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seiberwingI've been thinking a lot lately, about religion and death and what comes after that (and no I am not considering speeding the process along). I don't have faith in anything, and it's been that way for most of my life. I didn't even believe in the Tooth Fairy, it was just a fun little ritual that got me money.
I don't think I realized until recently, maybe a year or two ago, how much it hurts not to believe. I want to believe. *cue the X-Files music*
Being as I was born and raised in the Bible Belt, I grew up with the cultural assumption that there were three religious paths, none of which really appealed to me.
My parents are Jewish and they do the holidays thing and the synagogue thing and the Torah study thing, but I never got the vibe from them that they deeply believed what they said in Hebrew every Saturday morning. My dad even dodged the question of whether he actually believed in God or not. Me, I indulge in the holiday rituals and the Sukkot uber-party that my mom throws every year because they're family tradition and have copious amounts of good food because every Jewish occasion is an excuse to have food, but I stopped going to services a few years ago. They're dull and I feel uncomfortable doing any more praying than what you get at a Passover sedar (which, incidentally, also contains copious amounts of food). So that's out.
The second path would be the Christian path, more specifically the Southern Baptist one. The Triadpeoples may recall the church sign at the beginning of my street saying 'A good old-fashioned fundamentalist Baptist church'; that's what I lived with until I went off to college. Personally I could never get into the whole Jesus thing, it never felt right and I couldn't logically equate infinite compassion and infinite power with the state of the world and the concept of an eternity of suffering for those who didn't swear loyalty to a specific flavor of God and follow an express set of rules that seemed to change based on who you asked--at least the rabbis were honest about their disagreements and didn't condemn each other to hell when they squabbled over the right way to light a menorah (yes, this happened. Hillel/Shammai is the rabbinical argumentative OTP of the Talmud). So that's out too, and to be quite honest the more I hear arguements in favor of it the more I dislike the entire concept. Campus Crusade can probably shoulder part of the blame for that with their 'used car salesman/promise of eternal life and mortal happiness' combo.
The third path was atheism, the violent kind you find in high schools and internet message boards. At one end there were the 'I'm a criminal, I prayed in school' t-shirts which made absolutely no fucking sense (Dear Christians of America: You are not persecuted. Get over it.), and at the other end there were the 'don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church' buttons that no one seemed to realize were just as loud and annoying as the fundamentalist Christians. Sure, they might have had more logic on their side, but that hardly entitled them to be dicks about it. Someone who says they know for sure that anyone with faith beyond the material world is a fool and they know it for certain seems to be to be just another Bible-thumper--but replace 'Bible' with 'their ego'. So that's out because I don't believe in being a jerk either.
I broke out of all of that a long time ago. The Judeo-Christian god is apparently not my thing. But I still want something to have faith in, an ideal or a deity or a personal philosophy, maybe some sort of eye-opening experience that leads me to believe in something greater than myself.
I just don't know where to find it.
I don't think I realized until recently, maybe a year or two ago, how much it hurts not to believe. I want to believe. *cue the X-Files music*
Being as I was born and raised in the Bible Belt, I grew up with the cultural assumption that there were three religious paths, none of which really appealed to me.
My parents are Jewish and they do the holidays thing and the synagogue thing and the Torah study thing, but I never got the vibe from them that they deeply believed what they said in Hebrew every Saturday morning. My dad even dodged the question of whether he actually believed in God or not. Me, I indulge in the holiday rituals and the Sukkot uber-party that my mom throws every year because they're family tradition and have copious amounts of good food because every Jewish occasion is an excuse to have food, but I stopped going to services a few years ago. They're dull and I feel uncomfortable doing any more praying than what you get at a Passover sedar (which, incidentally, also contains copious amounts of food). So that's out.
The second path would be the Christian path, more specifically the Southern Baptist one. The Triadpeoples may recall the church sign at the beginning of my street saying 'A good old-fashioned fundamentalist Baptist church'; that's what I lived with until I went off to college. Personally I could never get into the whole Jesus thing, it never felt right and I couldn't logically equate infinite compassion and infinite power with the state of the world and the concept of an eternity of suffering for those who didn't swear loyalty to a specific flavor of God and follow an express set of rules that seemed to change based on who you asked--at least the rabbis were honest about their disagreements and didn't condemn each other to hell when they squabbled over the right way to light a menorah (yes, this happened. Hillel/Shammai is the rabbinical argumentative OTP of the Talmud). So that's out too, and to be quite honest the more I hear arguements in favor of it the more I dislike the entire concept. Campus Crusade can probably shoulder part of the blame for that with their 'used car salesman/promise of eternal life and mortal happiness' combo.
The third path was atheism, the violent kind you find in high schools and internet message boards. At one end there were the 'I'm a criminal, I prayed in school' t-shirts which made absolutely no fucking sense (Dear Christians of America: You are not persecuted. Get over it.), and at the other end there were the 'don't pray in my school and I won't think in your church' buttons that no one seemed to realize were just as loud and annoying as the fundamentalist Christians. Sure, they might have had more logic on their side, but that hardly entitled them to be dicks about it. Someone who says they know for sure that anyone with faith beyond the material world is a fool and they know it for certain seems to be to be just another Bible-thumper--but replace 'Bible' with 'their ego'. So that's out because I don't believe in being a jerk either.
I broke out of all of that a long time ago. The Judeo-Christian god is apparently not my thing. But I still want something to have faith in, an ideal or a deity or a personal philosophy, maybe some sort of eye-opening experience that leads me to believe in something greater than myself.
I just don't know where to find it.
