Sunday Sermon Redux: Spirituality in Lack of Faith

I read this posting today one of my bulletin boards. It was so beautiful and meaningful to me, to read these words from someone else going through the same thing I’m going through, and in the process of considering similar conclusions, that I had to preserve them. In case you didn’t know, posts on that board get deleted after just a few weeks; I felt this one deserved longer-term treatment.

———————————-

So I strongly believed. I was among those that even imagined having feelings of knowing somebody from the preexistence, had a relationship with her father in heaven, and thought that Christ really knew her and had suffered pain because of all the times she had been bad. My life was so intertwined with religion that it was part of my every thought.

At first I distanced myself from the church because of my faith in god. I became angry that his name was used to reach worthless goals that had nothing to do with real brotherly love, or even plain kindness. I felt sincerely offended because I loved god and I thought he was different. As I slowly began to leave the church, at first I sincerely missed the chance to meet with people and talk about god. So once, while in Rome I went to Saint Peter’s and went to talk to one of the many priests. I asked him if he was sure that god existed – he thought the question was rather bizarre, it was so obvious to him, it was as if I had asked him if he was sure the sun was in the sky. He said that sometimes he had doubted, but then the evidence that god existed was so plain that he could not deny it. He said that everything was a witness that there was a god.

I began to realize how ironic it was that the greatest injustices were almost always carried under the banner of some god. Starting from the Spanish inquisition, to witch-burning, to European missionaries destroying entire races of people in south America. I thought about protestant missionaries feeling it was their duty (being chosen by god)to destroy a people’s way of living, and reducing native American populations to a miserable state. I thought of Muslim anger for those who don’t believe in their same god and don’t follow their same rules. All in all, religion has been responsible for an unimaginable amount of evil.

As I thought of the people that had done good, they were never responsible for pushing people to believe in their same religion: mother Teresa of Calcutta, for example, only did good, and never preached. Gandhi never told people to believe in his same god. Rev. Martin Luther King fought peacefully for freedom but never pushed his religious beliefs. I can’t think of anything good that has ever come out of organized religions. Not one.

So, why is there such concern about how it is best to worship god, and which rules he likes best? Does god really want to be worshiped in the first place? Does he want people to pray using a certain name or kneeling a certain way? Does he care the least about all the religious stuff?

I came to my personal conclusion that god wasn’t at all about religion. That made some sense to me.

Religion is a way to explain the unexplainable, give a name to things that cannot be understood, and look into the invisible. If religion didn’t really exist – meaning, if religion cannot be relied upon – then how would god communicate with us? Which, consequently, had me think on whether he really wanted to.

So, I was left with a god that had no name, no characteristics, no message, and especially, no involvement in our lives. He was just an entity. Did he create the world, or did he just let it evolve on its own? Does he care about people or does he just let them live their lives? In other terms: what the heck does he do? Could I seriously remember anything that god had actually done? All the so-called spiritual experiences were nothing but warm-fuzzies, all the times that god had apparently helped out somebody now stood against all the times that god had done nothing for starving populations, people dying in earthquakes, wars, tortures, rapes, violence of every kind, drought, floods, storms.

A god that cannot be understood, a god with an incomprehensible behavior, a god that cannot be seen or felt, an entity that has done nothing… is that a god? I no longer believed so. I no longer believed.

So here I am. When I see a sunset I still feel emotional – but now it’s not because god is so good he created the pretty colors in the sky, but because the earth is beautiful, and I am part of it. I no longer do good because I know it is my duty, but because I want to, because I think the world can be so much better if we all were nicer to each other. I am alive now, and I want to make the most out of my life. I don’t have any consoling feeling of an after life to make up for my daily frustrations. Now I take up the responsibility of finding happiness in the present. I feel whole.

If that’s what not believing in god does to people, I am glad I have been disillusioned about god and religion. As I look at the way I lived my life before, I am sorry it took me so long to get out of it.