Renunciation Blues, Pt. 3

Little different this time.

I just watched the pilot of a show called “Eli Stone”, pretty much a throw-away hour of television on ABC which falls somewhere in the realm of “Ally McBeal” and “Boston Public”, but with a twist.

The lead character has a brain aneurysm, and has several auditory hallucinations which drive his character’s progression from fat-cat lawyer shark type to something more… well, human, I guess.

The point of this is a conversation that happened between Eli and a “mystical” chinese acupuncturist about God. The chinese guy tells Eli that he thinks Eli may be a prophet. Yes, a prophet. Eli retorts with, “The problem with that is that I don’t believe in God.”

To which the chinese man replies – and I’m paraphrasing here -

“You believe in right and wrong, right? You believe in goodness and justice? And you believe in Love? Dude, those things are all GOD!”

And this made me think. I believe in all those things. I believe in true love, in justice and in goodness. I believe that living a truly good life means having love for people, for seeing the world outside of yourself and caring for the other people out there, even if you don’t know them personally. I believe in doing good things, and hope that goodness comes back to me.

I believe in loving your children, and in teaching them to be the best possible people they can be. I believe that children need to be shown love and respect so that they understand what those things are.

And if you define all of these things as GOD… then I believe in God.

What gives me the most trouble is organized religion. The concept of God as a supreme, omniescent, omnipresent, infallible being who rules over everything, who created everything, who loves everyone no matter what.

I have trouble believing in Heaven and Hell, and in the position of the various churches as the places of God on Earth. I have trouble believing in the Bible as the Word of God, no matter if it’s the King James Version, the New International Version, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Torah OR ANY OTHER “BIBLE”.

So what does that mean? Is it the simple difference between spirituality and religion? Is it possible to not believe in all of the things I have trouble with, and still define yourself as a spiritual person? Because make no mistake, I have just as much trouble with Buddhism, Baha’i, Scientology, Satanism, and any other organized, Earth-bound, human-propagated collection of rituals and mythology that is defined as a “Religion”.

I realize that, as my favorite neighbor likes to say, I over-complicate the world by over-analyzing everything. I should just let it go, and EXIST, without the worry of definitions and classifications. She’s probably right.

Renunciation Blues, Pt. 2

Since I wrote this long rambling post, I have gotten a lot of feedback on my dilemma.

My Mother (whose opinion I value more than almost anyone) has asked me to just hold off. She knows the ongoing crisis I have been undergoing in regards to faith, and brought up a very valid point. She pointed out that even though I have talked to many, many people of different faiths and levels of belief, the one type of person I have never talked to is perhaps one of the most obvious. A Catholic priest.

It was a bit shocking to me to realize that she was right. Despite all my questions and doubts, and despite the fact that I was born and raised Catholic, I have never even considered actually going to a Catholic priest and having a sit-down with them. Why is this? As I think about it, I believe that I am plain and simply – AFRAID.

Afraid of what though?

I think that question has two distinct answers. First, I think it’s akin to the man who thinks he may have cancer being afraid to go to the doctor for tests. He is afraid that he does in fact have cancer, and that if he goes to a doctor, that just makes it real, as though as long as he stays blissfully unaware, he’s somehow safe. It’s the same for me in regards to going to a priest.

If I go to a priest, and I am still unable to find the faith I have searched for… that kinda seems like IT, y’know? Once I’ve done that, it becomes real. What until now has been a large doubt becomes a negative certainty, and I will have to act on that certainty.

The second reason is perhaps closer to the truth. I think it is rooted in my own issues with self-worth. I am afraid that the priest won’t give a shit whether I am having a crisis of faith or not, because God doesn’t give a crap whether I believe in Him or not. I mean so little to God (and thereby, to the priest) that my belief or lack thereof means nothing, because I mean nothing.

I know that’s pretty dumb. I fight constantly with my completely negative view of myself, and this seems to be another part of that. A thought that just occurred to me is that this may also be why I have stopped going to counseling – because I feel that whether I am fucked up or not means nothing to anyone, and that the counselor is going to be thinking on the inside “WHO GIVES A SHIT YOU WORTHLESS PIECE OF CRAP” while I am pouring out all of my feelings and issues.

