Intermission

It has been quite a long time since I've updated. I don't think that I have any readers here so I guess its o.k.

My main reason for having been absent for so long was a major upheaval in my personal life which I believe has settled itself back down. There are two things that I shall address in this post: seeing Hitchens debate against D'Souza and, of course, the Catholic Church and its many recent hiccups.

First and foremost, I had the up most privilege of seeing Christopher Hitchens debate against Denish D'Souza and please forgive me if I misspell that name; I can barely pronounce and yes while I have the wealth of the internet sitting right before me... I don't feel like looking it up...

Anyways, what I found interesting about seeing the debate was not the debate itself but I will have to begin with that. I felt that the points made by D'Souza were full of holes and when brought to the next step were easily dismissed. I was disappointed to hear him repeat arguments that have already been dealt with by individuals such as Dawkins with the most disappointing argument being "well, most of the world believes in god, so you should too!" I mean, really? Truth is truth even if no one believes it and lies are lies even when everyone believes it. He's asking people to base their lives on popular opinion? Seriously? My other biggest problem with him is how ethnocentric he was. He really took the stance that western culture and westernization of the world is making every thing evil oh and Islam's the devil. He had no problem relating Islam to terrorism but when talking about evil committed by other religious groups it was "oh well... their motivations are political." He sighted the Catholic/ Protestant war in Ireland as purely political and the conflict over Kashmir as political as well. These two conflicts in particular certainly do have large complex political elements over them but the religions of the respected groups of people do play significantly into them and especially the roots of the conflicts. The conflict over Palestine and the Gaze strip was another he mention as being "just about the land." There is undeniably a religious element to that conflict as well as political.

Hitchens did well but... I don't know how to explain this but I didn't leave feeling he had satisfactorily refuted the main point. I felt like he picked certain parts of the arguments and focused on them rather than the whole argument itself. I certainly know he has the capacity to do so and I wonder if the reason why he didn't had to do with the time limits given.

The most interesting was the audience. I know the purpose of a formal debate really isn't to change the minds of the audience so it's not surprising that people left with the same views they came with. The audience itself was mixed, not just atheists but not just religious people either and of course there were those who troll in real life and heckled Hitchens and even D'Souza had a heckler. The biggest impression I got was the each side had felt they had one. Those rooting for D'Souza seemed to feel he had made well reasoned arguments in favor of religion, particularly conservative Catholicism, while those of us rooting for Hitchens felt the exact same way about the points he made. It's fascinating how this can happen, how people can attend the same event and have totally different ideas about the result. I really got the impression that both sides looked at each other and went "how can you still think the way you think? Didn't you just hear him completely blow your worldview out of the water?" There really isn't much you can convince people of. People change their minds on their own efforts. This seems like such an obvious observation but we put so much time and energy into changing people's minds about things they have already deemed true.

Everyone has heard about the Catholic Church and the scandal involving priest and little boys, something the Church really has a problem keeping under control. I fully, fully believe that every single one of those priests needs to be defrocked and handed over to the authorities for criminal prosecution. I find it saddening that the Catholic Church, in being so hostile about this matter and not doing what needs to be done, is making it hard for members of the clergy who legitimately care about their parishes. I wouldn't consider myself a friend of religion and I don't encourage people to participate but I do recognize that there are religious people in the world that want to do good and to affect lives in a positive manner and the actions of the Church are causing distrust against people who legitimately want to help others. Not all priests are pedophiles and now decent, albeit deluded, individuals are taking the flack for another's crimes and ineffectiveness of an organization that thought they are apart of it, they have no real control over it.

The Catholic Church is an enigma. When it comes to sex, they are archaic in what they teach their congregations and while if you do something so natural as masturbate or something healthy like use birth control, you have to go to confession and its a big deal yadda yadda but when their clergy steps out of line, its a big cover up. I think out of the various Christian denominations, the Catholic church has become the most progressive in its approach towards science as a whole, especially with its positive stance on evolution which I (unlike Dawkins) am honestly impressed with. I just don't understand how the church can be progressive when it comes to evolutionary theory and so ass backwards when it comes to sex. It's really like they are sticking their fingers in their ears and yelling "I can't hear you."

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.

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.