Solvation

I used to be incredibly religious.

I was raised Christian, and adamantly believed in the Lutheran teachings I received from a truly thoughtful and compassionate pastor.  I went to Church, Sunday School, and Confirmation Class.  I learned everything there was to know about my mother's denomination.

I loved going to Church.  It gave me opportunities to think in peace and quiet.  There, I had the opportunity to care about things.  I was allowed to believe that my decisions mattered, and other people shared with me, at least for that transient period where we jointly worshiped God, the notion that there is meaning to things.

When I was in second grade, my uncle brutally murdered his wife.  He went to prison for life and left her three daughters in the care of my grandma, who was a devout Christian.  She taught my cousins to grow up quickly, probably in part because she knew that she wouldn't be able to do everything that a pair of parents would.  She did her absolute best to care for them in every way possible.  I remember going over to play with them all of the time, playing with Legos, chess, and Sega Genesis.  I love my cousins.

Over time, I kind of caught on to the fact that they had certain new rules in the house that they were unfamiliar with.  To a younger me, who inherently had a limited understanding of the interpersonal dynamics of the household, one of the craziest things to change was that they had to relinquish a whole bunch of things that my grandma wasn't comfortable with for religious reasons.  For example, they were no longer allowed to read Harry Potter books, as writing about magic is sacrilegious.  I got all of their Pokémon cards, because she didn't want them playing with "pocket monsters".  Of course, there were other rules that were guided by certain overarching religious-cultural principles.

I also remember a good number of sleepovers, and going out to do things with my cousins semifrequently.  One time we went to paint pottery.  After we were done, and it was late at night, I was in the car to ride home with the oldest sister, the one with whom I played chess and Sonic 2.  Whoever was driving us home went back into the pottery place for a while.  Some conversation that I can't remember led to my cousin telling me she didn't believe in God.

Very young, still, I was naïvely confused.  I honestly thought it was sort of funny that she said she didn't believe in God.  How could she not?

In the coming years, I kept in the back of my mind the thought that believing in God was a choice.  My parents got divorced when I was still pretty young, and I was forced to accept that some things that we take for granted are really much more complicated and explicable than we may initially realize.  I was forced to view the world from a new perspective.  There were times when I could leave my house and still hear my parents yelling at each other.

In sixth grade, some kid who used to bully me was spreading around a bunch of videos about factory farms compiled by PETA whistleblowers.  I kept that in the back of my mind.  In early seventh grade, I ended up stumbling onto some of those videos again by a different source.  in November 2005, I went vegetarian.  That was around the time I went on a youth group retreat with my church.

By middle school, I was thinking about morality, ethics, and such.  Philosophizing as much as I could.  I figure out that I'm unhappy and I'm confused about my sexual orientation.  In addition, I discover that I really like art, piano, and singing.  Healthily, I'm close friends with other people concerned about defying the standard social paradigms.  I share secrets with people, and they share secrets with me.

I had been praying pretty much every night since the time I learned how.  I always made it a point to ask God to heal the world.  At some point or another, I started to ask whether there was any point asking those questions and turned my interrogations inwards.  I'd start a prayer, then ask myself if there was any point.  I mean, the reasons to not believe in the organized religion in which I participated were piling up one after another.  It became to be far too ritualistic for my liking, and I became dissatisfied with the general consumption of time, the opinions of various members of the church, certain ways that the Christian lifestyle was incongruous with certain beliefs that I spent countless hours putting together.  I was coming to conclusions that I believed surpassed the blunt and the nuanced teachings of Lutherans, and as I developed my critical thinking skills, I came to realize that I was running out of impetus to actually believe in the narrative aspects of Christianity, which led me to the more epistemologically consistent stance of not holding any beliefs about the nature of the cosmos at all.

