The voice of God

Have you ever had that dissociative feeling that your consciousness is slightly outside your body? This wasn’t like that at all. In that case, you feel like a kind of strange, disconnected relationship to your physical body, but you’re very much aware that your body exists.

This (religion-induced, hallucinogen-free) vision was different. My physical body fell away and I was existing on a plane that had a cosmic scale to it. I didn’t feel any locality in this plane, but I definitely felt small in the presence of its grandeur, or maybe that my identity was diluted into something vast. This place communicated with me in a way that didn’t use words. But it was short. It was like a single word that communicated directly with my being. And then I fell back to where I was praying with, well, a very special person who I’ll illuminate later.

It’s hard to connect with the reality of an experience like that. Invariably your memory of the event is shaped by how you proceeded afterwards. At the time, I don’t think I was sure what it meant, but later I was sure that I knew. (to be continued…)

Righteous relationships

Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.
-Rilke

Cryptocalvinism

I’ve been hacking through Unqualified Reservations. I’m not sure I want to make any statement about what I think about it, because that’s what that author wants me to do, and the author (UR from now on) has made me paranoid about finding an unimpeachable foothold in the philosophical landscape. It’s possible UR’s flights of fancy and intellectual backflips have no connection with reality, but I appreciate sticking to a theme and examining it from many sides. To the best of my knowledge the theme is:

Ye shall know them by their fruits.

People can say whatever they want about philosophy, belief systems, and labels for them, but we’re all historically situated somehow, and our actions (or beliefs about practical everyday things) can always be traced back to that situation.
Step 1: Recognize this.
Step 2: ???

Atheists may rail against the illogic of god, but does it carry less weight if they believe in a whole bunch of other illogical things?

I say, not really. But I also say that people aren’t atheists because of logic. So maybe I want to join UR’s crusade: I want to know what people really believe and why they really believe it. UR picks philosophical/historical schematizing of beliefs, I pick an introspective phenomenological approach. While UR gets to use awesome words like cryptocalvinism, I’ll get to examine how masturbation affected my faith as an early teen. Both fun approaches, no doubt.

The kingdom of heaven

The church I grew up in doesn’t require a literal reading of the bible. I think I must have learned to take interpretive license from a young age. I remember only a little confusion about the creation story at some point, but when I discovered the verse “To God, a day is like a thousand years and a thousand years is like a day.” I was able to fit everything together without too much science/religion conflict.

The verses I liked best were of the mystic/poetic variety. I think there were times when I didn’t understand a verse “correctly” but I was using them to get in touch with myself, still buried under my community’s expectations. One favorite is this:

Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of heaven would come, Jesus replied, “The kingdom of heaven does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of heaven is within you.”

First of all, many people think the translation should be “among you” and that Jesus was saying that he was among them already. Whatever.

I wanted to believe that maybe all this theology about a Big Guy in the Sky who was smiting people left and right in the old testament, sending his son in the new, and totally silent in modern times, was bunk. I had a hard time believing God was going to do magic when he made a new kingdom, because I hadn’t seen any magic yet. But if the kingdom of heaven were really about some sort of inner destination, then I didn’t have to believe in magic. I just had to look inward and see this mystic connection.

In the end, looking inward was what allowed me to find myself and leave the pain and cognitive dissonance of religion behind. That’s why I love Luke 17:21, because I still believe the kingdom of heaven is within.

Christians, why are you persecuting me?

If I call myself “atheist” today, it is only as a resistance against the people who ask me to pigeonhole my religious beliefs so they can judge me accordingly. It is only until the day when someone who asks whether I believe really cares about what I believe and how I believe it, not so that they can change me, but so that we can share a connection, so that we can be open to each other’s beliefs, “two solitudes greeting and bordering each other” as Rilke would say. And in that moment of connection, if something moves me, then that is something that is real.

If you are a proselytizing Christian, ask yourself, are your beliefs a fortress? Do you attack another’s beliefs from behind your high walls? This is why people resist, or, if they capitulate it is only an illusion, a heart that is captured but not swayed. If you don’t make yourself vulnerable in this moment of connection, I don’t believe you can ever really touch someone.

The source of all intolerance

I’m pretty sure Dobson hates homosexuality more than he loves god.

Rilke

Rilke’s words on religion resonate in me more than any others at this point in my life, and they also inspired the title of this blog. From the “Letters”

- What justifies you then, if he never existed, in missing him like someone who has passed away and in searching for him as though he were lost?
Why don’t you think of him as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity, the one who will someday arrive, the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are? Don’t you see how everything that happens is again and again a beginning, and couldn’t it be His beginning, since, in itself, starting is always so beautiful?

I enjoy this lovely twist on pantheism. I always wonder why people think they have so much knowledge of what god is. Or, do atheists know what it is they’re not believing in? Yes, they do, they know that they don’t believe in the utterly facile, narrow conception of god espoused by most religious people. That straw man god certainly doesn’t exist. But god is just a word, and it connects with something, some possibilities of existence that I think we are better off not divorcing ourselves from. That is, I think, what Rilke has captured here.

In the beginning

My relationship with religion began very early, and has undoubtedly been one of the biggest factors in making me who I am today. Even now, when I’ve managed to escape my upbringing with my identity intact, those threads still tie me, and I can’t just forget about religion altogether. Looking around the world, we can see people acting in the name of god for great good or for great evil. And now that atheism has found a new voice, I find myself reflecting on a daily basis about what my stance towards religion should be. It’s personal, it’s political, it’s philosophical, and it’s not going away. So I want to explore my experiences with religion, to find the right questions and to find honest answers.

I don’t care about the existence of gods. I care about what belief means to me, my family, and society.