I did promise my Mother that I would not renounce my faith completely until I have at least sat down with a Catholic priest and talked about some of this. I guess that means that I will have to face that fear, and just see what happens.

Renunciation Blues

As I sit here tonight, there are a million things going through my head. One of them, I will share with you now.

 The sub-title of this blog is “Seeking but Never Finding”. This could have many possible interpretations, depending on who is reading it, but the one I will focus on now is my search for God. My search for meaning in life, my search for something to believe in beyond what I can validate with my own senses.

I have been blessed in life, or possibly cursed, with a highly analytical mind. I can intuitively see processes, causes and effects, and logical progression of ideas. I have a very good ability to “read” people and events, and if something doesn’t make sense to me then I mark it not necessarily as “untrue” but at the least “not verifiable and highly doubtful”.

This ability has affected my life in many ways. In my work with computers, I have been able to sit down with a completely unknown programming language and within an hour or two understand the way it works and effectively modify or repair it to it’s intended function, or even add new functions. In my dealings with other people, I can usually sense someone’s motivations and desires, and process and store that information (this does not, unfortunately, give me the ability to always make wise use of this information, as evidenced by my stunning lack of ability to maintain a successful relationship.)

I know, I know, I’m wandering away from the topic.

I grew up in a moderately religious household. We said grace at family meals, we said our prayers before bed. We went to church on Sundays and Holidays. My mother was the motivation behind this, as she grew up in a much more church-oriented household. My father on the other hand was happily agnostic. In his words, there are over 1200 distinct religions in this world, and only one can be right. The odds of you picking the right one are worse than roulette. He did enjoy the music, however, and in the interests of family harmony, he attended church with us and even played his guitar and sang at church.

I accepted all of this while I was young. I attended Sunday School, I read the bible. I was Baptized, had my First Communion, and went through all the steps and processes of my Confirmation. If you haven’t guessed from that, my family is Catholic.

I remember my first doubts. I was around 15 years old, and couldn’t put into words why I had such a problem with attending church every weekend with the family. I began questioning the teachings of the church and the Bible, but only in my mind as I didn’t really have the words (or the guts) at the time to directly question God and my family.

As I grew, the doubts became much more bothersome. I just flat out could not understand all these things in the bible. Why would God have to test Abraham by telling him to kill his only son? Doesn’t God already KNOW that Abraham is loyal? Isn’t that what OMNIESCENT means?

If God knows everything, doesn’t that put a whole different spin on the Garden of Eden scenario? God put the Tree there, God put the Forbidden Fruit there, and God put Adam and Eve there KNOWING that they would fall. Is God a sadist? How can you punish someone for doing something you KNEW they were going to do, when you yourself put them in the situation that made it possible?

Moving beyond God’s omniescence, let’s move up to Lot. Lot moves his whole family, wife, sons, daughters, to a town that is know across the world as a BAD PLACE. First off – what kind of idiot does this? Was there a really good job opportunity in Sodom? (Or was it Gomorrah? Whichever.) Were the property values so attractive that he just had to invest in some real estate? WTF?  This would be the equivalent of me taking my 13-year old daughter and moving with her to the worst part of the worst big city in America. DUH. Not a good idea.

While there, Lot is visited by two angels disguising themselves as rich human beings. They walk through this bad town, and a crowd of bad people form, wanting to harm, rob, or possibly rape these two VIP’s, who proceed directly to Lot’s house. The crowd starts to get rowdy outside of Lot’s place, so Lot comes out to quiet the crowd. “Here, people, stop bothering my guests. They are Very Important People! But here, to satisfy your urges for mob violence and possible sexual depravity, please, take my two virgin daughters and do what you will with them. All I ask is that you leave these rich folks that I just now met in peace.”

WHAT THE FUCK KIND OF FATHER IS THIS?

