I loathe religion. If someone offered me a free cruise around the world, billed as a “religious cruise,” I would say no, thank you, preferring to have a root canal or a bowel resection in its stead. It isn’t because I’m not familiar with religion, but because I am. I grew up in the Bible Belt and then devoted 30 years to an intense religious world. A pretentious world it was. A hypocritical world, (from today’s headlines) where the religious forces their kids to study the Bible at school (as in Texas) while worshipping a hate-filled godless man at home.

But I’m not alone in this loathing. Religion was the nemesis of Jesus of Galilee, indeed, the institution that put him to death. Religion has been responsible for most wars for the past two thousand years, including our present one. Religion is responsible for most hatred, bigotry, insults, brow-beating… and most angst. It comes from a deep psychological place of feeling unloved by the God of your imagination. No religious person would admit that because their religion doesn’t allow it. When I was religious, we couldn’t be that honest.

Religion has cost me most of my friends over the years, people I adore and would love to still have their friendship. When I was a religious person, I rejected a lot of friendships too. We had a built-in radar, like “gaydar” but much broader. It scanned every word others spoke, everything they did, looking for a chink in their armor, a doctrine they had wrong, a behavior we didn’t like, something to prove that we were superior and they were the devil. But that is the whole point of religion, isn’t it? A man-made system for enhancing our feeling of piety. The fastest way to enhance your feeling of piety is via competition. “I am better than those outside of Christianity. I am even better than those within.”

Now, if you consider yourself a religious person, and my description doesn’t sound familiar to you, then I’m not talking about you, am I? There are many people who love the rituals, practices, and institutions of religion, such as the church, but do so with a vastly different approach from what I described.

Even the Bible makes the distinction in James 1:27: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. When I see a Christian, or even a Buddhist or Muslim, looking after the orphans, widows, the poor, the downtrodden, I see their religion as pure, even though I, unlike the post-modernists, disagree with their foundational beliefs. But we have more in common than Christians who do not give a damn about these downtrodden, who are polluted by the world’s lust for power and rejection of empathy. Fortunately, I believe the church I am loosely associated with has, in most respects, a good track record of demonstrating that purer religion.

Agony of a Woman-Submitted

It feels so good to be back to writing on this blog. I just spent about 40 hours over 10 days preparing a proposal to a publisher for my novel, Agony of a Woman. They wanted to see the entire manuscript as well as many pages of other materials. Each agent, each publisher has their unique way of writing a proposal, so you can’t create one file and use it over again. I am optimistic for this publisher, but with thousands of other works competing, it would still be like winning the lottery (in odds, not money) to have them accept this book for publication.

Why Am I Continuing this Blog?

I wanted to get my statement on religion out of the way before I go forward. Why is this on my mind? I’ve come across several groups of post-Christians, or post-evangelicals such as myself, who want to “De-religionize” Christianity. But they are not all the same. While some are on the same page as me, some want to replace the old religion with a new one or with atheism. I will explore this idea in the future; I will only mention it here.

I have two purposes for writing this blog, okay, three, which I’ve stated many times: 1) to help those who have only known religion and, like me, don’t like it, 2) the fact that, in general terms, the American church is failing, and 3) the general loss of truth in this late-postmodernist age. These three things are interconnected. Postmodernists don’t care if the Christian church fails because there is no truth anyway; if the world were to become atheist, it would be the same if the entire world became Christian. But here is the rub for me. I do believe in a personal creator, and Jesus was the Messiah.

However, I also believe that the creator has given us only rationality for finding factual truth. You could argue for divine inspiration, but if there is divine inspiration, it would be almost impossible for a mere mortal to separate it from the psychological noise that resides in each of our heads. The Bible supports this, where it says the psyche is more deceitful than anything else.

The problem is that rationality, when examining the evidence and making deductions, can never attain certainty. Not in science or in religion, even pure religion. But in both, it can reach a high level of probability. No, I cannot prove God’s existence, nor can I prove that Jesus of Galilee was the messiah, but I can examine the evidence enough to act of my own free will to place my bets. What some would call faith, but a rational faith, not the subjective faith of Soren Kierkegaard or Richard Rohr. I have found that a rational faith is more mysterious and magical than a subjective faith. Although rationality is limited, it is far superior to the subjective or imaginary truths that most people, including religious people, now live by.

I believe in a merciful God, the God of C.S. Lewis and George MacDonald… but science has shown me that this God is much bigger, far more mysterious than the one I was taught in the Bible belt or in the religious group I was in. Therefore, my MO is not saving the religious nones from hell. But giving meaning and a moral framework. You can have neither in an atheistic model of the cosmos. Atheists would scream otherwise, yet I was an atheist once, and that’s what I found.

Additionally, unlike the religious, who make everything a moral problem, thus their harsh words and condemnation, this is not my MO. I am correct in my assessment of history, but I don’t see it as a moral problem. I am not religious, so I don’t sniff out sin in others. There is a problem in how we think as a culture, which has real-life consequences, such as the political mess we are now living in. It is a philosophical problem, not a religious one. The exchange of objective truth for the subjective. When we each create our own truth from our emotions, chaos will ensue.

If there is a God, that God cannot be incarcerated within the relgious walls of our imaginations

No, I do not participate in religious competition. In fact, I often see myself as morally inferior to most others I know. When you measure me by the words of James mentioned above, I come up wanting. And I want to do better.

So I say to those who don’t like religion, take heart. If there is a creator, and I think there is, they cannot be incarcerated within the walls of any religion and are knowable by anyone who is curious.

Future Posts

Going forward, as I said last time, I do want to return to cancer first, as I have a lot of readers who are interested in that journey. Without having to create new material, as I try not to think about cancer while I’m in remission, you know, denial, I will take some talking points out of my work in progress, newest book (How Cancer Taught Me to Swear, an observation of how a religious society deals with personal disasters), and write about those. Then I will start a new series, Honest to God, a very candid journey from religion to God.

When I’m not in denial about my own health, I know that likely my days on this earth are limited. The next monthly blood test could tell me that I’m heading back into suffering and death. Having lost most of my religious friends, and with my days numbered, I want to write boldly and with clarity, as I have nothing left to lose.

I hope you are doing as well as I am at this time,

Mike