My first pastor was a mulleted woman by the last name of Kreis. Unable to make an “st” sound, my step-father pronounced her name the same way he pronounced the name of the Savior. Chrisss. I thought that was hilarious, even though the only time they were in the same room together for me to enjoy it was when she was performing my mother’s and Mike’s wedding ceremony. Mike French-kissed my mother at the end of the vows. I didn’t think that was so hilarious.
Pastor Kreis was Lutheran, as was my family in its own limited way. We didn’t go to church often, but I have two early memories of our brief stints there. I can’t remember which one preceded the other so I’ll go ahead and give both.
One of them involves me sitting in the back pew with my brother Bryan, chewing the fat before the sermon. I can’t remember what we were talking about, although I was always anxious about which of us should put the money in the collection plate, so it was probably about that. An old woman sitting in front of us (who, I still remember had gray hair she had tried to dye some damn color, but which ended up coming out a horrendous shade of blue) turned around and told us that if we didn’t shut up we were going to go to hell. So we shut up.
The second memory is of being sent out into the hall during Sunday school because I couldn’t understand how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit were all the same person and I couldn’t drop it. Unless maybe they were all born different people and ran into each other so fast that they fused, just like in all the crappy television shows I used to watch. That thought was what got me sent to the hall. The trinity always confused me, so I sat out in the hall and thought about it.
I knew a song called “I am my own Grandpa” that used to send me into fits of giggles as I swung from branch to branch of the described family tree. But I didn’t have an idea in hell as to how someone could be their own father. So I sat in the hall, looked at a crucifix, and came to the same conclusion I came to every time I went to church. That Jesus guy had some terrific abdominal muscles, and that nothing else really seemed to make sense.
The family gave up all pretense of religion by the time I was in first grade. We were all wore out on being a part of the community. I only encountered religion indirectly after that. My sister was sent to a private Catholic school during junior high probably in hopes that the nuns could “scare the bitch right out of her.” That didn’t work so well.
I thought it was funny that my grandpa, who I had assumed wasn’t afraid of anything, human or otherwise, refused to go near the school. I guess some nun had beat the shit out of him enough when he was young that the terror was too massive to simply blow away with the passing of time. Watching my grandfather make up an excuse not to pick up Rachel, I decided that if a nun ever hit me I was going to go ahead and hit the bitch right back. For a while, that was that.
I didn’t step foot in a church again (mom and Mike got married at something called “The Rotary Log Pavilion” so that doesn’t count) until the seventh grade. My friend DJ had found out that I was an atheist so he invited me to his youth group. He couldn’t figure out how someone so smart could “think something so dumb.”
“It’s all about fun and the community” he assured me. “No preaching at all.” DJ and his mom swung by my house later that evening to pick me up.
My first thoughts of the rectory where the youth group met was that if cinnamon was a middle aged man with gas, then the room smelled like his asshole. I don’t know where the hell the scent came from, but I felt like I was in a spice mine on Arrakis when I sat down in those porous wooden pews. I don’t know how I stopped myself from sneezing every three breaths, but I did.
The youth minister was a fat man who liked to chew gum. You could see it back on his molars every time he spoke, shaped like a shriveled white vagina. He offered to let me fill out my name, address, and telephone number on a 5×7 note-card in exchange for an “entire” King Size Reese’s Pieces. I declined. He tried to entice me with the Hershey. I declined.
I wasn’t so dumb I didn’t know I could have the same amount of chocolate at any time for less than two bucks without having to sacrifice my privacy.
He started in on his “lecture,” which was basically “God makes us all good people, because his son died for us, and this is why we don’t have to sacrifice stuff anymore.” It made me want to ask if I could live on as an atheist if I promised to just knock off a cow every once and a while, but I kept my mouth shut out of respect to DJ.
Things started to get scary after that. He started crying, and holding his hands up in the air. I looked around. At some point everyone else had started crying, and they were holding their hands up in the air. I elected to put my face in my hands, sigh, and mumble “oh shit.” I think everyone thought I was praying.
When the preacher told everyone who loved and accepted Jesus into their hearts to come up to the front of the room and be saved, I was the only person left in the pews. I got the collective “stink eye” of the congregation for about a solid thirty seconds. I promised myself to never ever accept another offer to go to church with someone after that.
In time I learned to see communion as pseudo-cannabalism, circumcision as pseudo-mutiliation, and Jesus as a pseudo-Zombie. Congregations struck me as mindless fanatic mobs, which I disliked for the same reason I disliked the idea of being hypnotized. There’s not a person on Earth I trust enough that I want to lose control of myself while standing next to them. That probably sounds judgmental, but remember, I’m an odd duck. I don’t fit in anywhere social. You should hear my thoughts on circuses, school carnivals, and Chuck E. Cheese. They’re much worse. God damn do I hate Chuck E. Cheese.
