An explanation on religion

The other day, I gave a somewhat pointed retort to those that believe that Hurricanes Rita and Katrina were actually messages from God, exhibitions of his power intended to make infidels feel compelled to get some ackright. I’d be lying if I didn’t find that to be a little silly, but I would be wrong to be entirely dismissive of those that believe that way. They were raised in that, so I can’t knock them for believing that.
The problem is that many people who feel that way–though not necessarily the person who first brought that to me, a good friend of mine–have made my life unnecessarily difficult, and it pisses me off.

I was not raised in a church. A decent synopsis of my views can be found here, the original draft of a piece I did for Africana four years ago. It read better when it ran the first time because Kate and Phillippe got their hands on it, but this is the unedited version. It makes sense, even though there’s no editor in place. I’ll also warn you that this is probably not nearly as good as stuff I write now. You learn a lot after five years in the game.
(Same rules apply, kiddies. Please do not use this for professional gain without telling me. You are more than welcome to link to the file or this entry, but do not cut and paste the piece.)
I’ve had to do some reformulation of my religious views in the last few years. I’m not an atheist. I think I may have been a few years ago, but I’d really never given it enough thought to conclusively say that I had an ideology. At this point, I can definitively say I’m an agnostic, oxymoronic though it may be to definitively say that I’m a bit confused.
Is there a god? It seems possible to me, if not likely. Like I’ve said before, the people in my life and the things that have happened to me have been too random to be random. Plus, as charmed a bastard as I am, it’s hard not to thank something large for that. However, I believe in opposing actions. Basically, if I’m charmed, then a lot of people out there are fuckin’ cursed, and I’d prefer not to think that a god would curse people. Especially not children, who haven’t lived long enough to do anything to anyone or anything, let alone a god.
Or maybe a god is able to translate baby talk and detect heresy. Dunno.
So I’m an agnostic. That confuses people that were raised in church, I’ve come to find. Perhaps that could be more simply stated–I do not trust organized religion. I don’t trust anything organized but families, and those aren’t to be trusted all the time, either. I’m no religious scholar, but I’ve read enough to know that the trust isn’t to be trusted, and people would be hard-pressed not to see the point there. Muslim, Christian, whatever–just about all religions have been twisted by one person or another to serve the worldly needs of an elite class.
I don’t like the elite, even though I’m probably one of them and will almost certainly be one of them soon.
At the same time, I let people have theirs. If you want to be a Christian, that’s on you. If you want to go to church every week and give up ten percent of what you’ve got to the plate, do that (btw, when giving tithes, do you make that calculation as gross or net of taxes?). That’s on you. I understand that people need religion. They need something to ground them, to make sense of the inexplicable, something to give them a reason to believe that everything will be okay.
There are times when we all need that. When Jon died, I wished I could have that. Without any religion in my life, all I had was my overarching belief that everything will wind up being okay and the faith I had in my ability to deal with whatever was thrown at me.
A couple of bottles of cheap gin later, and all I was holding onto was the former of those. It managed to work out after a few years. Stopped drinking cheap gin way before, though.
But when you read that–not about gin, but the paragraph before–it sounds just like something a Christian would say, right? A Christian would likely say that God would not put anything in front of him or her that he or she was not able to handle. It seems like the same thing, but grounded in something slightly different.
Some call it arrogance, but I have a supreme belief in myself, my personal strength, and the personal strength of others. I think most people are way stronger than they believe. Tough times are when you find out just how strong you are. One day I will deal with losing my parents, something that seems totally foreign to me. But I will deal. A new element of my strength will become clear to me.
I just don’t put that straight on a god. Perhaps strength is something endowed from a god, but I don’t think strength is something one has to summon through prayer. Strength is within us all. We tap into it differently, but we all have it.
To me, it’s all the same.
To me, there are two kinds of people–good and bad. I’m pretty indifferent about what makes people good and bad. I fucks with good people. I fucks not with bad people. Just that simple.
So, why do I bring this up? Baba was doing some thinking this weekend. I’ve had no less than three women that I’ve dealt with fairly seriously tell me that my lack of religion was a serious stumbling block in dealing with them. One even went so far as to tell me that was the reason she was punting me to the curb (the real reason was she was going back to her previous boyfriend, with her lying ass). One about a year ago gave me a good punt two weeks after telling me that “to grow together, a couple must grow together in Christ.” Still don’t know what her real story was on that one. Probably never will.
(Luther had a different take on both of them. For the first one, he said something that I really can’t put here, but let’s just say that it was reflective of a bit of, shall we say, physical hypocrisy. As for the latter…well, Seuss was floored by what Luther had to say. To understand how extreme that must have been, keep in mind that Seuss wanted to “eat a plate of fish sticks, drink a gallon of milk, and stare right at her shoes.” Seuss is violently allergic to fish.)
Either way, thinking about that sort of stuff is beginning to get frustrating. I can’t do the church thing. Just can’t. I’ll go here and there with my mother–who has once again become active in the church after a few years away–because it’s important to her, but I’m not about to join or convert or anything. I feel like she raised me, and she and I have very similar values. The majority of goodness and honesty within me comes from my parents. They probably got that from the church, but it was given to me without the church, something that leads me to believe that goodness does not have to be given to someone through a twisted, mutated interpretation of what’s divine.
I think my mother fears that my soul will be doomed if I don’t get into the church thing, and that kinda hurts a bit. I don’t think there’s an afterlife–to explain my thoughts on that would take a while, but it’s borne in game theory, oddly enough–so that fear doesn’t hit me the same way. I guess I could pray for those things to be on the safe side, but that feels too hypocritical to me. Plus, I’m guessing that a god would be able to see through a “just in case” strategy.
But the older I get, the more tired I get of people being unable to accept where I come from on this thing. This is a Judeo-Christian society, so the majority of people I come across will be religious. It is what it is. I’m okay with that. I’m okay with them. I’m okay with them doing what they need to do to get by.
I just hope people can be okay with me the same way. I just can’t put no money on it.
That really sucks.
Oh well, I guess.
It’s the prospect of having a disconnect from people because of different beginnings irks me, if only because those beginnings lead to the same conclusions (at least in this world).
My informal research has shown that the majority of you will not agree with me. Nearly everyone I asked last year when it was looking like I’d lose someone that was then important to me because of religion understood where she was coming from, and they even said they would do the same thing. That was particularly bothersome because I was more head-over-heels than I ever remembered being.
That wasn’t just disillusioning for that one situation. That let me know I may be in bad shape for the rest of my life, at least when it comes to mate searching.
It would suck if that’s the case. It seems highly likely that it is the case.
Shucks.
Oh well. Just felt like sharing. Maybe someone will feel be able to offer some insight that would be useful for me and for others in similar positions. Just kinda sucks that I don’t feel like I can find people as tolerant of differing religious views as I am, even though most of those people subscribe to a religion that uses tolerance as its hallmark, its most attractive quality.
Such is life. Back to the fun stuff later this week. No less than two pieces running. One on ESPN about Michelle Wie and one on the BSN on The G-Code. That’s right, I’m doing a professional piece on The G-Code. Shawty yay-yuh!