Just A Statement Regarding Reliigion

I just thought I’d nail something to the door. For the heck of it. Since I've mentioned religion a few times.

I grew up with lukewarm Southern Baptists who didn’t force me to go to church but were happy when I did. I hated the clothes and preaching but enjoyed the singing. At one point I decided to lie about being born again just to see if I’d get struck by lightning or whether the adults would notice; following the results of this experiment I decided to stop going to church.

Then in my 20s I thought it was intellectually lazy to dismiss religion without doing a thorough investigation, so I started studying it, and that is what led me to being in a social circle adjacent to people like Helen Parsons Smith and Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as a whole lot of non-droppable names who represent the people I actually hung out with rather than people I met a couple times who probably glanced at me and thought "that young woman certainly is inebriated, I hope she gets home okay." The fact I’m not originally from North America helped inspire me to learn about religions other than monotheism, and Dungeons and Dragons played a part too.

Eventually I resumed not going to church, but these days I describe myself as an agnostic, because “I dunno” is a better answer than “affirmatively yes, let’s fight!” or “affirmatively no, let’s fight!” in my opinion.

 A lot of people in my generation stopped going to church, but some went back. The singing is pretty awesome, and so is the opportunity to spend time with one’s family and community sharing good vibes and looking at art. To my mind, that’s the main draw behind religion: a place where people can socialize outside of work and school. Most of the time people do not socialize outside a narrow group consisting of co-workers and immediate family, and religion gives them a place to mix, as well as formal rules against fisticuffs or arguing over competing worldviews.

 These days I find myself mostly aligned with Pope Leo. Which is not where I expected to be in my senior years, but I also thought there would be universal healthcare, and more trains, and look what life handed us instead. There is a loophole in the Christian religion that allows for one to get away with a lifetime of sin as long as we sneak in a confession and a few rap performances prior to expiring, and that’s what I’ve been aiming for.

 I consider myself culturally Christian in that I’m familiar with the scriptures, the idioms like rich men passing through needle eyes, and not throwing stones, I know a handful of Christian hymns and can hum along with several others. I went to church when I was a kid. Lots of people would classify me as Christian based on that experience, regardless of what I currently believe (or claim to).

 Despite admittedly lying about being born again, the fact I was not struck by lightning and in fact went on to have a life that has been perfectly delectable in certain aspects although certainly not all of them, I don’t consider myself Christian in the evangelical sense; those people support too many liars and I refuse to stand next to them. At the same time, I lead kind of a modest humble life with a low carbon footprint that doesn’t include a lot of lust or gluttony or other deadly sins, like some kind of nun from an order that’s mostly about reading books with occasional treats of almond-sprinkled yogurt and J.S. Bach. 

 I have a lot of alignment with the current flavor of secular humanism which is popular with my political faction as an alternative to formal religion, but it’s not complete. I will separate my recyclables, and I am willing to switch to vat grown cruelty-free chicken nuggies as soon as they appear on the market, and also my carbon footprint is likely lower than yours because I don’t drive. Plus recycling’s kind of a scam, and so is shifting the burden of climate change onto individual consumers.

Sometimes my beliefs and opinions clash with the status quo. For instance, there are many types of feminism, and I’m down with the one about how people should have the same rights regardless of what’s between their navel and their knees, and whom they wish would touch it (which I do not wish to know details about).

There have been lots of flavors of feminism over the years, all basically agreeing it’s better if women have rights and are not oppressed. That thought could probably be extended to liberalism – it’s better for us all if we don’t enforce structural barriers related to things like race, class, gender.

I really can’t deal with a few variants, such as the extreme subjectivity kind though in which people are encouraged to shriek their idiosyncratic spin on truth at me. Screw that. I’m also not in favor of the “organics versus tech bro” conflict because I think there will soon be advertisements for robots with 100% organically-sourced fake skin (I will bet you cash that’ll happen by 2050 if not sooner). 

I’m a pedantic sourpuss raised by math nerds, trial lawyers, and godless heathens, and the quest for accuracy is part of my innate nature. If there’s an endeavor where my innate nature disqualifies me from participation, such as pro basketball, so be it. I owe no intersectional duty to beliefs which conflict with this drive. 

And that pedantic thing so far keeps me out of religions both traditional and secular, because there’s always a shaky belief or two that one is required to lip service or be flayed by one’s peers, and I seem to have a broken filter with regard to figuring out where those limits are, let alone how to code switch between crowds.

I do have a hard time judging people by their religion, since I've known both good and bad people who subscribe to various religions (including secular worldviews that aren't technically religions but resemble them in certain aspects). That's what my investigation really brought me to: a place where I can't say "all the people in that religion are bad" and remain honest with myself. The person I was previously was a lot less tolerant. 

If there’s anyone around who embraces the religious-type belief structure that inspired me to do my whole Lucifer-like rebellion from religion, I just want to say that reading my words isn't sinful because I have had believers like you stand next to me and pray, and also I can say the Lord’s Prayer and go inside churches without bursting into flames or having ghosts spurt out of my eyeballs. So if I was ever possessed by demons, I got better. I realize I’ve listened to an awful lot of heavy metal with secret encoded devil messages in my time but I usually also play a lot of angel music like J.S. Bach which cancels it out by encouraging angels to come over and mosh with the devils so they can’t lead anyone into sin. And I think your worldview is a little basic but as long as you don’t go around bullying others over it I’m pretty tolerant.