~God Stuff
2005-01-08 - 5:59 p.m.

If there was no religion, would I believe in God?

If there were no people trying to force "the truth" down my throat, or even expressing their belief in religions that I can't find it in me to believe in, would I perhaps have searched on my own for answers to those Big Life Questions that seem to bother people so much and perhaps formed some private faith in a divine presence?

I haven't really been brought up schooled in the belief of anything, but my parents are Christian and every year until I was a teenager, I was taken to their old Church of Christ Homecoming day. What I knew of church, I knew from that. What I knew of Christianity, I knew from my Children's Bible, and my sister's book of 101 Bible stories.

My sister doesn't believe in anything. She believes that life is scientific and not magical. I suppose a romantic part of me has always wanted there to be something benignly supernatural in the world, but I haven't found it in Christianity, or any organised religion.

I can accept the Bible as an important religious book that was written by humans. It gave hope to people in exile, it used metaphor to explain the wonder of the Jewish and Christian God and to try to teach people a good way to live. It gave practices that would unite people and give them comfort. Lotsa good stuff.

But people don't see it like that. People have such belief and faith, that they take the Bible as a history. At Christmas, my step-cousin wasn't feeling well, so we put on my Prince of Egypt DVD for him. Well, his sister asked me part way through if this was all true. My nice, tactful, teacher answer was that it was what the Bible said happened, but her mum came along at just that moment and told her that yes, this was all true.

See, I respect people's right to have a religion and a belief, even envy it to a certain degree, but I can't agree with teaching kids that the Bible is fact. Your average Christian doesn't go to univeristy and study the history of the Bible, they don't learn that stories were written by humans, by men, in a certain time and place, to send a particular message to a group of people in a certain time and place. They get taught these stories and are left to believe that they are supposed to be taken literally, or applied to modern day life without reference to the biases and prejudices of the people who wrote them, nor for the context of the story. I remember learning at Uni that there's one story in the Old Testament that condemns the people who till the land as opposed to the more shepardy types. If the average person read that, it makes is sound like farmers are sinful people. Bad farmers, you may not be part of the church. *wags finger*

See, what experts who study the Bible have figured out is that the people who settled on land and started to farm it at the time the people wrote that story were far more dependent on weather and so forth for good crops to help them survive and make a living. Many of them began worshipping the pagan fertility and weather dieties and that is why the farming folk were considered sinful. But who knows that now? Who gets told? People just read the Bible and take it at face value because nobody explains to them what was considered common knowledge when it was written.

How can you expect children to understand these things if all you tell them is that it's true? I had a girl last year who brought her book of Bible Stories to school to read and told me quite proudly that all the stories in there were true. How is she going to learn to live in a society of differences with tolerance and understanding if parents are blindly indoctrining their children into this lore without explanation and education? Is it any wonder that so many Christians grow up to be either very rigid in their thinking or disillusioned with the whole organised religion?

I like Jesus. Jesus was cool. In fact, Emma and I had this joke in uni that we would teach a unit called "Jesus was a Top Bloke", coz there's no denying that he was. I'm not talking about the miracles and all of that. I'm talking about the way he had the courage to be so humane in a society of laws and prejudices and imperialism. The Pharisees had all of these laws about washing their hands and paying money to the temple and eating and praying fancily and everything. But Jesus never had time for that. He showed that it didn't matter whether you followed Church law or not, provided you were good in heart and action and belief. Now, I may not have the belief part, but the rest just rings so true.

You don't need elaborate masses, fustian about the Holy Spirit decending and really truly turning wine into blood (because not only is that icky gross, but they didn't really drink Jesus' blood at the Last Supper anyway!), solemn hymns and cetchisms. You need to live your life honestly, kindly, tolerantly. You don't need to pray to God to step in and change things for you, you need to be that change for other people. Seriously, whether you look at it religiously or not, aren't there so many amazing things we can do for others and isn't the most rewarding thing in our lives the connection we have to other people?

Take this stubborn belief that to practice homosexuality is a sin. A sin should be something that hurts other people, or could be of harm to oneself. Homosexuality is no more hurtful than heterosexuality...in fact, in some ways it's safer because there's no danger of bringing more children into an already grossly overpopulated world. Murder hurts people. Adultery hurts people. Theft hurts people. Dishonesty hurts people. Being in love? Since when has that been a bad thing?

I'm not really sure what my point is, except perhaps that the thing preventing me from believing in a God or Gods is the people who try to define God and how we're supposed to show that we believe. I'm not saying people shouldn't go to Church or wherever, that they shouldn't follow their nice traditions if that is how they choose to show and share their faith. I'm saying that I can't believe in a religion that tells me I must participate in meaningless actions or God will not accept me. It offends me deeply.

If there is a God, I cannot believe he/she would seriously care that all of the kind and caring Buddhists in the world, for instance, don't go to Church and take Communion. In fact, how do you really know, except because there's some book written by humans thousands of years ago, that it's not the Hindus or the Buddhists or the Aboriginals who have the real way to worship, or that anyone does? I'm not really worried about the belief in God, the thing I find amazing is how people seem to think that, if you search your heart and think about things and come to the conclusion that there is some benign supernatural presence, that it neccesarily follows that their definition of that presence must therefore be the correct one.

Of course, if people derive strength and solace and love from their religion, that's wonderful. If people believe that it is the best and most fulfilling way for them to live their lives, that's truly special. They had just better not dare to tell me it is the only way. That is narrow-minded and arrogant.

I don't really see that I am less qualified than anyone else to decide what is right, so I'll continue to be open, but make up my own mind based on what feels right, and what seems to fit in with being humane.

I really need to stop myself from reading journals of Christians arguing in favour of their faith. It inevitably seems to bring out all the things I hate about organised religions, when there are so many wonderful things about them, too.

I'm hungry.