Witness

I always walk past the free speech zone on my way to class. It's more of a curse than anything but I don't really feel like making a circumference around my classroom building in order to avoid a dozen fliers shoved under my nose, a sacrifice that must be made in the interest of time. Need less to say I am a complete master of avoidance, having done the job of passing propaganda myself plenty of times, I know how to look uninterested. On rare occasions, I stop and listen.

On such a recent occasion, I passed by a man surrounded by people and a few microphones punctuating a semicircle. I stopped and listened. I saw the book in his hand, the arrogance in his face and knew his purpose and message far before the first words struck my ear.

It wasn't the usual hell-fire and damnation. He had to have been a campus minister. Their PR tactics are more crowd friendly. He had been arguing with people in the crowd about religion but, by the time I arrived, he took an intermission for the university students to declare for themselves the difference Christ had made in their lives. The students parade themselves to the front of the semicircle, holding cardboard signs, one side reflecting a former existence and the opposite declaring a counter existence. I was on drugs. Now I'm high on Jesus. Cliche. My only thoughts were you don't need god for this. You don't need an invisible deity who's only spoken through a book from the bronze age to validate your existence.

I found myself glad to freed from the trap that there was something inherently wrong with me that the only way to fix it was to telepathically communicate with an almighty sky god and to deny myself this that and the other. I can value and accept myself from within myself, not without. Not through other people. Not through a god. I think it was this sign that stood out to me the most and contrasted so deeply within me. She claimed that she was looking for other people's approval but now she has the approval of god. But what of herself? Does she like herself, accept herself for who she is?

The speaker kept asking if any of those people's witness spoke out to us. So this was his tactic. Rather than trying to reason, he would appeal to emotions, to people hurts and sorrows, their sense of worth and self-being.

He resumed debating after a time. His biggest issue was the idea of personal morality. Morality is based on culture, what is in the best benefit of the culture and the survival of our species. He brought up Hitler and genocide and I couldn't help myself.

"If you want to talk about genocide, look at all the people god in the Bible killed!"

He turned and looked at me, smirking, and asked what I had said.

"Look at all the people god killed in the bible-"

He began talking again ("god killed them for their wickedness!") and turned away.

"LET ME FINISH!" My pet-peeve is being interrupted.

He turned back, surprise, an arrogant smile sliding into place, "I thought you were done."

"You will know when I'm done when I stop talking." I felt like a bad-ass, a stone cold bitch. I'm not very outspoken normally. "God commanded the Hebrews to kill all of the people in the 'promise land' simply because they didn't believe in the same god."

"No he didn't!"

Are you fucking kidding me? Me and another guy shouted at him to look it up in Joshua but he had already finished with us. He didn't want to deal with the vicious god of the Old Testament, only the soft and gentle Jesus of modern American Christianity. As a Christian, I had always wondered about this strange dichotomy between the god of the bible, Jesus of the New Testament and the Christian religion so prevalent in our society. The focus was so much on what Jesus could do for you. Jesus came into my life and ever thing is fucking peachy. I've read the entirety of the bible several times and the focus always seemed to be more on giving up for god. Give up your time, your money, your bodily desires, and your entire life for god. Sure, you'll get something back. Heaven mainly, but also peace, joy, discernment, and a whole harvest of intangibles. What I read in the Bible was about life being a struggle and what I heard from pastors and followers alike was about the shit Jesus would do for us.

At least when the other guys come to campus, the ones who tell everyone they're going to hell for some trivial thing or another, they're being true to religion.

Depression

I think this post may stray away from the general topic of this blog but it's my blog and I can do whatever the fuck I want with it.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression in the 7th grade. I spent a short time with a councilor and then was taken to a psychiatrist. The difference between the two, for those of you who are unaware, is that a councilor or psychologist is just someone who you talk to and helps you work through whatever the situation may be with you. A psychiatrist on the other hand, deals mainly with prescribing medicines (something a psychologist is not able to do). Ideally, someone in therapy responds better when both methods are used. Anyways, I was put on anti-depressant and sent on my way. It worked... for a little bit but I took it anyways up until my senior year of high school. I started on 50mg of it and by the time I took myself of I was up to 250mg plus 10mg of Prozac. Nice little cocktail.

