How Santa Ruined Religion

One of the problems with trying to describe yourself is that one word attributes just don't cut it. So sometimes it's better just to give examples.

I think one of my defining characteristics is best illustrated by my reaction to being told there was and then later wasn't a Santa Claus. I never thought he existed, at least I can't remember ever believing. However, there was always this terrible feeling that there was something going on and that there could actually be a Santa Claus. I like to call it optimistic pessimism. Besides, my parents told me he was real and that was the story they were sticking to, so that was good enough for me.

So good, in fact, that I would defend his existence to the more skeptical kids in the neighbourhood. As a point of honour, I would fiercely defend something I wasn't sure I believed but wanted to so badly. I got made fun of and roughed up a bit over it, but it was so worth it at the time.

Time passed and my suspicions were confirmed when one of my parents broke the news to me in passing (I was old enough that it would be safe to assume I had outgrown these things) in a very, "but of course, you already knew that," type of manner. This was fine, of course. I did already know that. I'd known that for a long time but now; now I could feel it. Sometimes, confirming what you already knew can still make your heart sink.

Fast forward a decade and a half and I'm frying much bigger proverbial fish. I have had life changes a-plenty mostly revolving around my moral structure and beliefs. Not an easy thing to adjust, kids. Yet, it still seems like I'm wresting with the same issue under a different name.

Say you wade through the treacherous muck of trying to reason through whether there is or isn't a God. Say you make it through to a totally solid, unwavering conclusion with your sanity still intact. Say that conclusion is that there is, indeed a higher power and Creator. What now? So all of creation is too wondrous and magical to have been the product of circumstance. So God made it. Who's God? Your God? The Christian God (among which there are many different versions)? The Druidic gods? Allah? Yahweh? Shiva? Amaterasu? How do you know it's yours?

I don't mean to be challenging anybody or their beliefs, although in essence that's probably what I'm doing anyway. It's more that I don't get how anybody can be certain of their God. I don't have a distaste for organized religion from a belief that it's inherently wrong/unethical/evil (although I do find it a little unnerving); I have a problem with it because I don't see how any rational person could pick one. I honestly, truly do not understand. Not because I think I'm any better, more clever, or more insightful than the next person. I just don't know how anybody could think their way through it without a suffocating amount of doubt.

Some might say something like, "oh, you haven't felt His love," or, "open yourself to His word and you'll understand," or something equally presumptuous and insulting to my own religious experiences. Too many times have I been told that if I could only feel Him like they do, it would all suddenly make sense. I have felt it. I feel it every fucking day. You know what I haven't felt? The need to go to Mass. The need to find a mosque. The need to visit a stupa. (These are all very cool places and a neat experience but I haven't personally found any spiritual significance in any of them.) They are places where Santa Claus lives. They're places for me to go for me to feed that part of me that wants an easy explanation to why Santa (God) exists even though I don't trust a single one of them, mainly because there's way too freaking many of them.

I mean, seriously. It's hard enough already trying to figure out whether or not God is a real thing. Now I have to sift through the umpteen trillion versions and find out which one makes the most sense? God's not a "Him," by the way.

UGH

Every religion, at some point in it's doctrine or mythology, says something an outsider would consider pretty outlandish. Transubstantiation? Nirvana? Heaven and Hell? Slow down, buddy, we have a lot of ground to cover. Also, many religions like to look at other religious institutions and point out how silly and far-fetched they are while totally ignoring the part where they say the can make things change form without changing physical attributes.

And that the form is human blood and flesh.

And that the blood and flesh is to be consumed.

But look at those Yoga freaks with their Chakra! Silly hippies!

Another thing is that, with a couple of exceptions, each religion bases it's beliefs on it's God(s). Whether the philosophy came first or the God did, the teachings mainly boil down to, "because God said so." Most of them have some common ground: don't kill (but we have special cases when it's allowed), don't steal, don't be dishonest. However, some start to differ in drastic ways ranging from diet to worship techniques, prayers, attitudes, relationships and philosophies. The differences seem to be inextricably tied into who and where the people were at the birth of the belief.

Some might claim their religion simply follows the law of nature and that's proof enough that it's the right path. From Taoism to the Tridentine Rite, but rarely do they actually explain what that means outside of their own terms. Natural law is still the religious law. What do you mean by "natural"? Do you mean the way things are or the way they are supposed to be? Lots of people believe in Fallen Nature, and heck, I'm inclined to believe it. People are capable of nasty things but how is our refusal to give into our inclination towards nastiness following the law of nature? I mean in nature, animals shag all the time and don't even call the next day, all the while never feeling the slightest twinge of guilt. It's natural. So why do believers of natural law believe that marriage is so important and sacred?

I don't not believe in marriage and I am not by any stretch of the mind promiscuous or polyamorous (full respects extended to rationally promiscuous people and polygamists), but I can't get it to make sense in my head. I don't want to dwell on the marriage thing too long, as it's only an example and not my real point. It just all reeks of design by committee. Several committees. Over several hundred years. Not by God; I guess that's my point.

Bleh. I'm running on too long with this. My point is, you can't just say, "My God makes the most sense," and give me endless, convoluted reasons why. Well you can, but they had damn well better be good, different reasons.

C.S. Lewis once said this:

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."

