Religion .. the hardest post?
A difficult topic to discuss for sure, and not just because of the ethereal nature or the wide range of different beliefs even among those of the same religious breeds; its just hard because it is so easy to step on someones toes or hurt someones feelings. For whatever reason, be it because people might be insecure or have their own doubts, or because they’re just such strongly held things, people tend to get their backs up, get really defensive or offensive… instead of just discussing.
So theres no reason for this posting; a lot of questions come to mind here or there (especially around the holiday season), and because of life. My parents were some breed of Christian but had some troubles with it when they were younger so I think got fed up and departed their church. They met at church if I recall right, which is nice. My brother and I were thusly raised more or less without any religious mention .. we weren’t agnostic or anti- or any such thing. It just wasn’t discussed, so we didn’t know it existed really (and went to public school; we did do the Lords Prayer, but it was more a abstract thing for me .. I just had it memorized, and spoke it, and I didn’t really think about it. It was rote.)
I’m a pretty curious fellow, so when browsing through my parents bookshelves as a little one I naturally discovered these ornate books; they had some fancy bibles with zipper cases around them and all that.. heck, I even spent a couple of days here or there reading some of the Bible; I didn’t know what it was, just assumed it was a book like any other, so I went digging to find the rousing adventure, and found lots of interesting bits. Gotta admit, the Bible can be an interesting story from drama to violence, especially the Old Testament.
I’m not sure if it was the monoculture of my friends (we were all unreligious) or as a result of a number of annoyances that churches caued (starting with how they treated my parents though we werent’ privy to much of that information I’m sure it stuck with us a little), but I ended up getting a nice anti-churchy chip on my shoulder for quite a few years as a kid. I mean, many churches do like to Get In Your Face, which is something they should not do imho — people really should respect each other, and that goes both ways — but historically churches have been pretty awful. Especially in this day and age where we must be secular, with many churches co-existing as neighbours.. they have to play nice lest we be taken back to the dark ages. Witness the many wars in the world….. but anyway. But the distinction I learned from my eventual girlfriend and later wife was respect, and not to hold history per se against the whole of the thing. Religion is not bad (but at times implementations of it can be).. but the bad parts are the failings of men, not the failings of any grand design. Or something. The Crusades .. sure, they were driven by the Popes, but the middle age popes were basicly crazy much of the time. They were supposed to be the voice of God, but they were nuts — see the Children’s Crusade, or stringing up random people or especially scientists — how dare you try to think problems through, rather than just say God made the sun come up?
And that my friends is my core problem with it all — religion is fine and I respect it, I truly do; again, its hard to discuss these things at all without causing some hurt feelings but that is not my intention; just showing my past and how I arrived at some thoughts — but my core problem is when religious is held up as an excuse not to think. Let someone else do the thinking for you.. that is always a recipe for disaster.
Religion (and when I say that, I’m basicly talking about Christian brands such as Baptist and Catholic and not Muslim or the like; thats a whole other discussion that I’m barely equipped to have.) is best kept in the realm of the unprovable, and cannot step into the realm of logic per se. It is ‘irrational’ by definition, though that term carries a negative connotation so I’ve learned not to use it (doh!) I mean, as soon as someone says ‘the sun comes up because God says so’, then I get annoyed and rightly so — we know bloody well why the sun appears to ‘come up’. Science _is not_ at odds with religion — those scientists who think so are idiots, just as much as those religious folks who think so. Science is a process of learning, and we all do that from birth. We have clothes on our backs, we eat healthy food, we have agriculture.. this is all science. Likewise, in my books, evolution is provable and only an idiot would refute it.. and it has nothing to do with religion. (For those hard core Christians who believe the Earth is only a few thousand years old.. then how do you explain fossils and dinosaur bones? If you cling to the earth being 6000 years old, then your God must have placed them in the ground to trick you… and who wants their god to be a dick?) But if you take the evidence that we can see and say hey, the Earth is pretty old, and we’ve got evolution going on… but just maybe there is a deity that sparked the whole world of physics off, or kickstarted the process.. okay, fine, theres nothing for or against that. It is just a human made up idea, but theres no refutation, so fine, whatever. Anyway. We can demonstrate evolution in fruit flies and so on, and can see the very large flaws in the design of animals and people .. if there was an intelligent guide for evolution, then he sure made a lot of mistakes! (Consider that all the tiny little steps from no eye to seeing eye have been found in fossils, and each step is useful to its host. Further, we’ve found some dozen different kinds of eye design, and the human one is actually pretty inferior to many other animals. Light passing through a lens, to the optic nerve is all great.. but we do we have all this blood vessels and stuff inbetween, rather than behind? And so on..) — so religion and science _can certainly co exist just fine_ (witness all those Christian science folks!) — but when people tart using religion as an excuse to be dumb .. thats when I take offence.
