I was born to a family of moderate Lutherans, but my childhood had more religious emphasis than many other moderate Christians because I went to a Catholic school for kindergarten through eighth grade. Fortunately, it was a fairly progressive Catholic school (only the eighth grade teacher and the principal were nuns) but we did have religion class every week and we did attend a children's Mass every Friday. Each class took turns sitting up at the front and leading the readings and the prayers, so at the age of six, as the only student in my kindergarten class who could read, I vividly remember standing up at the pulpit to give the readings every time our class led the Mass. I was introduced to religion in the way best-suited for childhood indoctrination; as a subject to be studied, understood, and taken as fact alongside math, science, history, reading, and writing. It never occurred to me to question the existence of God, or to even consider the fact that there may be people out in the world who heard the same things I did and did not believe it to be true, or that there were people who believed entirely different things, or did not believe at all. At least not at first. But there were two inevitable clashes coming that I can directly link to my questioning of the validity of religion and the existence of God.
The first was the fact that I was being raised in two religions. Every week, I was being taught the basics of Catholicism - their interpretation of the Bible, their rules and rituals - and every Sunday, I was being schooled in the Lutheran religion. And I was proud to be a Lutheran, to be a member of the church that first split away from Catholicism and dared to find a different way of interpreting the Bible. I imagine that you can see where this is going. I was learning about the way that Catholics interpreted the Bible, and I was constantly asking questions about why they saw it one way and Lutherans saw it another. And as I began to learn about the existence of other religions, and as I came to understand that even different Protestant religions had vastly different understandings of the Bible, I just couldn't stop asking why.
My favorite example of this: I learned during a Sunday school class on other religions that Catholics, Lutherans, and other Protestant religions all have different ways of interpreting the phrase, "Take, eat, this is my body. Take, eat, this is my blood" (I'm paraphrasing here). These are the words that Jesus said over the bread and wine at the Last Supper, and these are the words that most priests and pastors say over the bread and wine at the Eucharist when they consecrate it, or turn it into the body and blood of Christ. The Catholics believe that when the priest says these words over the bread and wine, it LITERALLY turns into the body and blood of Christ. They put their emphasis on "This is my body, this is my blood." Lutherans believe that the bread and wine turn into the body and blood of Christ while remaining bread and wine, but that the transformation does not occur until it has entered the person's body. They put their emphasis on the "Take, eat" and "Take, drink." All other Protestant religions, I was told, view the changing of the bread and wine as purely symbolic - it is a representation of Christ's sacrificial body and blood, but it is not literally transformed. One simple phrase, interpreted different ways, leads to three separate types of religion. And although it may seem to be a trivial difference, these differences of interpretation occur in one of the most vital expressions of the Christian religion. If you are of one religion, it is not acceptable for you to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist of another religion because you have not gone through the training that allows you to fully understand the significance of the ritual. Wouldn't you think, if this expression of one's belief in and devotion to God was so important, that it would be easier to interpret?
Anyway, my opportunity to study other religions and my desire to understand why they did not all believe that same things, since it all seemed to start out so easy to understand, led me to constantly question why other people believed the things they did. This inevitably led to me questioning why I believed the things I did, something that I still do and will probably continue to do for the rest of my life. Though the ability to question why one believes the things she does does not make one an atheist, it certainly makes it hard to be religious, because eventually every religion has some things you are supposed to accept without question, and that wasn't something I was willing to do. But there was another event that started me on the path of questioning not only the validity of religion, but the existence of the God that so many religions claim exists.
When I was in the fifth grade, a very close friend of mine, a man named Denny Medill, committed suicide. The event in itself was a traumatic experience for me, but since I had experienced the death of friends and loved ones before, it did not cause me to question God in the way you may expect. I knew that people died, and went to heaven, and were in a better place, and that I would see them all again when I died. That was a fact of life, as far as I was concerned. But Denny's death put me at odds with a religious teaching that I was only just starting to learn about: the existence of hell.
My religious teachers were very savvy, and they knew that exposing a small child to the fullness of their ideas about hell right off the bat would be a traumatizing and cruel experience. So when I was just learning about religion, I believed that hell was a place that only the worst people in the entire world, like Hitler, went. I was convinced that hell had to be a fairly empty place, because no one could be so bad as to deserve to be punished for eternity. Except for Hitler. (I don't know why, but I once imagined that Hitler was the only person in hell. I think he was the only person that I could imagine had done something bad enough to deserve hell. I was, and still am, very optimistic when it comes to believing in the goodness of people.) But as I got older, the list of things that people could do, or not do, during their lives that would land them in hell grew longer, and longer, and longer. And Denny had not only committed suicide, but he had also been non-religious. A double-whammy. I was terrified at the thought that I would never see him again because of that. My parents tried to comfort me by telling me that God knew what he was thinking before he died, and that there was still a chance that he would go to Heaven, but all I heard was that there was a chance that he would not. He had been the nicest, funniest, happiest man I knew: I was having a hard enough time, at such a young age, wrapping my head around the question of why someone who seemed so happy and full of life would kill himself; the thought of him being punished for all eternity for a moment of terrible weakness was just too much for me to understand. So I did the only thing I could do in that situation: I rejected the idea of hell. I told myself that it did not exist, that the God I believed in would not allow such a thing to exist. But the problem with rejecting one aspect of a belief system is that it leaves you open to questioning and rejecting other aspects of it as well. And if the God that I believed in was suddenly not the same God that everyone else believed in, if he was now different because I refused to accept the existence of hell, then what did that say about the whole idea of God?
I will conclude this essay tomorrow with Part 2, when I will explain the events in my adult life that led me to the conclusion that there is probably no God.
1 comment:
Very good post.
It's always interesting reading about people's experience with religion growing up. I never had that, I suppose I've always been an atheist. Most of my experiences with religion are from the outside, I recall one time in the 4th grade my friends were talking about the symbols of their churches ("Mine's a cross", "Mine's a fish!"), when they asked me what my church's symbol was, I was dumbfounded, confused and more than a little embarrassed and ashamed. Finally I lied and told them it was a cat.
Never having believed in the first place I'm often at odds with other atheists in that my non-belief isn't an important part of my identity so sometimes I struggle to understand why some atheists are so... in to... atheism.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to reading the rest of your post.
laters,
Piestrio
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