On the Road

So what is the something that prevents me from truly believing in any established religion?

I come from a line of Danish theologians but have other genes that have led several in my family to become scientists. I seem to have a foothold in both mindsets and have begun to think that the frontiers of theology are actually to be found in science and science fiction.

I live in NYC but for many years I would visit my late aunt in LA (and I swear the minute I left the airport and went into the sunlight there my brain became far more credulous). She was a minister of Religious Science which is part of the New Thought movement begun in the 19th century partly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This offshoot, Religious Science, was founded by her mentor Ernest Holmes who knew the "Secret" long before Rhonda Byrne - in other words there is little new under the sun.

Being an omniverous reader I would browse among the books in her library. There were several Bibles and concordances, the books of Ernest Holmes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, books by Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Sri Ramakrishna and others. I found that all this "new thought" still relied on old teachings.

The universe is approximated to be 157 billion light years in diameter and 13.7 billion years old, consisting of possibly one trillion galaxies each containing billions of stars with countless planets orbiting them. We are, in all likelihood, not the end all, be all of creation. I believe there are other intelligent lifeforms out there, though not necessarily in our Milky Way, and their way of looking at the universe and their place in it will certainly bear little resemblance to any of our earthly religions where we most assuredly created our gods in our own image.

J. B. Phillips once wrote a book titled Your God is Too Small which he spent the rest of the book refuting to his own satisfaction. However that is my take on the so-called revealed religions - these gods are far too androcentric and Earth-centered, their scope far too limited. Would a deity who could see a sparrow fall on Earth and a similar creature on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy really be too concerned if one wore linen and wool mixed together or women wore men's clothing?

These beings on other worlds may not have anything remotely male or female about them. There are creatures on Earth that have no sex (ie. amoebas), creatures that change sex or develop into a specific sex due to who it is they first encounter, creatures who are both male and female and species of fungi that have 20,000 sexes! If god encompasses them all how can he have only one particular sex? Therefore I simply cannot believe in that male god pointing the finger at Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Judeo-Christian tribal god who runs around having tantrums. And this variety of lifeforms is just on one planet - who knows what forms life takes elsewhere in the universe.

Still Beginning III

So if I'm not a Christian what am I? Among the religions of the Earth there are a few that I view favorably and among them are the Jains (as they prescribe a path of non-violence towards all living beings), the Ba'hais (whose beliefs emphasize the spiritual unity of all humankind), the Quakers, the Unitarian Universalists and possibly Buddhists. Unfortunately for me they each have something that prevents me from truly believing in them so what am I? People have for millennia been philosophizing about god and religion and creating various terms for their arguments. In my quest to figure out exactly what I am and what I believe I have come across a number of them. Atheism:   1. the doctrine or belief that there is no god. 2. disbelief in the existence of a supreme being or beings. Well since I do think there is something beyond us I guess I'm not an atheist in the strict sense of the word. Agnosticism: 1. the belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist. We have been killing on matters of faith for millennia and we'll continue on this senseless path until we grow up and accept we can't know the truth this side of death when either we find this is all there is like the finale of "Terminator 2" when its CPU finally shuts down or we meet Jesus or Mohammed or whatever. There is no proof one way or another in the here and now. I guess I could be an agnostic but I still like the term freethinker best so it will have to do for the moment.

Still Beginning II

I was a skeptical child and those incredible biblical stories I was exposed to seemed to have a lot of inconsistencies. I remember, in Sunday school, when we discussed Noah and the ark, I, who even then was an animal lover, would ask "how did Noah get llamas and buffalo from the New World and kangaroos from Australia when they hadn't been discovered?" and "what did they eat - I mean even if rabbits bred like rabbits there wouldn't have been enough to feed the lions and tigers and leopards?" The teachers would sort of pat me on the head and say "you'll understand when you're older so stop asking questions and go back and color in your Noah's Ark coloring book".