Now, I had a lot of issues with the various churches growing up; I would have ideas, and churches would sometimes find a way to get up in my face. I made some crazy posters for a local band, and a church took offence (very creative and perversely I might ad) and got me some trouble. I played “Dungeons and Dragons” (a creative imagination medievil role playing game with dice, not dressing up and waving plastic swords around), and churches got it banned in my city because they didn’t know what it was, or didn’t like kids pretending to have characters casting spells? Heck even more recently many churches get all uppity with cute movies like Harry Potter, because it has ‘witchcraft’ represented in it.) Supressing ideas and getting into peoples shit has been the stock and trade of religions since they began.. but again, we must hold the religious ideal up, and thats fine; its our human built religions that tend to cock it all up, so I will try not to hold that against them.. but as we live in reality, we do have to live with those concerns.
So when a non-religious person marries a religious girl, and wanting to do it ‘right’ ( in her church where she grew up .. its just a beautiful thing to be all swept away in that emotional state, to grow up and then be married in your church, don’t you think?), they make you take oaths. Churches tend to be self protective which I did question, but I can understand why, so.. fine. The ceremony is a little different for this situation thankfully (and is permitted these days.. it woudl have been much more stressful a few decades ago).. but our priest gave me a fair amount of grief. (You can see a trend here.. a few dozen times in life, religion got in my way, and that is why I had such a slant. One set of my grandparents woudl regularly tell me I was going to hell .. that was nice.) Anyway, I promise to be right and do the right things — as I’m a right honourable person, and I intended to be godo to my girl anyway, so the promise didn’t really take that much cajoling. We go to church on Sundays, because its a part of my wife’s life, and because I promised to do that.. to not be in the way of her faith.
Now, dont’ get me wrong — my wife is not one of those hard core bible thumpers; she’s an intelligent girl with a clear mind who has faith, and is not ‘whacko’ about it. We don’t talk about this stuff, since we have an understanding and we’re close.. I know where she’s at, and we do it all together. And I won’t let her be lazy on my account ;)
Anyway, when you get married, another promise is to raise the children religiously — another self protection the churches build in. And more promises for baptism and all that, fine. When we got married, we took this stuff seriously.. I’m not going to lie just for my benefit — to lie just so I can selfishly get married; that would be an insult to my wife and her family and so on, so we had a lot of talk over these issues to see where we all were. It was terribly stressful since these questions can tear apart a couple. (See, that slant I have .. no religion, no problem; one person religious, causes all these problems. Anyway.) But in the end, I figured sure, I can promise to raise the children religiously, since ultimatley it is their responsibility, and they can make up their mind when they come of age. It struck me that no rational person would become religious from not being religious (it is hard to suddenly believe in ‘ghosts’ say, something entirely heresay and unprovable), so if they are to make a valid decision then raising them religious and letting them back out or continue in those pursuits on their own is a good way to go. And certainly we can try to raise them right, so they don’t just blidnly accept whatever the priests may tell them, and try to think things through to form their own opinions. Just like witht he army.. too often have peopel done things because another told them to .. that is no excuse, we must each of us stand on our own feet and be measured at the end of our days for our actions .. not justifying by saying someone else told you to go forth and murder or whatever.
So, here we are .. happily married with some kids, and our first little girl is off to Catholic school. And I hope they do her right, teaching her that God is ebverywhere and comforts them when they are sad, and doesn’t teach them that it rains becuse He says so. I’m sure it’ll cause some friction, since I will always be careful to have funa nd fantasy (Harry Potter is great!), and explain why things work they way they do. We take things apart, we fix things.. everythign is like that; why the sun comes up, we can take it apart and examine it as best we can, too.. its not ‘magic’.
Anyway, goodness, I ahdn’t intended to write any of this; I do have some questions and thought I might write a series of articles about them, so they can be recorded; so some logic can be laid down or refuted, so I can mull some of these thigns over. I mean, I want to be fair, I want to do the right thing and think the right things. But ‘right’ is not something you get from a book, its somethign you do, through consideration of your actions.
