Wednesday, August 25, 2010

surely

I can talk all day about my religious upbringing, my unwilling indoctrination in the Christian faith. I understand that my involvement at church, my Christian education, and my extended family's heavily religious influence all predispose me to a kind of "God burnout," but I've been burnt out on God and church for many years and still never lost my faith in what I perceived to be a greater reality. Up until a few months ago, I still tried to pray every day and, anytime my back was to the wall, my eyes went upward to beseech God for help.

What put me off of God was the personal realization that two cornerstone, Biblical descriptions of God are incompatible. I've been overlooking bothersome and paradoxical scripture for many years, became comfortable with adopting a laissez-faire attitude that was necessary for me to be able to sustain an anemic faith in the words of a book that didn't make a lick of sense. 

I was having a conversation with a good friend of mine the other day about his experience deconverting from Christianity and he said something that's really stuck with me: He said that the first step for him was realizing that God was not good.  

"Goodness" isn't really a term that needs defining--we instinctively know what's "good." We use the term every day, from wishing people to have a "good day" to referring to an acquaintance with the reassuring term "good dude." When I die, somebody will undoubtedly sum up my existence by saying, "He was a good man," despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

If I killed 2,476,633 people, would you--could you--call me good? Is there a "greater good" that could justify this?

The Psalmist, like all the writers in the Bible, sure thought God was good. "Oh give thanks to the LORD, for He is good; for His lovingkindness is everlasting,"  he says (Psalms 107:1). Elsewhere he says, "How great is Thy goodness, which Thou hast stored up for those who fear Thee, which Thou hast wrought for those who take refuge in Thee, before the sons of men!" (31:19). 

You can't really blame people for thinking this cosmic mass murderer was good, though, right? Because God himself constantly declares himself to be such, saying to Moses, "I Myself will make all My goodness pass before you, and will proclaim the name of the LORD before you; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show compassion on whom I will show compassion” (Exodus 33:19).

So that's goodness. (Yeesh.)

The other cornerstone belief is of an omnipotent God, a belief that that God is all-powerful ("almighty" is the preferred Biblical term) and, unlike we fallen mortals, not bound by the laws of physics. He can make a body of water split down the middle to create a path; he can make bread and fish multiply by (I guess) mitosis and make boring water turn into AWESOME wine; he can make a virgin deliver a perfectly healthy little boy.  

So, tell me this--if God is good and God can do anything, why the fuck does everything suck so bad? I mean, really. God split the sea in two when the Israelites didn't have a boat, but he doesn't raise a hand to stop Hitler from slaughtering 6 million descendants of these boatless 4 million? He feeds 5 thousand people so that they don't have to stop gazing upon him in awe and go get dinner, but there are currently 49.1 million people living in food insecure households in the United States, one of the richest nations in the world. God chooses pregnancy as a means for the miraculous birth of his son, but my precious, innocent daughter was the 1 in 1,000 of babies that was born with a very specific fatal birth defect that robbed her of any chance of life.

A little bit of intervention isn't too much to ask, is it?

I've gone back and forth: God is good but not omnipotent, so there are things he wants to do but cannot and this breaks his good heart; or God is omnipotent but not good, so the plight of mid-century European Jews or modern-day Africans don't really concern him too much. But the Bible doesn't tell us to believe one or the other--we're told God is good, and God is Almighty. And I just have to throw up my hands and cry "bullshit," because, in failing to be both, he convinces me that he is neither...that he just plain isn't.

Friday, August 20, 2010

Or...

Or maybe God is real, I don't know. I'm equally willing to believe that something created all this as I am willing to believe we all evolved from a single atom.

All I know is that the God of the Bible isn't the God who I was taught claimed to be the embodiment of love. I've always known this. I mean, you can't actually read the Old Testament and feel like God is a heavenly father you'd want...he's one mean-ass motherfucker.  Let's look at this little gem that doesn't get much play in the pulpit, but is popular with those not inclined to take the Bible at face value:

Then [Elisha] went up from there to Bethel; and as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from the city and mocked him and said to him, “Go up, you baldhead; go up, you baldhead!” When he looked behind him and saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. Then two female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two lads of their number.  And he went from there to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria. (2 Kings 2:23 – 2:25)

Uh...

Okay, on the one hand, that's pretty awful. Surely God could have dispensed with the youths in a less, I don't know, insanely violent way. Maybe spanked them with a lightening bolt or made their desserts disappear after dinner. But he had fucking bears fucking eat them. Damn, that's cold. (God is love.)

