The Only Dance

(warning: self-indulgent)

As a child, I definitely believed in God. I believed in God, because I saw God as immanent in the natural world around me. I believed in God because I had a sense of communicating (praying, if you like) with something larger than, other than, myself.

My family did not go to church, which made it easier to believe in God, I think. Whenever I went with friends, church seemed to be less about immanence and beauty and more about people, who and what they were, and who they slept with, and who wasn't living up to the standards of the community. Or, if we were in Sunday school, God was about coloring pictures of Jesus. No one at any church I went to felt compelled to tell me that the Bible was the Literal Word of God, and so I continued to think of it as a collection of kind of cool stories, if a little bloodthirsty, and then this one guy who seemed pretty chill. There was not very much emphasis on the Jesus-as-God-Incarnate thing, and more on the Jesus-as-cool-teacher thing.

Okay, so. In the world of books that I read, the world of Anne and Laura and Little Women, belief was something Good People had. Good People believed in God. God was a handy explanation for all those mysteries we little people couldn't quite understand. When I was in seventh or eighth grade I decided that my family should belong to a church. For one thing, we were Good People. And another thing, everyone else had a church they belonged to, and I felt like we were out of the loop as far as communities of faith went.

Armed with this inspiration, I also decided that we should be Catholic. My mother's family were Irish Catholic since forever, and in fact, my mother had wanted to become a nun. So just because we didn't go to Church doesn't mean I wasn't raised Catholic, y'all. Anyway I felt like Catholicism was the way to go, an expression of our heritage anyway, plus the Catholic churches were definitely the nicest in town. Into the fold we went. My brother and I were baptized, had our first Confession, First Communion, and I was confirmed at the end of eigth grade. My dad went to classes and was baptized, First Communion'ed, etc., so that my parents could have their marriage sanctified in the Church. And my poor brother was dragged through another couple of years of classes before he was confirmed at 14, at which point he said that since he was in charge of his soul, he was not going to church anymore and would henceforth sleep in on Sundays.

It amazes me that everyone went along with my sort of impulse-buy religiosity. Looking back, I'm sure my parents wanted to belong to a community, too. So we went to Church almost every Sunday for four years, all throughout my high school years. Luckily for me, some of the kids in my AP class also went to St. Patrick's, so it was kind of hip in some way (by "kind of hip" I mean "morally superior." Also, I've come to the conclusion that this time would have been much better spent getting laid. All those hormones, wasted). I even won a Catholic scholarship for college. Off I blithely went into the heathen world, and when I came back two months later and we went to Church, I gazed around at the congregation and thought, "These people are just not, actually, good people. There's the guy who hates Jews and won't let his wife have a job, there's the priest who slept with my confirmation teacher, there are all the people who believe that the poor deserve to be that way..." In a sort of anti-ecstatic experience, I felt a wave of darkness wash over me and I felt sick, claustrophobic and nauseated: a deep sense of wrongness choked me.

I never went back.

I probably would have continued along in a sort of automated respect and tolerance of religion. This is, after all, one of our primary national tropes: that freedom of religion was the primary reason our country was founded and the solution to the religious wars that tore Europe apart. We're all brought up to exempt belief in God from the scrutiny given to other beliefs.

When Bush II came along, I started feeling a little uneasy about the shameless use of religion to provide both moral cover and a wedge issue to divide Americans. And then, from my point of view, the evangelical community in the U.S. went just crazy. All of a sudden it was deeply invested in everyone else's life, particularly their sex lives, and even more particularly, what women did or didn't do with their wombs. I felt betrayed, really. I kind of thought the deal was that I tolerate your beliefs which may range from doubtful to ridiculous (reading golden tablets with stones that you put into your hat? Thetans? for that matter, birth without sex or insemination?) but that the evangelicals would be content with merely repressing their own people. But now the cows had broken down the fence and all hell was breaking loose.

So I actually started to think about the evidence for God, and I started to wonder about the phenomenon of religion. The more they wanted me to believe things handed down from on high, the more I liked the scientific method and the more closely I held my skepticism. Relgion is such a strange artifact, really. Imagine if we based medicine today on what people believed at the time of Christ. Imagine if people were out on the streets with nametags and bicycles, trying to get us to believe in Athena?

What finally got me, though, and why I jumped the fence to agnosticism bordering on atheism, is that I think that a belief in God, rather than adding to the wonder of the world, detracts from it. I don't believe that there is a life to come; I don't believe that the self I carry around in my head will survive after the last synapse stops firing. This is it: this is the only dance we dance.