And it just goes on and on…. After saving his family and the two-by-two animals on the Ark, the waters recede and Noah finally gets off the boat and onto dry land again. There, he does what any sailor coming back from a long duty on ship does. He gets blasted-ass DRUNK. He gets so drunk that he starts stripping off his clothes and running around naked, then stumbles his drunk ass over to his tent, falls inside in his birthday suit, and passes out. A little later, his youngest son Ham (and who the hell names their kid after pig meat? seriously.) comes to the tent checking on Dad and finds him passed out nekkid.

NOW because Ham had the audacity to look upon his fathers nakedness….. God CURSES Ham! Again, WHAT THE FUCK. He lets Ham and the Family know that all of their descendants are blessed, and each of the sons descendants will someday form great nations… except fucktard Ham, whose kids and grandkids will wind up as the SLAVES of his brother’s descendants. Take that, you pervert! Lookin’ in on Daddy’s ding-dong and all that.

Okay, I know this post is getting epic in length – sorry again. The end result of all this rambling, doubts, questions, and flat-out disbelief is that I can’t accept the teachings of God as literal truth because none of this shit makes sense! Let’s not even get into the fact that the Bible is the most-translated, most-reprinted, most-edited freakin’ book in the history of man. Let’s not even get into the fact that before printing presses, all of the copies of the Bible were hand-copied. Oh, no errors there. YOU try copying a book the size of the bible by hand, hundreds of times, and see how many errors you make. Then take that book, translate it into Different Language ONE, where it is hand copied by anoither guy, then translated again, and so on and so forth for thousands of years. Ever play the telephone game? Where one person in the circle whispers a message, then that person whispers it to someone else, so on around the circle, then the last person says the message he heard out loud and everyone laughs about how far off from the original message it was. Yeah.

Then move on to the Council of Nicea. This was a huge convention of religious leaders in the period of time approximately 300 years after Christ died, held in a place called Nicea. At this convention, these religious leaders took all of their disparate belief systems, all of their widely varying Bibles, all of their differing rituals of worship, and sat down and hashed out a combined, singular version of all of these things. This way, all the groups could standardize their worship, and everyone is happy. Oh, they also took a vote at the Council on whether or not Jesus was actually the Son of God, or if he was just a holy man. You know how the vote turned out.

BUT WAIT. This was only 300 years after Christ. Didn’t everyone believe that he was the Son of God? I mean, shit, the dude was born from a virgin, performed MIRACLES for god’s sake, DIED ON THE CROSS AND CAME BACK A FEW DAYS LATER. Were these things just not that remarkable? If a dude dies, then comes back and hangs out with me later in the week, I’M going to believe he’s the Son of the Big Man Upstairs. I’m going to make damn sure that everyone I know believes it too. So how come they had to have a freakin’ VOTE?

So I don’t know. What I do know is that all this internal debate, this doubt that hangs over me like an anvil in a bugs bunny cartoon, is very TIRING. I really, really do want to believe. It would be so much easier to just accept and conform, to truly have faith that God is up there, that Jesus was his #1 Son, that all of life has a purpose. I just CAN’T. My stupid brain won’t let me.

I have tried talking to so many people, of all walks of life, of all different levels of religious belief. The response I get most often is “Have Faith”. FUCK! If I had any damn faith, would I be having this issue? That’s like telling a baseball player in a slump to “just hit the ball”. Or telling an asthmatic having an attack to “Just breathe.” NOT VERY HELPFUL.

So the point of this long, rambling, bullshit post.

I am considering quitting The Search. I am considering breaking my confirmation medallion, of renouncing my baptism, of directly declaring that I am no longer Catholic. I can’t do things in halfway measures. My mother wants me to seek guidance from a priest. To let someone who has dedicated their life to serving God try to guide me out of this morass of doubt.

I just don’t know. I don’t think a priest can help me, because it always boils down to that final leap of faith, that necessity of believing in something that you cannot verify. No matter how much you learn and interpret and analyze religion, you eventually have to make that leap.

I don’t think I am capable of doing so.

And on that note – I’m off to bed. It’s 3:00am on Valentine’s Day. My birthday. I’m 39.