On the other hand, that is truly an awesome story. I do not want it to be true, but neither do I want Die Hard to be true, and Die Hard  is a pretty entertaining yarn for a rainy Friday night.

This is why, as an undergraduate literature major, I refused to take the class titled The Bible as Literature. I really, really wanted to, as the professor was one of my favorites and I had immensely enjoyed the Film & Literature class I'd taken with him. The problem was, I didn't want to read the textbook. I considered myself a Christian who was doing pretty okay in secular academia after a few, strange hiccups (I think I might have passively condemned a gay teacher I had in a very early composition class...or my instructor certainly thought I did. Oops), but I knew that my faith couldn't withstand a critical reading of the Bible. So I took Intro to Chinese Literature instead.

Funny thing, though, now that I'm not at all inclined to read the Bible literally, I'm more inclined to read the Bible. I'm no longer tortured by the fool's errand of mentally rectifying the serial killer God of the Old Testament; the dichotomy of a Jesus who loved the poor but preached hellfire for those who didn't fully embrace his monotheistic message; a book like Revelation that, frankly, scared the shit out of me as a child to the point that my parents would often find me cowering under the kitchen table attempting to "hide from God" because I wasn't ready for the rapture to come and rob me of my childhood.

Oh, hey, maybe I can finally read Job. I'm not sure I've ever made it through Job. I would contest that Job, a story that's not been shuttled into the closet with God's angry she-bears but is actually quite well-known, is the saddest fucking story I have ever heard. It makes Hamlet look like A Midsommer Night's Dream. To nutshell the piece, Job was a good man and Satan believed that his goodness was just a result of God treating him well, so God says, "Have at him, just don't kill him." So Job's children are killed, his livelihood is destroyed, and he's tortured with full-body skin infections; so he, because he has conversational access to God, says, "Hey, man, what's up? What did I do to deserve this?" And he was fully sincere, it should be noted--he figured he must have pissed God off on accident, wanted to make right. And so God responds by pretty much saying, "Job, my job is really hard. Do you do my job? No, no you don't, I do, so just shut up and how dare you question me. Say you're sorry." Job does, too, he says he's sorry and gets some more kids, gets a new livlihood, and his skin clears up. And the moral is:

Thursday, August 19, 2010

-less

Godless...yeesh.

At this point, my struggle seems to be less ontological than linguistic. As a Christian, a person owns a label of goodness and truth, but there's such a pall that hangs over those who don't define themselves as such. All the terms I've ever known are the necessary negatives to the positive: the lost, unbelieving, unsaved. The godless. In losing my faith in the Christian God, I'm suddenly facing this term and the negative implications that it connotes--that it's just a matter of time before I'm shooting up heroin, murdering hookers, and, if I remain on my current path of destruction, somehow becoming a native of the deep, dark jungle where my godless state will lead me toward its logical career choice as a cannibalistic pagan.

But if I can accept the term godless, then it's not a problem, because we're all godless. I mean, I can vehemently insist that there is a tree that grows marshmallows in my back yard, but, despite my single-minded belief, I and all of my neighbors will forever remain marshmallow treeless. The fact that "marshmallow treeless" hasn't become linguistic shorthand for "depraved and immoral person" isn't ontological, it's cultural--having a renewing, sustainable source for marshmallows isn't a requirement that we, as a culture demand of those we deem "good."

I still don't like the term, though. It suggests that there is a God and those who can't accept that fact are simply lacking a part of the whole experience or have chosen against embracing a fact, and I don't feel like a person who's giving up any kind of truth; rather, I feel like I'm no longer able to sustain a belief that the oak in my backyard secretly possesses the ability to produce fluffy, confectionery delights--that the acorns all over the ground are never going to become marshmallows and it's in my best interest to figure out what to do with all of the acorns.

In this incredibly forced metaphor, the marshmallow tree belief is reliant upon "yeah,  buts."

[Those are acorns.] "Yeah, but they're really marshmallows."
[I don't see any marshmallows.] "Yeah, but they're there."
[I have a hard time believing that.] "Yeah, but it's true."

Christianity is very reliant upon the "yeah, buts," but, like the negative term "godless," there's a Christian-approved umbrella term that's got a positive spin: faith. Even when I believed, I had some serious doubts, but, but...yeah, but.

Until I ran across an acorn that just didn't work as a marshmallow at all and I was left with two choices: that God demands our prayers and our unconditional love and, in return, chooses not to intervene to better our lives; or that God can't intervene and misrepresented himself as omnipotent. I danced between both of these, "yeah, but"-ed myself into a corner multiple times, and ended up realizing something.