Now I know, after years of the same battle, that I won't ever actually kill myself. For the most part, everything's under control. I tried medicine again last year when I did happen to hit a very hard low but once again, I haven't found any that are really effective and don't fuck with my ability to sleep. Every once in awhile, on days like today, I just get... bummed. I am, just as the word describes, depressed. Yet, I often wondered if I've been misdiagnosed. OCD and Bi-Polar disorder run in my family, not clinical depression. Certainly doesn't mean that I couldn't be the first but I do notice that I do go through intense highs and lows. I notice the lows more because its debilitating. I can't work, study, think, or do anything but lay in bed when it's at its worse. The aforementioned very hard low was just that. I couldn't get myself out of bed in the morning any more. Now, I certainly don't enjoy going to class or work but I am normally self motivated enough to drag my ass out of bed anyways and go. Last year was the only serious time that I actually considering institutionalized. At the end of it all, I had dropped half my course load and forced myself to finish the semester with what was absolutely essential to my degree.

How did this work with being a Christian, a Catholic at that? I blamed myself. I was sensible enough to know that being a Christian doesn't mean you are constantly happy. Sounds stupid, but I've heard that one quite a bit. However, when I was depressed, I would always jump to the conclusion that it was because something was wrong with my relationship with god. My last two statements contradict. How could I accept that Christianity did not equal constant happiness and yet feel as if my depression was brought on by offending god? It's the difference between intellectual assent and practice, like ideal culture and real culture. What you say and what you do are not always consistent.

I often prayed and begged for this "weakness" to be removed and when it remained either it was because of my own sin or it was to be my thorn, the thing that makes me rely on god, rely on faith.

From 2 Corinthians ^"7To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. ⁸Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. ⁹But he said to me, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness." Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ's power may rest on me. ^10"

^{What kind of god intentionally makes someone weak, allows people to be tormented, just to make himself look good, to show his own power? Why would an almighty God need for people to suffer in order for him to do his work? Wouldn't be a better display of mercy and power to remove such an illness?}

Gah.. this is just another reason why I despise this kind of self-depreciating thinking. The Bible, with all it's murders, genocide, racism, and sexism, not only in it's content, but often commanded or enacted by god himself has no value for human life. Humans are to grovel at the feet of this almighty, merciless dictator, born into a losing cosmic battle and having no internal worth but worth only in their service to the deity.

A god who slaughters the first born child of every non Jewish family is not a god of love
A god who condones genocide, commands the death of entire people is not a god of love
A god who commands petty crimes to be punished by death is not a god of love
A god who willing kills his own son to cover someone else's ass is not a god of love
A god who drowns the entire population of the earth except for a single family is not a god of love
A god who endorses racism, sexism, and slavery is not a god of love

Sad Begining

It's almost 11 o'clock and I've been meaning to do this for awhile but now, I don't know if I can articulate what I want to say into something more than incoherent babble. I think I am already at the babbling point to be honest so I might as well carry on.

The purpose of this blog is to track my thoughts during the process of achieving intellectual freedom.

So we shall begin where all stories begin, at the beginning (unless you are Tarentino, who begins things at the middle or the end).

I wasn't raised in the church, which is rare for the south. My father, Catholic born and raised married a southern Baptist woman and there wasn't much religion in our house. We never went to service but my brother and I went to catechism every Wednesday night. Then my father's mother died and there was no more catechism. My idea of god as a child had been something along the lines of a cosmic peeping tom, always watching you, staring at you.

