On Religion

I was raised as a Christian in rural America. Growing up, we went to church on Sundays. I went to Sunday School. My Dad sang in the choir. He was an elder in the church. I went to church camp. In short, I was immersed in Christianity as a child, but something never felt exactly right about it all to me.

Even as a child, I think I realized that there was something wrong with the stories they would tell in church. As I approach 40, I don't recall the specifics of my childhood rationale, but I do recall feeling that there seemed to be a lot of glaring inconsistencies with the logic of the people I was around. "Noah did what now?" "I have to love God or he will torture me forever after I die?" "What do you mean, talking snakes?" Needless to say, I was not popular in Sunday School. However, I did take away something from those years: an innate sense of a Creator; that there was some ultimate good in the universe and that it maybe had some plan for me after my life here on Earth was over.

As I grew older, I compartmentalized this part of my mind to keep it away from what I learned in high school, college, and life. If someone would ask, I would say that absolutely I believed in God (denial of God, I remember being told many times, was the one unforgivable sin), but that I wasn't sure of the specifics surrounding His works or will and as such, didn't really feel it was my place to try to convince anyone that they were wrong or I was right. That when it came down to it, my beliefs were, I freely admitted, based on "faith" in what felt right. While all true, this was really just my defense mechanism to keep people from fiddling around too much in that compartment of my mind which I had created to store my irrational thoughts. It seemed to work well.

Lately, I've opened up that part of my mind and begun to examine its contents. This is an activity I can't recommend highly enough; everyone should do it and I wish I'd done it sooner. I've realized that I have a lot of skepticism about religion in general and admitting this has been extremely liberating. It is, as Christopher Hitchens might put it, much like refusing to submit to living in a celestial dictatorship. It is saying, "No. No I do not submit myself to your heavenly government on the basis of threats or promises of rewards. I choose to examine my life and make rational choices about what is right and wrong based on reason and intellect, not fear and greed."

I am not saying that there is no God; I simply don't know if there is or not. I will say that as I've examined my life and my thoughts on religion, I've come to realize that at some point over the years, I've stopped being motivated to do good because of heavenly threats and promises, and started being motivated to do good because of a deeper understanding of morality and ethics and a desire to act as a genuinely moral person. Furthermore, as I have looked over my own history and examined what I understood about religion up to this point, I have also noticed a great many problems reconciling the beliefs of Christianity with what reasoned thought proclaims as moral and rational behavior. In future posts here, I intend to discuss some of these issues.



"Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blind-folded fear." --Thomas Jefferson