I was born and raised in the Bible Belt of the South. In the American South, as well as in Christianity
and in any other religion for that matter, the absolute worst and most shameful
thing a person can do or be labeled with is “being uppity”. Being a Christian in the American South gave
me a double dose of that soul-crushing pile of crap.
My family was Episcopalian and tended Mass every Sunday and major holy
day, but we were very exposed to more fundamentalist versions of the Christian
religion. We had Bible class taught by a
fundamentalist once a week, on school time, with repercussions like missing
recess if we didn’t memorize our verses for the week, and this was at a PUBLIC
elementary school.
We grew up down the street from that school and lived next door to a
Reformed Jewish family from New York. As
a result of the latter, we had Jewish godparents in addition to the godparents
we had at our baptisms.
In terms of thought, my family and our immediate friends at our parish
were from the school of Episcopalian thought known as the High Church or
Anglo-Catholic wing. That’s the wing
that is much closer to conservative Roman Catholicism.
I did have a bout of Dissenter fundamentalism when I was 13 and
attended an unaffiliated Baptist church until I figured out that the preacher
was full of shit. After coming back to
PECUSA (Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA), I attended the Bible study
classes at our parish whose members were mostly charismatics, Episcopalians
aligned with many aspects of Pentacostalism, for about a year.
Oddly, it was during this same time that I decided I was called to be a
priest. And no, as I have frequently
explained to those who think all priests are Roman Catholic, that wouldn’t mean
giving up sex and marriage. Episcopal
clergy have always been allowed to marry, even after ordination.
One of the reasons I chose political science as my major at university
(I minored in psychology, religion, and history) was that canon law recommended
a social science or liberal arts degree for aspirants to the priesthood. Even though my course of study was officially
poli sci, my declared major was pre-seminary.
And so it remained until mid-spring semester my junior year. The priest with whom I’d been working in the
process of getting into seminary had decided to become a Methodist minister and
we’d gotten another priest to replace him.
He proved to be something of an autocrat who related better to what he
called the “Scotch and soda” crowd.
Which should have warned me ahead of time: who the hell would fuck up
good (or even bad) Scotch with soda or anything else, including water or
ice? Well, I am gonna try Scotch and Dr.
Pepper one of these days, but only once.
Anyway, in my first meeting with him as my “guide”, he suggested
strongly that I go into business so I’d have something to fall back on if
things didn’t work out. Since I’d always
thought the Church should be run on faith rather than pragmatism, that ended my
aspirations to the priesthood, at least in PECUSA.
That didn’t stop me from laying the groundwork for the Chattanooga
parish of the Anglican Catholic Church, which I helped establish during one of
the periods I was home on leave from the Navy.
But that’s another story.
At the time of the flowering of my disillusionment with PECUSA, I had
been attending Sunday evening Mass at the Catholic Student Center on campus for
nearly three years anyway, as I mentioned in a previous essay, “A Big Chill, or
Fuck Forrest Gump” (http://notesfromtheninthcircle.blogspot.com/2011/12/big-chill-or-fuck-forrest-gump.html).
Since I already had long considered myself more Catholic than
Protestant, it wasn’t that much of a leap for me to convert. I didn’t go all the way until I got to Holy
Family Parish at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, though.
I have only good things to say about my experiences there and the
people I got to know there. I attended
rosary and Mass every day, even when I was in the Rite of Christian Initiation
for Adults and had to stop taking Eucharist for that period. I joined the Knights of Columbus and made it
through the Third Degree after my confirmation.
After that, I became a lector, a lay Eucharistic minister, and chairman
of the community outreach committee upon which sat two lieutenants, three
captains, a major, two lieutenant colonels, and a chief master sergeant…and I
was a mere petty officer third class.
Since my wife, whom I met much later, was from a very Protestant, in the anti-Catholic sense of the word, my
activities were curtailed to the point of nonexistence. It wasn’t until our son, David Nicholas, was
born that we began to talk about church.
We compromised on the Philippine Episcopal Church and became active
members. We were at a teach-in which the
vicar of the pro-cathedral was conducting for the whole parish on a Saturday
when he dropped dead in front of us and forty other people. I helped revive him on the way to the
hospital, but he eventually died permanently a couple of hours after I went
home.
Grace was one of two people being confirmed in the PEC the very next
day, and David was being baptized. The
bishop of the PEC had to take over.
Everyone was in a daze and we might have all gone completely crazy if
there hadn’t been David to focus on.
That, too, was another parish for which I have only fond memories,
except for Brian dying, of course.
Pardon the digression, I just needed to give some background on why I
ended up Episcopalian again. Back in the
States, our little family became founding members of a new mission of PECUSA
along with the rest of my family and remained there until the dissolution of my
marriage.
And still, I kept going. I
eventually switched to the parish of my childhood and youth then back
again. Included during this time was a
year-long attendance at a conservative synagogue in which I went to services
every Shabbat, First Shabbes dinners every month, and inquirers’ class.
During another period I also went to prayer services at a Hindu temple,
including Navratri festivities one year.