That idea remained into middle school where I met a girl from a very religious family. She went to church and youth group every Sunday except when she came over to my house for a Saturday night sleepover party in order to avoid going to church the next day. But she was still religious, a believer. We were at Disney when, waiting for Space Mountain, when she told of a book she had read about the end of world so I borrowed it and learned about Jesus. I felt a horrible feeling in my stomach that because I hadn't told god I was a sinner and that I believed in him and I was going to be left behind when all of the good christians were taken away at the end of times. I had to solve this Jesus problem and I to solve it quickly because I didn't know if he was going to be here in five minutes or two days so I knelt down and prayed and I was saved. When Jesus dropped in after thousands of year of expectancy, I was going to be ready and I was going to go with him.

I started going to church with my friend after that. Her parents, dedicated to cause of faith, picked me up every Sunday and dropped me back off and I had made other friends. These friends were also christians and we went to church together and I enjoyed myself.

The day before freshman orientation, right before entering high school, I lost them all but one. Teenagers fight among each other regardless of creed, hormones are thicker than faith. I faltered in this religion that I had become so apart of, so I joined a bible study club at my school. It had been a year since kneeling at my bedside in fear and I went to church every week and even began reading the bible.

I had always been a lover of books, devouring tomes of information and lore, so when I entered the student led bible study January of my freshman year, it was no wonder the leaders were impressed. I had been able to reference and even quote significant passages to the faith and when it came time at the end of the year to choose new officers, I inherited the position of vice-president. The next year, when the president stopped showing up for meetings, stopped talking to club members, I ended up in charge. I gave short sermons every week and deployed my artistic skills to help gain new members. Even after transferring to a charter school in order to dual enroll in college, I remained president right until graduation. This was my best experience with faith, with people who truly believed in a gospel of love. Our group was small and very close knit, having no fear of sharing our heart and souls, tears and joy. If there was anything ever good about religion, it was this and these people.

My youth pastor's best friend was an assistant director of a campus ministry at the college I was heading off to. Service was on Sunday, prayer meetings and small bible study was on Mondays and Tuesdays, and Wednesdays was dinner and small groups. I got involved, went to everything, led some things but I never felt anything.

The entirety of my time within the Christian faith was spent searching for god, desiring god, trying to please god, submitting to god. It was my life, the focal point of everything. I arose in the morning with prayer and laid my head to rest with meditation.

When people find out I'm atheist and former Christian, they often remark that I must not have tried hard enough or had to right heart while searching for god and it is this that is the most infuriating to me. I gave 6 years of my life to the church and when you are young, that is a lot of time. I converted to Catholicism while in college. It was my last chance. Years of Protestantism failed me in spite of my veneer of success and faith and the only hope was to return to what my grandmother had attempted to bring me up in. During that last year, I went to mass 6 days a week, bible study twice a week, and prayed daily.

And I broke.

It was slow, like walking down a gentle hill. I got a job that required me to work on Sundays so I stopped going to church. I couldn't motivate myself to get up at 6:30 for daily mass during the summer holiday and I always found a reason to forget about going to 5:00 mass. After that, I stopped reading the bible and stopped praying. My university cut my program and I would have been unable to finish within the year. I moved to a new town, close to where my fiance lived and we moved into an apartment together. I didn't know anyone else I could have moved in with and I couldn't afford a place on my own. I think this was the first thing that in my life that I had used reason to determine rather than doctrine. I knew it was wrong, according the church, but it made sense and still stands as one of the best decisions we had made. After this, I stopped ignoring all the things that I had ever doubt about my faith, all the little nuances and inconsistencies that occurred not only intellectually but within my experiences with other people. I thought, perhaps for the first time in my life, without worrying about protecting my faith. Yet, I would still lie awake at night with fear in my heart. Was I going to hell for this? Was Jesus going to show up at the end of 6 years of faithful obedience only to leave with out me?

I don't really know what or even when it happened but I woke up, like from a long nightmare, and I knew it was over. There wasn't a god after all. There is only this life... and it is beautiful. There is no judge... and we are free to pursue who we truly are. It is liberating and like I am breathing for the first time. No more guilt, no more fear.