful, to me.

Eg #4: There are many, many other examples like the above, but the minister at my mom's funeral was the person who shoved the hardest. I think I could have accepted the overly Christianity-filled sermon with some equanimity, had he not directed a section of it to me, personally. Maybe I should transcribe it, but I don't have the heart to listen to it right now. Suffice it to say that I was (and am) somewhat repelled, that a person who had been told "the deceased was not religious" and "I am not religious" should have taken the opportunity of her funeral to shove his religious beliefs at me.

I didn't feel all that much about it at the time. Now, I feel like... well, if that was meant to bring me into the fold, and it's had this profound an effect the other way... what does that mean? I know that supposedly, God works in mysterious ways. But this is beyond mysterious, it's bizarre. Could God have wanted me to be targeted at the funeral for my mother, in a way that would repel me deeply, instead of comforting me?

The fact is, it hurt. I was (and am) feeling a loss bigger than any I've ever had to deal with. I am my mother's only child, and she was a single parent. It was literally just her and me for most of my childhood. Now my childhood, mostly, is gone - there is nobody who remembers it but me. In-jokes between the two of us are gone. Stories where I was never sure of all the details - now I'll never know them. Parts of my childhood that I'd forgotten, but that I assumed would turn up at some point during my boys' lives (ie, my mother saying "Don't worry, Daniel, your mother also had a lot of trouble learning to tie her shoelaces") will never surface again. Stories about my mother's childhood and her life, her marriage to my father, her parents, her experiences in Chile during the coup, as a foreigner in Morocco, as an immigrant in Canada - that's all gone.

In the midst of this loss, during her funeral, I was offered not a caring, "if you remember her, she'll be with you," or a gentle "think of how lucky you were to have her there for as long as you did," but an unwanted lesson in the Christian belief system. "If you don't believe in Christ, how can you possibly deal with her death? What other comfort could you possibly have?"

I don't believe. At least, not wholeheartedly. So, according to the man who performed her funeral service, there is no comfort, no recovery, nothing positive to be gained from her existence in my life.

I know, he's one man, and he shouldn't affect me this deeply, especially since I do have my own Godless ways of dealing with her loss. But the fact is that he's one man who had a position of some authority at a very vulnerable point in my life, and it's just not that easy to shrug off the pain that his words caused then, and still cause now.

I was going to wrap this up with my observations re. oppression/silencing of persons of belief v. persons of non-belief, but that grew to be its own monster entry and feh. Later. Tomorrow, maybe. Right now I'm going to bed.

(and at this point lj died on me last night, so I'm posting in the morning instead)