My Religious History

After reading Jane’s excellent post about her thoughts on religion at Coffee and Varnish, I thought I’d share my own religious history.

I was brought up Episcopalian in what Pimme calls an “EC Christian” family. That is, we rarely attended church, but always turned up at Easter and Christmas.

The impression I got from my mother was that church was important, only so far as it was a respectable thing that good families did and that going to church was part of a well-rounded person‘s life. However, I didn’t sense any real personal interest in religion for its own sake from her.

My father’s attitude was that of respectful skepticism. He didn’t attend church with us on the infrequent times we went, nor did he interfere, as he went along with nearly everything my mother wanted. This was quite interesting, in light of the fact that he was raised in a southern fundamentalist family, but I suspect that even during his childhood, he merely went to church to humor his parents. Even in later life, he went to church with his second wife primarily as a way to appease her.

When I was about eleven or twelve, my mother wanted me to be confirmed in the Episcopalian church. I attended several confirmation classes on Saturday afternoons, which consisted of quite a bit of tedious rote learning. However, I managed to pass and was confirmed.

After my mother died, we stopped attending church altogether. One summer, when I was about fourteen, my father’s brother, a Baptist minister, came to visit and dragged us all to a huge Billy Graham appearance. Again, my father humored his brother by going along.

In high school, I fell in with a group of friends who went to a local Baptist youth group on Friday nights. Though I attended for a couple of years, I used it mainly as a place to pick up girls. Often, a group of us would slip out and hang around a liquor store a little ways up the street. We’d wait outside until we found someone a few years older willing to go in to buy beer for us. Because the drinking age was 18 then, this was usually a fairly simple matter. Once we had the beer, we’d drink it in the alley of a strip mall, then would head back to the church in time for the pizza they ordered every week.

To my amazement, the couple who ran the youth group never threw us out, but continued to welcome us each week. In addition to the Friday night meetings, they took us on inner tubing and camping trips, so I accepted the religious discussions as part of the deal in good humor.

I met a girl there once who was serious about her faith, who desperately tried to convert me. I liked her a lot, so I listened to what she had to say and for awhile, I tried to believe it, but couldn’t quite wrap my logic around it and pull it off. Interestingly enough, I still get a Christmas card from her each year.

As an adult, I’ve not attending church but a handful of times. I consider myself an agnostic. I’m not sure whether or not there is a Supreme Being, but I think it would be foolish to totally close and lock the door on it, as there’s really no conclusive proof one way or the other.

I am convinced, however, that if there is a supreme being, it’s much different what has been commonly presented -- God is not a jealous, autocratic white man with a beard, of that much I am certain. The Deist idea of God being found in nature, with the corollary of the universe itself being the Infinite, is an attractive one for me. It’s interesting to note that most of our Founding Fathers were Deists, regardless of claims by the Religious Right that the United States was founded as a Christian nation, which is patently untrue.

My son believes that God and Jesus are aliens who visited our planet long ago, and the miracles described in the Bible are merely examples from an alien technology so advanced to be beyond the ken of ancient humans, so that they interpreted such events as magic or as miracles. This idea was expressed in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode, “Who Watches the Watchers”, where a group of primitive people witnessing the Enterprise’s technology mistake the crew for gods. I’m not sure if my son’s idea is true, but it’s an interesting theory, nonetheless.

As for my own code of ethics, it boils down to two things, the Golden Rule and the Wiccan Rede:

“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”

“And if it harms none, do what you will.”