Religion: my own story

Essentially, many people love religion, and cherish the opportunity to speak to God. Personally, I was the same way until God began responding, and talking to me. My religious background was rather bizarre. I come from an American old-timer background, where every stripe of religion is represented, including Quaker, Shaker, Hussite, Huguenot ... so essentially fusion Protestant. When I was growing up I thought of myself as just Protestant. I loved it. I loved everything that I associated with religion: the sound of an organ, the simple elegance of church buildings, the unusual friendliness of people when they're at church, the cute little rhymes that were written up somewhere.


When I was about eleven, religion started to take on a new meaning. I started to focus on the substantive aspects of religion, and to ask myself "what is it telling me to do and think?" Fortunately, around the same point in my life, I would receive an answer. I might have been experiencing something that most people go through. When I was doing research on Mesopotamia, I would open the "M" volume of the World Book encyclopedia, and see a map of the Middle East without turning any pages. When I turned on the television, it seemed like the episode of the South Park was directed at me personally. And the fact that I was a D-student with no friends must have been a deliberate part of a grand plan. And if so, then how should I correctly fulfill my role?


I needed things to be made simple, since I knew the clock was ticking on me, and I didn't want to make any mistakes. My default assumption was that God wanted us to do anything we didn't want to do. Otherwise, why would we need religion? I knew that Catholics wake up at 6 AM every Sunday to attend mass. Muslims fast every day for a month and keep their women locked up in a cellar. Devout Jews dress up like pimps, even during the summer, and they follow so many dietary restrictions that their food is garbage. Furthermore, I knew that people across the globe were killing people in the name of religion - from Arafat to Milosevic to Eric Randolph. Who really wants to get up and kill someone? It seemed to me like most people wouldn't be willing to without a divine mandate.

I wasn't quite motivated to kill anyone, so I didn't, although I knew God might make me pay for this. But I did other things that I thought God might want. Better to be safe than sorry. For example, there was a period of about five months when I would drink a certain amount of vegetable oil, or olive oil every night; initially I would drink 1/8 cup, but eventually I would find myself drinking 8 or 9 1/8 cup measures per night. Many years later, I would ask a psychiatrist if these "requests" from God constituted psychotic delusions. She did not give me a direct answer, but she gave me the impression that they are not delusions because I did not think I was physically hearing them. They were, more accurately, abstract conceptions of what messages I might be receiving. So essentially I was in the same boat as everyone else, except that I stopped to think about it in a way that most people hadn't. But paradoxically, because I thought about it, I would arrive at another deduction: I was not allowed to think about it. So I had an obligation to maintain all my existing ideas about God and His messages, not matter how absurd they seemed. And to me, the cruelest aspect of religion was that it necessarily limited my intellect. When people talk about anything that assumes the existence of God, they can rarely do so in a way that is intellectually-sound. I was fully aware of this, but I knew I did't have a choice.

And this was the status quo until my senior year of high school, when I finally abandoned religion on the following grounds: although religion might have been my supreme, unconditional obligation, the likeliness of this hypothesis was so small, and the cruelty of religion to humanity was so great, that I should prioritize human life instead. And to me that meant abandoning religion one thousand percent. This was about eight years ago, and since then I have never looked back, in fact my conviction has continually become stronger. So what am I now? I've described myself as a cynic, an agnostic, a "passionate atheist" - the label keeps changing. But what matters is that I'm unrestrained, and therefore have the privilege of thinking. And at this point in my life, no one can tell me I'll go to Hell for it.