I am trying to post at least once a day, so the two of you cross your fingers and wait with baited breath.
At little history if you will:
Throughout my formative years I was quite involved in the Episcopal church: I went to service every week, worked in the church nursery, had my Boy Scout meetings at the church, was in the Youth group as a teen, and generally spent a lot of my time and energy involved in church-related matters.
If anything, my involvement in the church was a positive aspect of my young life. I cannot stress how wonderful my Scouting experience was throughout those extremely important preteen/teen years. I would not hesitate to say it was hugely influential in making me the man I am today.
Two of my best friends to this day are the sons of the priest of my childhood church, and one of them is an Episcopal priest now.
My love of children certainly began in the church nursery, and I learned many child-care skills which have proved invaluable both as a teen-aged babysitter and as a father.
In my wild, lonely, and single years my Mom once mentioned that there were a lot of nice, single girls at church my age and I should, in essence, come check out the scene. Honestly, I considered.
Clearly, from the title, you can see where this is headed.
Despite all the obvious benefits of attending church in my formative years, I can barely pass through those doors nowadays without a sneer of contempt plastered across my ugly mug.
You see, shortly after 9/11 I began to seriously question the beliefs of my youth. How could there be a loving, christian god who allowed so much suffering of people who were clearly innocent of any crime save being at the wrong place at the wrong time? And, not to diminish the 9/11 victims at all, but what about fucking Rwanda? Or the Holocaust? Six million plus people subjected to the most nightmarish torture imaginable, all pleading to their god for help and the cold European winter skies stayed silent as they shat themselves in fear and died alone.
Is god caring and compassionate and I, a mere mortal, just can't see the big picture? Perhaps. Is god a watch-maker type that the deist founding fathers of America envisioned, who created a wonderful world and set it in motion, simply sitting back and watching as it all unfolds? Maybe.
Or perhaps god is some ultra obscure deity from a native African tribe that is now extinct due to slavery, a god who requires continual human sacrifice to appease his blood-lust, and events like the Holocaust are simply his way of settling the score.
However, as an agnostic I know one thing for sure-we humans cannot know anything at all about the true nature of god.
If god came down from heaven (or up from hell for that matter) and every human being on earth saw him/her/it at the same time, that would be an o.k. start to us establishing that there might, in fact, be a god.
Why does this matter at all?
Clearly a vacuum would have been left in my life if I hadn't been raised in the church. What will fill this void for my children? Is the sense of community church provides more important than our spiritual beliefs? If not, what is the substitute for non-believers?
Any thoughts?
Tomorrow, with the help of my wife, I intend to publish pictures of what I think god might look like.
No, seriously.
7 comments:
Oh, tim. Nothing like starting a blog and jumping in with the big questions, eh?
I was raised similarly to you, only in the Catholic faith. And similarly I became disillusioned with the principals or doctrine or whatever it was that made the place tick. I fought to be an altar server prior to Vatican II. When they finally let me, they changed the rules. Girls were allowed to be on the altar but they were now charged with setup, cleanup. ... maids.
Sigh.
The catholic church has its own problems now. Not just with pederasts but also with cruel and inhumane treatment worldwide.
I left the church when a friend of mine died in a car accident and the priest was so callous in what he said and did in the events surrounding her funeral. I was done. These people who didn't want me as a giving part of their society weren't spreading the love of any God I wanted to be a part of.
I think a part of me that regrets that my children won't have church experiences worries me because much of what I believe and understand about religion comes from experiences I had in one. Good or bad, I definitely learned something.
Suppose we bring them up outside of religion and they rebel by becoming fundamentalists?
Sigh.
Wait a minute ... with the help of your wife, you're gonna what now?
Hi toyfoto thanks for the awesome reply! Hey, if i'm going to bother writing at all, why not go for broke with the big issues eh?
Tony you dirty dirty boy.
Hey toyfoto,
Yeah, Angela and I always joke that our kids will grow up to be christian republicans just to piss us of.
What can you do?
Hi Tim,
I'm a flickr peep of Angela's who poked my nose in here for news of her condition post-partum. Thanks first for sharing your thoughts and experiences on Harper Jane's entry to this world--very real, touching, and frankly informative for those of us in the InterWeboSphere who were concerned.
As for The Church Thing, I'm in the agnostic boat as well, having been brought up without indoctrination of any sort by an agnostic recovered Baptist and a mind-yer-own-business Methodist. My husband, though, was raised in a very churchgoing Presbyterian household. He's turned away from The Belief now, but his early background was decidedly more religious.
Three years ago, after our own Audrey was born, we started talking about the community aspects of church, and whether she would miss out on that by living in our non-believing, non-attending household. We ended up taking a good close look at our local Unitarian Universalist church, and found it to be pretty much all the things we would like to have in a community, without the dogma.
Now, we haven't actually joined a UU church--we would want to put more time and energy into membership than we have made space for in our lives. But the thought of joining a UU church is still on the table. This is despite the fact that I have absolutely no belief in any deity, and my husband has only the vestigial remains of a belief forced down his throat as a child.
The UU (please forgive me if you're already totally versant with their principles) focuses on commonalities, not on divisive doctrines. Attending a UU service is a philosophical experience, a cerebral one, and yet also spiritual, but it's not at all a scripture-based diatribe. It can't be, because the members listening may include adherents of Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, or any number of other faiths, as well as agnostics and atheists. UU clergy draw from the literature of various faiths, but treat it as just that--literature, not holy, glow-in-the-dark scripture that has a divine edge over anyone else's literature.
Anyway. If you're unfamiliar and curious, you can check out uua.org, or more specifically this link for the list of UU principles:
http://www.uua.org/visitors/6798.shtml
If this big ol' nonbeliever ever joins a church, it won't be because I decide to believe in any particular mythology; it will be because there is at least this one denomination that is about learning and bridging gaps and promoting justice and coming together to serve others, rather than closing ranks around a doctrine.
One more interesting source re: UU is the blog of a local pastor here in the Houston area. This guy has really impressed me with his insight and wisdom, his calm in the face of crazy blog trolls, and his steadfast insistence on treating people with dignity, even those who spit invectives at him through the keyboard. The blog is here:
http://blogs.chron.com/keepthefaith
All the best to you on this journey,
Claytonia/Cindy
There is always the possibility as well that there is no god-in the sense of some person, power force, etc.. that created everything. I always thought it was pretty egotistical to think that the entire world was created for man by someone with their best interests at heart.
As far as the no church experience- I have been to church about 10 times total in my life(including weddings and funerals) and I think I turned out ok. I played sports, was in the boy scouts, and took part in a lot of non-church activities that helped me get a sense of the importance of community without all the guilt, doubt, bluster, and condemnation that comes with most of the church experiences that you will get here in the bible belt.
Hi Claytonia
I am only vaguely familiar with with the UU church-mainly through the kids of 1960's hippies. However,like you, we just don't feel the need to make space in our lives for organized religion-at least, not right now.
Another thing you might check out, if you are the pod-cast/NPR type is speakingoffaith.publicradio.org. It all different types of religious thinkers and leaders talking about their faith-but always in an informative and enlightening way.
Hi Robalauncher!
Yeah, the whole hubris of thinking we could even possibly know all of god's wishes is another whole aspect of what led me to Agnosticism. The "what ifs" that are inherent in any speculation about god are truly mind numbing. Perhaps that is one of many reasons we humans have had and still have religion.
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