Had there been a mainstream Muslim mosque, I doubtless would have
attended that too. There’s no Buddhist
pagoda either, but I had been in tune with aspects of Buddhism, especially Zen,
since I was in 6th grade.
My next-door Jewish godfather attended Midnight Mass every Christmas
Eve, so I saw nothing unusual about attending Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim
services.
At one point, my sleep cycle finally got so out of whack that I needed
sleep on the weekends more than I needed
superficial social contact at the facilities of a religion of which I was only
going through the motions of believing.
Besides, my son wasn’t really into it either and that had been the main
reason I’d been going, at least to church.
With nonattendance decided upon, I had time to think. Not just time, but freedom from interference
with my clear thinking. With that I came
face-to-face with the self-imposed credulity upon which all religions base the
structure of their ideology. In streets
terms, I had to clean off my face and stop bullshitting myself.
The arguments among fans of Star Wars and Star Trek and between the two
sets of groupies are nearly an exact match in tone for those within any one
religion and between believers in different religions, and the basis upon which
they base their arguments is equally lacking in validity. In logic terms, all religious arguments are
fallacious because all religious arguments are an appeal to authority. Just like arguments between Trekkies based on
Star Trek canon for the Star Trek Universe or between their mirror images in
the Star Wars Universe or the two against each other.
Religion needs to be called out for what it is: literary fantasy and
science fiction. With the twist that
most religious texts as we have them today, in ALL religions, serve the purpose
primarily of upholding the interests of a society’s elite. In other words, look not to Mount Olympus or
the equivalent for your true gods, look to Wall Street or its equivalent, such
as Eretz Israel in the case of the sectarian Jewish State or the mullahs of
Iran in the Islamic Republic. Not truth
but conformity is what religion teaches.
As for our innate sense of right and wrong, that inside voice we hear
even when our culturally and/or religiously ingrained voice is screaming at us
to do the opposite (say, for example, in
the white supremacist American South that went virtually unchallenged until the
1960’s), that has come from millennia, even meganni*, of evolution. If that innate, evolved moral sense, rather
than the superficial moral sense of religion, were to ever triumph, humanity
would have the world-wide socialist economy it needs to survive, one where the
needs of the many outweigh the greed of the few.
(*A megannum is one million years.)
But I digress.
One thing I hate above nearly all else is historical fiction. Not the literary genre, of which I happen to
be a fan, but political, religious, and social historical fiction. As I mentioned before, my 12th
grade American government teacher first introduced me and my classmates to the
idea that we had been “lied” to. Historical
fiction is the bane of every religious believer, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Jew,
Buddhist, Taoist, Jain, Wicca, New Age, etc.
A predisposition to credulity accompanies every system of religious
belief because humans have to suspend their disbelief in order to believe some
of the absurd hypotheses religion teaches as fact. Sometimes, however, a mountain of
misinformation reaching up to the heavens falls down upon a believer and the stench
forces him or her to face the truth.
The character of Jesus as the protagonist of a
persecution-death-rebirth cycle story is anything but unique as several writers
known as Church Fathers themselves relate.
In fact, some used this similarity as proof that their own doctrines
were real.
These other deities—Isis and Osiris, Cybele and Attis, Adonis,
Dionysus, Orpheus, Demeter and Persephone, and Mithras, to name the most
prominent versions—had stories and tales that were indeed remarkably similar to
that of Iesous as formulated in Egypt.
Some parts of their stories are incorporated into the Gospels with
almost no change, such as the raising of Lazarus in the Gospel of John. In Roman
Judaea, there was no town of Bethany; Bethany derives from “Bet Anu” or the
House of Anubis. I don’t know about a
parallel for Martha, but Mary, sister of the dead guy, bears the same name as
one of the titles of Isis. Lazarus comes
from El Azar, Osiris.
Gnosticism is not a heresy of early Christianity; it is a movement that
developed in parallel with early Christianity, both most likely originating in
Alexandria.
As for the actual history of early Christianity (first century Judaism
for that matter, and the Mystery Cults), therein lie the pitfalls of believing
only what you are told to believe and ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Hadrian Augustus’ letter to Consularis
Servianus in 134 CE recorded in the Historia
Augusta makes it clear that the common modern day view of such things holds
water about as well as the RMS Titanic
after its pilot backed it away from the iceberg:
“There those who worship
Serapis are, in fact, Christians, and those who call themselves bishops of
Christ are, in fact, devotees of Serapis.
There is no chief of the Jewish synagogue, no Samaritan, no Christian
presbyter, who is not an astrologer, a soothsayer, or an anointer. Even the
Patriarch himself, when he comes to Egypt, is forced by some to worship
Serapis, by others to worship Christ…Their only god is money, and this the
Christians, the Jews, and, in fact, all nations adore.”
A few years later, Bishop
Marcion of Sinope (Pontus, Asia Minor) appeared in Rome with his Evangelikon
(Gospel of the Lord, an early version of Luke) and Apostolikon (epistles
of Paul: Galatians, I & II Corinthians, Romans, I & II Thessalonians, Ephesians,
Colossians, Phillipians, and Philemon, plus Alexandrians and Laodiceans). He
also brought with him his Antitheses, an explanation of his own ideas
contrasting Jesus of the New Testament with the “Jehovah” of the Old
Testament. Antitheses also
prohibited allegorical interpretation of any Scripture.