Which is totally awesome and astute and everything, but that doesn't just go for Christianity. It goes for just about everything except nihilism. It's true for every single bloody religion on this planet. If any one of them is true then it's very important that we all try and figure that out. Which kind of makes the quote not mean anything at all. I mean, come on!

DAMN.

Imagine There's No Heaven

I feel like I'm seeking in the same manner that somebody looks around for their glasses when they are right on the person's face.

I've spent a long time trying to expand upon my last entry and it has been exhausting. I've been trying to explain why I am not one thing and why I think another thing, revising opinions and scrapping entire entries and starting over. I feel like my mind is settled and that I can sit down and write, but then the dust just gets kicked up again.

I think this is mostly because, although I believe in the importance of spontaneity especially in cases of philosophy and spirituality, I never took the time to sit and lay down some basic groundwork in my own mind (for example: I am not a Catholic but I still wear a scapular). After I left the church, I wandered pretty aimlessly until I finally landed on a few ideas that have recently evolved. The problem is that I skipped over or didn't think much about the basic things and leaped right into the big ideas, using terms and concepts that I'm not sure I understand or at least haven't really taken the time to make a decision about. So a created a list of four questions that I had never genuinely asked myself.

Do I believe in God(s)?

Not as such. I do not believe in an extra/omnidimensional or omnipotent existence. It has taken me a long time to come to admit that. I held onto that concept like a child that won't give up it's security blanket. I do, however, hold existence itself in similar sort of mystical esteem. I accept the idea that there are very strange forces at work that we cannot yet hope to understand. For example, magick might actually be a thing. I don't really buy into it but it does make a certain amount of sense to me if I think of it from a sort of... psychodramatic point of view.

Do I believe in an afterlife?

No, but I do not believe that it strips us of our responsibilities and consequences of our actions.

What is the purpose of existence?

The purpose of existence is, in my mind, that there is no purpose. That existence is for existing, and every second I spend thinking about what I want from it or where it is going is a second spent not actually doing things and figuring things out. Even what I am doing right this very second is kind of weird, because while it is the exact opposite of what I have been talking about (learning and being instead of knowing and dissecting) I get enjoyment out of blathering about nothing and putting it out there for people to see. I like to entertain. I would like to see if people out there can enjoy a point of view that I quite like, and that has helped me a great deal.

So my answer to "Why are we here?" would be, to be happy and find a sense of worth in some fashion or another. Sometimes being happy means living for the moment, in a perpetual now; sometimes it means planning and doing something productive and getting that sense of worth.

I don't think it's weird to say that and turn around and say that I don't think there is a God or an afterlife. I don't believe the removal of a cosmic judge and watcher from the picture turns the idea of ethics on it's head. Which leads me to my next question.

What is good and evil?

No afterlife and God is not, in a stricter sense, a single being with a single will of it's own? No great entity comprised of pure goodness, or even goodness itself? Well then, how can we possibly make a clear, concise decision of what is good and evil? How can I claim that we ought to be compassionate when I have no basis, no creator to compare it to? I'm really tempted to just say "I don't know," and move on, but let's at least try.

For a long time I tried to distance myself from dualistic views of good and evil, mainly because of the sense that good is stronger was so heavily ingrained in me. Also because of a concept that was explained to me through the works of C.S. Lewis. He talked about how dualism doesn't work in this case because evil has to borrow free will, a good trait, to be evil. Evil has to actively decide to be so, and yet good can be good of itself or through free will.

There are ideas in there that I like and that I don't like. I like his distinction that good is not only a choice, but also that when things are the way they ought to be, it is a good thing. What I don't agree with is his assertion that free will is not a neutral thing. I certainly enjoy having free will (most of the time) and try to make the best use of it, but it can be used to perform acts on either side of the ethical fence. Saying free will is good because you don't need it to be good doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. So, to bring it back around, I can't help but have this nagging inclination that, while the "forces of good and evil" (whatever that means to you) might not be exactly equal in strength or will or power or whatever, that it's difficult to imagine one without the other. Good things are called good, I think, because they can be compared to evil.

If a person doesn't go around stabbing people, helps friends when he sees they are in distress and tries to be decent but generally minds his own business, we would say that is a good person.

If a person, say, becomes a doctor and goes overseas to help impoverished countries, donates regularly to homeless shelters and generally dedicates their life to helping others, we would say that is a very good person.

Killing people, taking their things, hurting people physically or emotionally, hatred. These are evil things, n'est-ce pas?

So if we remove the heavens from the picture we see right away that good things are things that help or at the very least don't hinder each other's lives and that, comparatively, evil things are things that create obstacles for each other. We know when something is good if it is not evil, and conversely we know something is probably bad if we can't find anything good about it. Both things will perpetuate forever or as long as humans are still around to make that distinction. So it is hard to not see it from a dualistic perspective.

So now I think I can knuckle down. Those are, to my knowledge, the questions I had really been shying away from. Just when I thought I had landed on something profound, the only thing holding me back was fear of letting go of a few things I really didn't find worthwhile in the first place. I couldn't really think about God or the afterlife because it's what my life was based around for so long, and I couldn't let go of it. I could be wrong, obviously. Everybody could be wrong. However, even if I were to return to Christianity, I'd feel good about admitting to myself that, for a while, I didn't believe in God.

I'm feeling better already.

Sorry about the J Lennon quote in the title, I couldn't resist. I used to dislike that song.

It's starting to grow on me.