A while later it was the story of Adam and Eve and this original sin stuff that must've meant incest as near as I could figure that bothered me. I mean in the beginning, according to the bible, there was Adam and Eve and their sons Cain, Abel and Seth and some unnamed daughters. Eventually Cain and Seth (not sure about poor Abel) "knew" their wives and begat a whole lot of sons. But the only females at this time were Eve and her daughters so the brothers had had to marry their sisters - yuck! Also why was Cain marked as there was no one else in the world but his family? Were Adam, Eve and Seth so stupid that they wouldn't recognize their relative? Again with the head patting and "you'll understand when you're older". I'm older but it still doesn't make sense.

Then, during my agnostic stage, I obsessed about the story of Mary as I was teenager about her age - god gets her pregnant without so much of a "Mary will you do me the honor of bearing my child?" No it's zap she's pregnant. No wonder she and Joseph wandered around so much so no one could count the number of months she was pregnant. As a budding feminist I felt (and still feel) it was a form of violation of Mary's bodily integrity if not outright rape (just a variation of what happened to Danaë and other victims of various gods).

Xtian fundamentalists often say when they have kids they would want them to read nothing but their Bible. I've read it (not word for word but skimming along) and found it full of genocide and rape and terrible injustice. The story that really got to me was one in Judges where this guy, in order to save himself, hands over his concubine to be gang-raped to death and he himself is never punished. As a feminist I was and still am appalled and it made me even more sensitive to all the god-condoned rapes of captive women that's to be found in this book. I swear, if I had kids, the Bible would be the last book I'd want them to read at least until they were adults.

Still Beginning

When I was a child our family attended St Peter's Lutheran Church in NYC. At the time it was a gothic-type church, sort of a smaller version of St. Patrick's. It was later torn down to make way for Citicorp, a huge office building with a smaller, more modern St Peter's at the base. My father thought Citicorp looked like a man in his underwear and that it was an apt representation of our time - this huge edifice to Mammon with the small church cowering beneath it.

Children are born into a world that they are ignorant of and for the most part assume that "Grownups know everything!" and "Grownups know the truth!" As a little girl attending Sunday school we'd later go to the main area where our parents were listening to the sermon. On the walls, as I recall, were murals of Jesus on a cloud surrounded by angels. The pastor would say "Let us pray," and everyone around me would bow their heads and pray. I'd sit there thinking there must be something wrong with me as I simply could not believe but I didn't dare say anything as I feared god would strike me dead (so I'm inconsistent, hey I was a kid). It wasn't until I was 10 that I dared say anything out loud and, as I was in distress about my mother, I may have been attempting suicide-by-deity (a variation of suicide-by-cop) as he (if he truly existed) would declare, "What she doesn't believe in me? I'll strike her dead." Obviously nothing happened and decades later I'm still alive and still not believing in the biblical god.

In the Beginning...

My mother was a Lutheran Protestant and my father an agnostic. I went to Sunday school when I was young and heard the fantastic stories fit for a child's ears (nothing about all the killings and rapes that are also to be found in the Bible) and, knowing about the Greek, Norse and other myths, waited for some sort of proof that this set of fantastic stories was real, unlike the myths of the more "primitive" peoples but that proof never came.

At 10 I gave up believing in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Easter bunny and the Middle Eastern tribal god. At that time my mother had had a severe stroke and I couldn't believe that god would do that to her so all my doubts bubbled up to the surface and I proclaimed he didn't exist.

In my later teens I became an agnostic - perhaps god existed but I still wanted proof. In my 20s I became a feminist and sort of believed in the goddess but in my 30s I came to realize that that is just as sexist as believing in a god. I'm not sure exactly what I believe now and I know what I believe today I may not believe tomorrow but I do feel there may be something beyond us.


free·think·er
[free-thing-ker] –noun
a person who forms opinions on the basis of reason, independent of authority or tradition, esp. a person whose religious opinions differ from established belief.