Considering that Marcion has
been declared one of the earliest heretics of the Church for eschewing the
Jewish Tanakh, it is ironic that his Pauline Epistles have been
preserved as presented (except for the last two) and in the same order. His
Gospel was heavily interpolated and renamed the Gospel of Luke.
At about the same time, a
manual of prayers and religious practice was being passed around Roman Asia
known as the Didache. Within the
Didache is a set of prayers for the communal meal; modern-day Christians are
stumped by the fact that there is a prayer over the cup BEFORE the prayer over
the bread.
What they don’t realize, not
knowing Jewish practice lasting even to today, is that first there is an
offering of the cup to sanctify the meal, followed by the breaking of bread to bless
the meal, and another cup after the meal to give thanks. This tripartite offering is actually
preserved in the account of the “Last Supper” in the Gospel of Luke,
which even the Gentilist Marcion knew about since his Gospel of the Lord
was its forerunner and source.
Excuse the aside, but it does
show how diverse and unlike our conception of it in its time early Christianity
actually was.
Even if the above were not the
case, Christian history has been swamped with “pious fraud” endorsed by,
perpetrated for, and acquiesced in by Church leaders that Christianity itself
has not one shred of credibility left to it.
The Shroud of Turin, debunked in 1988, and the more recent fraud over
the sarcophagus of “James brother of Jesus” are but two examples that come to
mind immediately.
Clearly, Christianity
developed out of the ferment of the 2nd century BCE to 2nd
century CE that produced the numerous Mystery Cult religions. But whereas the adherents of Isis-Osiris,
Demeter-Persephone, Dionysus, Orpheus, Adonis, Cybele-Attis, etc., knew that
the stories about their deities were allegories that told a greater truth, some
Christian, somewhere in the Mediterranean world, decided that the version of
the story he believed in was the literal historical truth. Perhaps it was Marcion, Bishop of Sinope.
Anyone who has been in a Star
Trek or Star Wars chat-room or e-list can easily see that happening. Many of the stories from the Star Trek and
Star Wars Universes provide useful, or at least amusing, anecdotes to our
everyday life. But neither should be a
framework by which to organize our lives and our very system of thought, much
less our laws by which to govern each other.
Nor should any religion ever propagated by humans.
No amount of polite historical fiction can make me ignore the fact that
this Universe is 213 duovigintillion km3 in volume, with Terra, our
planet Earth, only a mere dust speck by comparison, hardly the be-all, end-all
of existence in space-time. At least not
anymore.
Yes, I confess that I was once a religious believer, and that I truly
and devoutly believed and sought out the truth of what I believed with every
fiber of my being. My absolution is that
I saw the light, an epiphany to which I was ironically brought by my own ardent
seeking for confirmation, and gave up that misbelief.
It was easier after I’d had a conversation with my ten-year old son and
learned he thought most of what he “learned” in church was ridiculous. Previous to that I’d been reluctant to come
of the unbelief closet, kind of like a parent pretends the Easter Bunny, Tooth
Fairy, and Santa Claus are real.
At last allowing myself to judge Christianity as it is without giving
it the benefit of doubt it does not deserve, my first reaction was anger. Anger at myself for bullshitting myself for
so many decades, anger at all the people who’d lied to me over the decades
(yes, lied; even if they were lying to themselves like I had been, they were
still lying to me) directly through personal interaction or indirectly through
their writing, anger at the atrocities committed in the name of Christianity
over the centuries, atrocities I and every other Christian are or were
complicit in by virtue continuing to adhere to the ideology of mythology which
made such atrocities possible.
Rage is a better word than anger.
Rage like I haven’t felt since the rage which made me leave the
Philippines out of fear of what I might become responsible for if I remained.
Just imagine, I had not even suffered under the same kind of theocratic
hell that my unfortunate fellow humans in the Islamic Republics of Iran and
Afghanistan have been enduring for decades.
Nor was I molested by a pedophile priest protected by an allegedly
celibate male hierarchy. Nothing but the
mundane crushing of human spirit, freedom of thought, and psychological health
that is the everyday business of an institution whose main purpose in fact is
to keep people in their place. Nor am I
a woman, which would make me a victim no matter what religion I was in.
So, why am I an atheist?
Because I think fairly tales should be kept in their place, and that is
exactly what the scriptures of any religion are, fairy tales.
Because I believe in thinking for myself and not persecuting other
physically, socially, or even in my own mind because “Authority” tells me I
should.
Because adhering to any set of beliefs formed by others is a lie, and
doing so also automatically cuts me off from the overwhelming majority of
humans.
Because I do not believe in any Master Race, whether formed by
conversion or genetics, that has any right to claim precedence above the rest
of humanity.
Because there simply is no deity.
Because I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth, because the whole world is
my home, and all its people my brothers, sisters, and cousins.
No comments:
Post a Comment