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02 February, 2006 - 9:15 a.m.
on the subject of religion... and other things you think about in doctors' waiting rooms

today i was thinking about religion and what i means to me. you may have guessed from previous entries and conversations that i'm not religious. and i know that a lot of people say "oh, i'm not religious. i'm spiritual" but they never define what that means to them. and it's almost a cliche by now. so. here goes.today i was thinking about religion and what i means to me. you may have guessed from previous entries and conversations that i'm not religious. and i know that a lot of people say "oh, i'm not religious. i'm spiritual" but they never define what that means to them. and it's almost a cliche by now. so. here goes.

i grew up hearing stories about this angry, resentful male god who took out his inability to guide his progeny (and their subsequent failures, which could have been learning experiences if handled properly) on them and who somehow decreed that one gender was weaker than the other, rather than both genders being reflections of itself. i grew up hearing about the things that i should feel bad about... being a female, thinking for myself, standing up for others when the Person-In-Charge is wrong, expressing my views, dressing in clothes that please me (rather than the ones prescribed by their school of thought).... where does it end?

It seemed to me that there had to be something more. i see the failings in the world today and wonder what sort of god would allow such tragedy to occur, and whether he loves one group of people more than he loves another, and why there is no intervention when things go horribly wrong and no explanation for the things that have been done in his name and i decided that, other than the divine intervention, the things that i dislike about god aren't god. it's mankind. it's organized religion. i think there are compassionate, humanistic individuals who preach whatever religion and have the idea dead-on. but there are so many who do awful things in the name of religion, like killing entire races of people and taking over a region and causing centuries-long wars for money and land and and causing one gender to have less power than the other and and and and and...

so it's not god i really have a problem with. it's people. but the scientist in me begs to operationally define god. do i mean, in strictest terms, the christian god or the hindu gods or the jewish god or any of a number of possible gods? no. not at all. gods are archetypes, and as those of you who've read Jung will agree, archetypes are sort of the BIG idea behind themes we find in our lives. archetypes are so big that you can't really define them operationally. there's some large force that may have influenced human development and caused us to realize the importance of having rules to live by. could this be consciousness itself? absolutely. could it be a collective unconscious? sure. could it be the King James version of the christian god? absolutely, though i hope not (i mean, he has temper tantrums all over the new testament. who wants a god like that? grow up, already.)

the scientist in me begs me to operationally define something that is too large to be defined. how do you like that? i think part of having faith is to continuously redefine god for yourself across your lifespan, to reaffirm for yourself what your faith means to you. i believe that it is our responsibility to do this for ourselves and that anyone who tells us what we must think and feel and believe is robbing us of the opportunity to do our job. presenting alternate viewpoints and suggestions is ok. that helps us think outside the box and consider other options. but i said "must".

i think i lost my faith around age 8. i don't know if we went to church when i lived in ______. but i do know that we did not go to church when my mom moved us back down to t. i had some serious questions about the world (why do parents get divorced? is it ok for my stepfather to do that to me at night? who is supposed to protect me when i'm in danger? is it ok for my brother to make me look at pictures of naked ladies when i don't want to? what can i do to change the situation?) and i went to the church across the street and asked them. i figured that perhaps churches were safe places and that people who were there were wise. this is the same church that kicked neighborhood kids out of their playground, erected a fence, and would call the cops if anyone was on their swingset. so, you can guess that no one there was able to give me my answers. in retrospect, i suppose they should have had some sort of moral obligation to contact the authorities about the molestation, but they didn't. plain and simple. i suppose an organization that believes that women are property of men must have ascribed sexual ownership to my stepfather, as he was the man of the house. so, i suppose maybe it was also the elephant in the room... everyone knows it's going on, but no one wants to bring it up or talk about it or deal with the feelings that they have on the subject. Instead of offering to help me, even by answering a few of my questions, they told me that everything i needed to know was in the bible.

so there i was, eight years old, reading the bible from cover to cover. i was horrified by the violence and injustice and had no one who was interested in helping me find meaning in it. god tricks some guy into believing he has to kill his own son? why would god do that? why would god let his chosen people suffer under slavery? why would he let them wage war on other people in order to claim land and resources? why would he kill nearly everything else on earth ("except for the floating ones and the swimming ones," --eddie izzard) because they were bad (because in my eyes, i saw it like i saw my brother, going to hell in a handbasket because no one was around to tell him that what he was doing was wrong) with no second chance? i don't know. there are a lot of things that i want answers to, but i'll never get them unless i find them myself.

we moved and i went to church with our neighbor's daughter, who was about my age. we sang about jesus loving all the little children and i had questions in my head about if all children, red and yellow black and white, were precious in his sight, how could he leave these children to starve and suffer in countries around the world (i saw it on TV!) and how could he let there not be enough food in my home (lettuce and mayo sandwiches, people... not by choice. for a month.) and how could he let these other things happen to me in my home? is that how you treat someone who is precious? yeah. you could say that, by age nine, i had some serious issues with god.

where is that loving protector? where is the father figure? god must be absent, as my father was absent and unable to protect me, though to this day i do not know for certain that he would have done anything to help me, if he could. my archetype for god was simplified into the role of an absentee father. great.

by this age (9), i was reading tolstoy... war and peace is a heavy book for me NOW, but i was shattered by it back then. you can say i was a bit of an unusual child. our neighborhoods sucked, so i was pretty much confined to the house or to the duplex's yard. i did have a library card and my grandmother would take me there sometimes. i remember that i read every nancy drew book one summer, but got tired of the characters halfway through the hardy boys collection.

