Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I really do. To think that there is a master plan for everyone and everything seriously appeals to my inner control freak. It means I can just sit back, relax, and procrastinate to my heart's content because everything happens for a reason. It means my OCD can have a margarita or four because everything is in the hands of the divine.
I wish.
I tried to believe in god. I tried to climb on-board the holy train multiple times in my life but never managed to hang on for very long before reason plucked me off.
Growing up (as it always comes back to that, doesn't it?), I had a strange introduction to religion. My mother termed herself a "recovering Catholic" and my father's side of the family were Christian Scientists. My mother would have sooner given me a jailhouse tattoo before dragging me to mass so I mostly attended church with my father and grandmother. They attended "adult church" upstairs while I went to Sunday School. Problem was, our church was in a mostly retired section of town so I was literally the only kid in Sunday School. I had the teacher all to myself and she asked me to read passages from the Bible to her. I gladly did so because I loved reading out loud but I didn't pay one bit of attention to what I was reading. None of it seemed important. And this is why when you say "Well, you know the story of how Mary cut her baby in half and fed it to a lion, right?", I will look at you blankly. Any Biblical knowledge is mostly from pop culture osmosis, and even then, I think my brain tries really hard not to let godliness in (it burns). I can sing Duran Duran's "Hungry Like a Wolf" from memory but I have no idea what is old testament, what is new testament and why any of it is or should be significant to my life.
Around the age of 12, I realized that the Christian Scientists were a not-very-well-disguised cult and would probably ask for an organ donation soon. I needed to find a new religion and fast. I started attending church with my friends so I could try them out. I saw the Catholics apologize for an hour, the Pentecostals wave their arms in schizophrenic unity and observed the Lutherans promising not to have premarital sex. None of it fit. I watched my classmates wearing the WWJD bracelets and it was a mystery to me. What WOULD Jesus do? I had no idea. But I was fairly certain that he wouldn't wear a pompous bracelet and then refuse to sit with me at lunch. It all seemed so absurd.
I eventually decided that I still liked the idea of god and that he would probably want me to be happy and make good choices for myself. I didn't think repenting made a lot of sense because life is about mistakes and "real" repentance seemed to be learning from those mistakes rather than apologizing to a statue. Simplistic as it was, my version of religion made a lot more sense to me than anything I observed in a cathedral on a Sunday morning.
Over the years, critical thinking kicked in and I started to understand that religion is merely a warm blanket to wrap oneself in. It's an easy way to make sense of the good and the bad. I cannot argue that it's comforting to think our loved ones are watching us from heaven. It's clear that believing god has a plan when natural disasters occur is preferable to allowing yourself to think that life just sucks sometimes. The prospect of death is much less scary when you let yourself believe that bottomless milkshakes and roller skates await you. I get it. And sometimes, I wish I could turn off the critical thinking portion of my brain and just drink the kool-aid.
But here I am, married to my rational thoughts and practicality. I, and I alone am responsible for my poor choices (and my good ones!). The shitty things that I can't control are because life sucks sometimes. And as much as I would LOVE to believe that there is a force greater than me driving the car, I don't. Sometimes life is ridiculously and horribly unfair. And it's not a test of my strength or purposefully to make me stronger. It's because life sucks sometimes.
This is likely why I've developed a serious allergy to all things god. Mentions of religion (especially in political arenas) make me twitchy. I'm a master of nodding and smiling with the kool-aid drinkers. Since embracing my atheism, I've become annoyed with how ubiquitous religion is. I'm probably less tolerant than I should be. I try my very best to be tolerant of others but have difficulty not making jokes about kool-aid or sheep.
Now... if church were about watching actual sheep drink actual kool-aid, I might just be interested.
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