-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.

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.

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.