time moves on and my mother had a nervous breakdown, so i got to go stay with my grandmother in ______. a summer turned into the entire next school year. they'd taken me to a counselor because, well, i had issues. the counselor told them that my childhood had been stolen from me. i imagine what a brooding child i must have been. i know that i was deathly shy (and thank god for X that year. i haven't forgotten all you did for me). all that aside, part of the routine was church every sunday. the pastor was a decent guy. the didn't ram religion down your throat. and i think i was able, for a time, to quiet the questions that had plagued me for so long. i enjoyed sunday school. i had a baptismal. i got to be jesus in the christmas play (we drew straws). it was wierd to be in that house sometimes, because my cousin was/is? catholic and there i went to a protestant church. *shrug* (my aunt married a catholic guy and we'd ceased to be catholic years before. however, he was raised catholic.) i think that's the first time i became conscious that there were different flavors to christianity. and i became obsessed with knowing the difference between them. i wanted to go to his church because it had these great bells that would sound out and it was within walking distance and they had a sort of fair every year.

i moved home (against my will) and started the 6th grade and became obsessed with reading gospels of all sort and i would have given you my left arm to have gotten copies of religious books. i decided that i wanted to be a nun when i grew up. i mean, it sounded sort of cool. you hang out in churches and you have a daily schedule and you are so important that you're the Bride of christ. dude! and you comfort and care for orphans and help care for the sick and dying. and it also meant that you got to be close enough to god to have your questions answered.

well, i hit puberty. religion went out the window. high school. Z's father was a preacher and there he was molesting her at night and she wasn't allowed to go places if they knew i'd be there because i wore t-shirts with band names on them (and rock music is the devil). and it was heartbreaking because there was nothing i could do for her but offer her comfort and the guidance office at our school had us pegged as attention-seeking based on our clothing (which is one of the reasons why i won't be a guidance counselor) and i'm pretty sure that we could sue for their failure to report her abuse. here he was, a holier-than-thou preacher, raping his own daughter at night. well, both his daughters. my questions came back.

by this time i was old enough to find answers in strange places... my senior english teacher, my theatre coach, dance instructors. college. more events. more questions. C. i got a lot of wisdom from him, and i bet he hasn't the foggiest idea how. i'll leave it at that.

junior/senior year. i became obsessed simultaneously with the concept of purity and cutting. oh. and i became a closet alcoholic. i developed a standard of goodness that was rewarded by drinking and punished by carving my own skin. with my own blood, i felt i was making myself pure. i think something happens in life along the road. i think you're gifted with epiphanies here and there and that it's your decision to take them and use them... or don't.

i was so down that i gave up. i don't think anyone that i knew back then had any idea that i'd just resolved to die. just let it go. fortunately, you cannot die just by willing it so. i'd held in so much of my depression and anxiety (from such a young age), that just letting it go and resolving to die cleared so much of that pain that i think i was able to see clearly. either that or i was visited by the divine presence. i realized that sometimes in life you have to let things go and that good things can come of letting go. bad things happen when we hold all of those things to ourselves. i realized that i was carrying around so much in terms of negative energy that it was dragging me down. and i had a choice: let it go or drown. when i counsel, i use a similar metaphor. each year that goes by is another suitcase that we have to carry with us. Negative things, obviously, weigh more than positive things... and if we cling to those negative things, they stay with us. if we deal with them, they become lighter, easier to carry in our past. so yes. counseling. meditation. blogging.

and then yoga. i'd already renounced the christian idea of god and i'd already realized the power of nothingness, of emptiness, and yoga taught me to feel peace. that same peace i felt when i gave up. you know me and religions... i probably have a book on it somewhere. i don't really label what i believe, because i think that it's probably a mixture of all of the systems of belief that i've studied, but it would be closer to buddhism than anything. hense the yoga and meditation.

i don't think i'll ever have the answers to my questions and i believe that they have either become outdated or they have been answered. why does all that stuff happen in the bible? well, it's a work of fiction. written by man, supposedly divinely dictated, though it was re-written at the behest of king james and ALL sorts of stuff was changed with all sorts of consequences ("suffer not a witch to live" had been "suffer not a poisoner to live"... hello spanish inquisition and the salem witch trials, and that's just one example). i discovered that the churches are run by people and that people are fallible. People decided back in the (i dunno, 4th century, was it?) which books would go in the bible and which ones should be burned because they didn't agree with the picture that the catholic church wanted at that time. including texts that have a much healthier view of women.

the main point is that god or God or Whomever isn't the issue. it's other people telling you what to believe and to do and not letting you determine that for yourself. and when you find a place in yourself where you can let everything go and you don't have bullshit tumbling around in your head, maybe you can see clearly enough to determine what is Right and what is Wrong for you. and I guess this is why i say that i'm spirtual, rather than religious. religion is dogma. spiritual is in the heart.

i think that the end result of growing up so spiritually-motivated is that i have a strongly developed conscience. i know where i stand on most issues and i know what is right and wrong for me. some people call it "directed" or "noble" or "honorable". whatever.

i find that i cannot place my system of faith in the hands of Man because all Man has done is let me down, cause me harm, fail to help, label me without justification, and basically live up to the reputation of an absentee father. However... believing in an archetype who lets you decide for yourself and puts things in your path not to hurt you, but to help you learn from them... that i can do. i can learn from my mistakes. yes, i'll see the pattern eventually, i hope. and i can stop reliving the same events over and over in my life when i have enough clarity to see the for what they are. it's worked so far.

sometimes you feel pain and you see a knife sticking out of your back and you get all upset about it... and sometimes you look for the hand that did it and are surprised that it is your own.

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