My great uncle Johnny (he looks like Super Mario got fed so many mushroom that he jumped out of the television. When you see the guy you expect him to start jumping on people’s heads and shooting dinosaurs with turtle shells) used to drink his paycheck away every two weeks until he found Jesus. Now he lives by the dictum that he must do good because “The Bible tells him to” which I think is inestimably aided by the fact that he’s never read the Bible.
I don’t have the heart to tell him that Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt, and that Lot begat children by his own daughters. Or that Lot offered his daughters to the folk of Sodom when they wanted to fuck some angels in the asshole so bad they were rioting, and that Lot was throwing female orifices at them like a man throwing water on a fire. Uncle John’s taken religion and turned it into something that helps him lead a better life. I’m not so big an asshole I can’t tip my cap to that.
I know all kinds of criminals. Drug-dealers. Prostitutes. A couple of murderers. I even know a guy that killed his own baby, although he’s schizophrenic so it’s not like he did it on purpose. Not a one of them wouldn’t lose their collective minds if they knew I was an atheist. Not believing in God at all? That’s what bad people do! Sweet Jesus the only true son of God Christ, is that annoying.
Not that I think being a religious person makes you bad anymore than being an atheist makes you good. Having a naturalistic interpretation of the universe is pretty much only indicative of having a naturalistic interpretation of the universe. All the science in the world isn’t going to make you a better person if you’ve made up your mind to be an asshole, just like religion isn’t going to make you a better person once you’ve decided to be asshole.
You know what assholes have in common at the end of the day, when you adjust for all variables? Being assholes.
I suppose religion only bothers me when it makes people do something dumb. Like decide that their children can’t have blood transfusions because some obscure passage in the Bible says something that doesn’t make a damn bit of sense. Or that gay people can’t get married, because all knowing all powerful God is very concerned with where we stick our genitals more so than he’s concerned about how we treat our spouses. Or that we have to go off and form a cult because we’re the only people who really know what’s going on. Oh, and adding to the list of things that are abominations: shellfish, and your wife kicking some guy in the nadges while you’re fighting with him.
But religion doesn’t do anything more than annoy me because I know it’s not going anywhere. No one is going to stand up and decide to be an atheist because I show them all their dogma doesn’t hold up to the scientific model. Mormons aren’t going to stop being Mormons because Native Americans are descended from Asian people and not Jewish people. No one is going to stop going to church because I explain to them how collectives do nothing but destroy diversity of thought. It’s been with us too long, and if there’s anything I hope for, it’s avirulent dogma.
A good argument I give to my religious acquaintances is this: imagine a machine with the intellect of God. It knows the location of every molecule in the universe, and where they have been and where they are going. The machine is sentient, and has a complete understanding of both itself and human psychology. It holds the secrets to our happiness. Now, suppose we asked it how to form the best possible society. In the instruction manual it prints out to answer our question, how many pages do you think would have to do with treating others with respect, and how many pages would have to do with affirming dogma?
Like I said, I don’t have any great illusions that religion is going anywhere, but I think the day might come when the God of dogma goes the way of the Dodo bird and we’re left with “Grand Compelling Warm Cosmic Fuzziness.” Grand because it sweeps the universe, compelling because it supports all natural law, warm because the previous two descriptors give us very good reasons to be nice to one another, Cosmic because we can’t understand it entirely, and Fuzzy because we all want to interact with it. See? An amorphous God that doesn’t do a whole lot to fuck up your life. Not such a bad idea. The Grand Compelling Warm Cosmic Fuzziness. I like the sound of that.
So, dear Reader, on this Christmas those are my thoughts on religion. At present, I believe only that there is something called Being, and that for some reason Being has won out over Oblivion (try imagining the perfect clarity of class extending in all directions some time. Not white, not black. Just clear as far as you can look in any direction. Now imagine, that there are no dimensions. Just the clear sitting in null space. I can’t do it, but then again I’ve never been drunk or high, which is what people usually are when they sit down to start wondering about this stuff) and that’s about as far as I’ve gotten on the subject.
I don’t understand the nature of consciousness, although I’ve come to understand that no one else really does either. I don’t know why the universe appears to be intelligible, although my guess is that it is intelligible. I don’t know how far back you can go with deduction before you run up against the causeless cause. But I do know that Zeus, Odin, Rama, Buddha, and Jesus don’t really seem to know either. As long as we keep trying to figure it out and we don’t make up reasons along the way, it’s all good.
In closing, I believe in the Spirit of Christmas and don’t care how many carols people want to sing about Jesus or where they want to sing them. I’ve never met a person of any religion who doesn’t think Christmas is the greatest Holiday ever invented, and I don’t care if it’s called TheOneTrueSonofGodwhoistheOnlyPathtoSalvationMas, because it’s entirely about making a point of being nice to people. Being nice to people is very seldom a bad thing. I also believe if there is a God he doesn’t speak in words, but in music and that if there’s one thing that makes life worth living its the ability to laugh. That may not be much, but its what gets me through the nights.
So I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas, and will go on to have a Happy New Year!