Have you ever heard of Occam's Razor? It states that "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity," that the simplest explanation is usually correct, with "[simplest]  referring to the theory with the fewest new assumptions." In short,  it states that the more explaining and "yeah, buts" a theory requires, the further it is from the truth. Add up all the hours I spent in Bible class, in church, in chapel assemblies, at Bible camp--these hours amount to years' worth of "yeah, buts." Now watch this:

There is no God. Bad stuff happens because stuff happens and some of it is bad.

You really don't need any "yeah, buts." It works.

Oh, and here are some recipes for cooking with acorns.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

de-

"Deconversion," as a term, leaves a bitter taste on my tongue. It seems so heretical. In my life as a church-going Christian (which began when I was just one week old; my mother, being the church organist at the Baptist church of my youth, was unwilling to miss a postpartum week of "serving the Lord." FYI, she doesn't go to church anymore, either, having lived through this bit of cliched church history), there was so much emphatic importance given to what is known as the "conversion experience" that I walked down the aisle no fewer than five times just to make sure I was doing it right, not missing some crucial step and, in this oversight, damning my soul to hell. I lived every day under a blanket of guilt because I, as a shy kid with a nervous cough and a pathological fear of speaking to strangers, had never led anybody to the Lord--in Sunday school or during Bible class at my Christian school, tallies were given, taken, and recorded of souls saved from damnation and signed up for membership in the church (which was to mean, unmistakeably, our church, as all other churches somehow got it wrong, putting every parishioner in jeopardy of hellfire...there was a lot of emphasis on hellfire in those days).

Even in my early days at grade school, I was aware of my SuperChristian classmates, pious preschoolers with a foreshortened arm's-length list of neighborhood children who dirtied the knees of their OshKosh B'goshes and repeated the sinner's prayer with them. My list was non-existent. In later years, I took comfort in the belief that some people can "plant the seed" though Christlike behavior; as I often struggled to pinpoint a specific sin that I'd committed some days, laying in my bed attempting to bring my list of daily sins to Jesus for washing, I thought that being a "silent witness" (these are real terms, I'm not making them up) was the role for me. But--and this really happened--I was told that those who actually made the sale, who convinced the unsaved person to invite Jesus into his or her heart, had done the most important thing and that Jesus favored the good salesman's successful pitch.

I did get a bone once. I'm not being metaphorical, I was actually given a bone...well, it was a piece of cardboard, cut to the shape of a bone and wrapped, shiny side up, in aluminum foil. (That elementary-age children were rewarded in the manner of dogs is concerning, I realize.) The challenge presented to us children was to bring an unsaved friend to church. And this really was a challenge for this particular junior soldier of the cross, as I spent my days in the company of fellow youths for Jesus at the Christian school, most of whom already attended my church and all of whom professed a personal relationship with the One True God. I didn't think I'd be getting that bone and the status bump that it represented, but I managed to pull out a last-minute win in the final week of the competition when one Wednesday afternoon, after riding bikes around the cul-de-sac for an hour with the kid next door, I invited him to have dinner with us and then, when rushing to clean up and get out the door and to church on time, encouraged him to come with us. He accepted and, once the service started, commenced fidgeting, talking, and loudly unwrapping and crunching LifeSavers throughout the evening's hallowed proceedings. Those seated in our vicinity were clearly offput by my neighbor's behavior, and my parents were mortified, but I was able to announce in Sunday school that I'd brought an unsaved friend to church and, after grilling me to make sure the claim was true ("And you're sure he's unsaved?" Yes. "Does he go to church?" I think he does sometimes, like on Christmas. "Where does he go to church?" He said his grandmother is Catholic. "Oh! Good job, Rodney, here's your shiny bone!"), I was rewarded. I treasured that bone, carried it around with me until the cardboard broke and the foil flopped flaccidly, finally retiring it to the corkboard above my bed, where it remained for many years thereafter.

But conversion. So sought-after and sacred. And deconversion, so sacrilegious and selfish. And yet, there's no denying that the reality of the latter is more real to me now than the former ever was. I was told that people who are truly saved don't lose faith; "Once saved, always saved" was our mantra. If a Christian left the church, he or she was never really saved, never truly believed, never really relinquished their love of the world and embraced Jesus.

I did believe, though. I embraced Jesus. And now I don't because I can't anymore, plain and simple.

