Filed by Trevor at 1:57 am under Atheism, Religion, UU

“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.” — Albert Einstein

I grew up thinking everyone needed to go to church. Not just for community, not just for spiritual nourishment, but mainly to keep one from going to hell. Believe it or not, this was a viewpoint I held at least in some form until a little over a year ago — maybe even less. At that time, I was driving 110 miles round-trip to attend a Unitarian Universalist church in Orange County, dogged by the irrational fear that we were all headed straight for hell due to our collective non-belief. But I still went, perhaps out of some greater motivation to find just where all of this was leading, but more for the growing hope that I had been seriously misinformed. And soon, the vestiges of my rotted Christian outer layers fell like so many skin cells sloughed off our bodies. I finally began asking questions, getting into heated discussions, connecting the dots into my own original ideas; in short, I stopped accepting religious ideas wholesale. I had a wonderful place to belong, to give of myself — hence why leaving was so difficult for me.

Since arriving in Chicago, I’ve discovered — with a resounding thud — that such will not always be. For six weeks I attended a Unitarian church in town helmed by an interim minister who was either bent on turning the congregation back to Jesus or had otherwise just gotten lost on the way to a United Church of Christ. Some Sundays I held my breath just waiting for the altar call and laying on of hands — or worse yet, just waiting to open my eyes and discover myself at Saddleback on the wrong end of an intercessory prayer. But I had it coming, I suppose. Last year I was an evangelical thrown into a congregation dominated by atheists and pagans, so being thrown right back into Christian theology seems like par for the course. And I responded like a frog thrown into a pot of boiling water.

I have a hard time summing up exactly where I stand on the vast spectrum of religious beliefs. Harvey Fierstein once said, “Do not allow anyone else to define you, but define yourself.” So I’m trying. I hate the word “agnostic” since its sheer ubiquitousness has completely diluted its true meaning. Sometimes I describe myself as an atheist — a stigmatic word that tends to make others jump. And it’s true in a way: I do not believe in the God of the Abrahamic faiths, a strictly literary figure that has turned into a caricature of itself; a celestial being that coincidentally hates all the same people you do. But, again, this isn’t completely accurate. To me “atheist” implies a rejection of all non-rationality, and there I cannot follow. Frankly, I find the pure atheism of prominent commentators like Richard Dawkins rather counterintuitive: claiming that everything can be explained in perfectly rational terms without leaving any room for the extraordinary seems unnecessarily rigid, since science is essentially an open canon, with an unstoppable torrent of new information constantly nourishing and shaping that which we hold as truth. The same can be said for faith, I suppose.

“Post-Christian” is the most accurate way to describe me, I feel. I’m well-versed in Christian theology and speak fluent Bible, but I believe in the God of Abraham as much as I believe in Osiris or Thor; I get nothing out of seeking wisdom from the Divine. Nevertheless, I still pray. Call it meditation, call it prayer — whether we’re all talking to ourselves, we’ll find out when we’re good and dead. In the meantime, I embrace the mystery. But because I regard faith as the most private part of our lives, it irritates me to the core to take part in group prayer. We all pray differently, if at all, to whom- or whatever, and it does me no good to do so in the presence of others. Meditation perhaps, a blessing over a meal for sure, but everything else leaves me cold. To be frank, I have no desire to hear what God has to say. I’ve heard what God has to say, and he has an unfortunate tendency to choose the most narrow-minded idiots to speak for him. It’s so terribly convenient for people to interpret for God, since there’s absolutely no possible way to verify its truth.

I have no patience for religion, and I have no loyalty toward the Church for its own sake. What many regard as faith and morality I regard simply as common sense. Even more so, none of us will face eternal punishment for what variety of invisible man in the sky in whom we chose not to place our trust. But humanity cannot function without community; love is invisible, love is crucial, and without it, there cannot be life. If nothing else, the sheer maddening irrationality of love is the hardest proof that none of us are experts at anything, that there is something beyond ourselves. This is where my loyalty lies.