It wasn't a matter of negative evidence that turned me off of the belief system.  It was a lack of positive evidence, which was illuminated as such by the understanding that any experience could be interpreted multiply.  And as I slowly came across the kinds of experiences that others would describe as rapture, revelation, and extracorporeally significant, I understood how people would confuse those truly great feelings for something that they weren't capable of experiencing on their own.  One time I went to a book discussion with my step-dad's old college classmates and participated in discussions about things that I had almost no familiarity with.  It was a long trip there and back, and on the car ride back, I felt a powerful sort of glow throughout my body that I figured came from being able to interact with many intelligent people in a meaningful way.  I realized that, if I were more susceptible to foolhardy assumptions, I could easily have attributed that general, prolonged feeling as a communion with a holy spirit.  Of course, I put a higher stake on epistemological concerns than many people, so I connected the dots as follows:  many people have feelings that they say are the result of God touching them.  I had the same feeling, and I know that it could easily have come from the fact that I was in communion with mortal human beings.  Armed with Occam's Razor, I concluded I couldn't consider an experience like this one spiritual just because it was amazing.

In time, I got fed up with the rigidity of church, which made me emotionally step back from church.  Still required to go by my mom, and by extension my step-dad, I just used the time I was in the sanctuary to develop my own independent thoughts on spirituality.  Then I wondered what the difference was between my thoughts and the pastor's thoughts, and I realized there was no substantiable distinction.  Ethics trump tradition, I would argue vehemently.  Therefore what is thought of as right should be deduced independent of what has been thought before.  This line of thinking was parallel to and laid the groundwork for my next substantial train of thought, which was that nothing made God more likely than his absence.  I also realized that my beliefs about the world, humanity, and nature would be unfazed by the elimination of a deity from my schema.  And at that point, it hit me:  that my desires for there to be a God had no meaning whatsoever.  What I wanted wasn't what defined reality.  I wanted there to be a God, and I wanted there to be a heaven.  But our measly human desires have no impact on the nature of reality.

So I moved forward.  I became aggressively disgruntled by the fact that people were waiting for answers to come to them from God.  They were only half looking.  As if they could better receive answers if they implemented a pathway of reasoning that completely sidestepped rational thought and the practical capacities that are available to us mortals.  And even though I learned of many attempts to coincide religion and sound science, they seemed vacuous and confused.  They aimed to justify arguments with conclusions, and moved in exactly the opposite direction that scientists moved.

In many ways, I believe that I was able to come to this logical conclusion because any preconceptions that I may have grew up with were shattered along the way of my maturation.  Death, strife, cruelty, and doubt were things that I became aware of quickly.  I quickly grew to understand that the world is responsible for the world.  The Universe causes The Universe.  The ontological argument for the existence of God is wrong because it assumes that chains of causation are finite, and the notion that actual causation is underlied by divine causation simply doesn't coincide with the real world--which I first saw as a child.  You can't say that God is a benevolent God, responsible for a flightless bird finding shelter in a storm, when he simultaneously allows my aunt to be murdered, innocent animals to be tortured as an integral process of modern society, my parents' relationship to fail when my brother and I were only in elementary school, and the widespread tragedy in the world that blows my relatively small concerns out of the undrinkable water.

Anything that posits God as, well, anything, is simply wishful thinking.  And the Universe showed me early on that wishful thinking is utterly useless, unless you follow it up by making your own wish come true.

God isn't going to give me talking animals.  I'm going to give animals language.

God isn't going to give me a boyfriend.  I'm going to scour the Earth until I find somebody who can love me, and who I can love in return.

God isn't going to end poverty, war, or disease.  Social activists, doctors, and scientists are going to to suffer through years of strenuous education and fighting against the underlying systems that mandate the constant presence of these destructive forces.

Instead of being a martyr for God, I'm going to be a martyr for the reality I want to create.  Nothing will stop me.  And if God comes down from the sky and tells me that he does not condone my defiance, then I'll explain why he's completely wrong and why I really couldn't care less what he wants me to do.