Yesterday, my eldest daughter was sick, throwing up every ten minutes and unable to keep anything down. I didn't pray for her, instead opted to just hold her hair back and make sure she knew she was fully taken care of. This morning, when I saw her bedside water drained and the vomit bowl empty, I pumped my fist and did a silent little victory dance by her sleeping form, but I didn't thank Jesus. A part of me feels really guilty about this, but overall I'm just glad to no longer be chasing after that foil-wrapped bone.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

salt of the earth

I've got random music in my ears, a handful of customer rushes behind me and (I assume) ahead of me, and a shopfront window view of a darkening sky.

It's Thursday morning, somewhere around 11am.

(I'm not sure why I'm starting a blog.)

([But I do have some things to work out.])

God. I mean: Oh, my God or your God or whatever.

([(Whatever, probably.)])

I'm not sure if I believe in God. I've always believed in God and, at the same time, thought I might be wrong in that belief...I'm wrong about a lot of things a lot of the time, so it does stand to reason.

Now I'm fairly certain I don't believe in God as I once did. And, again, I think I might be wrong.

I don't have a hard time believing in the God of the Old Testament. The communities of faith I've been involved in off and on for the past decade haven't focused much on God as he was depicted in these books, a tendency I can understand--it's hard to love this God. He's kind of a jerk. But, from where I'm sitting right now, I find it easier to believe in a God who's distant and wholly focused on advancing his own agenda to the point of cruel indifference to the overwhelming plight of being human, which can be damned hard.

For example, Lot's wife. God didn't just knock her dead or have, you know, a boulder fall on her head. No, he humiliated her in her final moment by rearranging her atomic structure, robbing her of any semblance of humanity, transforming her into salt. Into salt. Cool parlor trick for a deity who controls the carbon that we and everything we can see, taste, touch, smell, and hear are made of--kind of like Three-Card Monty for a being who isn't limited by the laws of physics. But for her husband and children...sheesh, I can't even imagine, can you? One minute your wife or mother is there, running alongside you, and the next she's a pile of salt, already degenerating and blowing across the desert floor. This had to fuck her family up more than a little bit, right? Enough to have an incestuous three-way two nights in a row, maybe? (I guess God didn't mind this too much since they weren't being gay like the people who God just burned alive in their sleep. I guess getting your dad drunk and sleeping with him is okay so long as the sex is heterosexual.)

All the while, Lot's wife is just a shrinking pile of salt out in the middle of nowhere because she glanced back at her house one more time before it turned into a pile of smoking cinders, at her friends as they awoke from their sleep on fire, their lungs filled with smoke and oxygen denied entry into their bloodstream; as they died confused or, if they understood, heartbroken that a deity hated them literally to death because they didn't reproduce and build a nation-army of sons.

Growing up in a Baptist church in Kentucky (i.e., more than a little bit misogynistic), I was taught that Lot's wife was weak and disobedient. But I would look back. You would look back. I mean, all of your stuff is smoking and your neighbors are dying in a bonfire...you would look back in  horror, in sadness, and in regret. You couldn't not look back.

As a kid, I was told the Bible was better than an action movie--that it had more violence, sex, and drama than the pulpiest of R-rated movies and (stage-whispered with the church's panache for conspiratorial propaganda) we were more than allowed  to read this, we were expected  to, rewarded even (some day I'll tell you about AWANA, which is eerily similar to Hilter's youth regime).

As an adult, I look at these stories with horror and utter sadness. I see God drowning every human and terrestrial animal, saving only a handful of each. I see God participating without even a single tsk-tsk in a caste system that was unabashedly racist. I see God telling a father to kill his son and being overjoyed when said father was willing to stab his offspring in the heart, because this meant he was truly a man of God.       

I do not like this God. And yet, I find this God easier to believe in than a Jesus who made the preposterous claim that God is love. Jesus knew about Lot's wife, even referenced her as an example, as cited in Luke. And he still says God is love.

God is love? God has throughout the better part of his magnum opus killed us off for not living up to his expectations. I guess, in light of this, I can buy that the human race--we, the progenitors of the Holocaust, of the holocaust currently happening in Rwanda, of an Iraq war that considers loss of innocent life an acceptable risk--that we were created in God's image. But I don't see a whole lot of love in us.

This is where I am, and I'm terrified of being here--I'm afraid that when I hit "PUBLISH POST," I will turn into a pillar of salt heaped upon a cheap office seat to be found by an unsuspecting customer who's just looking for a cup of iced coffee.