Day 63: A small look at my (lack of) belief

Like I’ve said before on this blog, my parents raised me Catholic, but I’m not really into it, or God in general for that matter. This often causes crisis in my life because people have attempted to convert me – save me, as some call it – or at the very least insult my lack of belief in a higher being.

A friend once told me, “I can’t understand how you look at the world, see all of these things like animals and us and all of this, and still don’t think something made it happen. That something made it this way for us.” Okay, he said it much less eloquently and with many “ums” and “ahs” thrown in, but the gist of it was that I, by way of agnosticism, downplayed the miracle of life.

Hmm… Whatever. That was the Christian take, as for the other side…

Sophomore year of college a guy loaned me a book called Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith, a kind of 1980s version of Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins. He gave me this book as a way to –and this makes me laugh – convert me to atheism. He’d been at my apartment ranting about how belief in God was stupid and immature, and only for those with weak intellect. He eventually turned to everyone in the room and asked for their beliefs. After condemning a few Christians he reached me: the token agnostic.

More so than the Christians, I annoyed him. How could I be in the middle? Either there is or isn’t a God. Done deal. No debate. I’m apparently an idiot. The book changed hands.

In his book Smith argues that since the word atheism consists of “a-” – lack of – and “theism” – belief in God – all agnostics are actually atheists because they “lack belief in God.” I read that and thought to myself, “That’s not what an agnostic is…” And then the rest of the book seemed kind of self-righteous and rude, as if he needed to be a huge dick with a book to legitimize his beliefs. This picture of a guy acting rude because of a book conjured thoughts of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and led me back to my agnostic position.

I know not of God’s existence, nor do I care. That is, until recently.

I’m currently trading off between reading Hitchens’ God is Not Great, and A.J. Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically (The Hot Zone and Hell’s Angels distracted me for a while so I’m behind in both), and the different takes on belief, God, the Bible, and faith each author discusses is enough to get even me filled up with questions again. Plus John and Sean are both taking a class on the Bible with John remaining confused about Jesus and the fig tree despite reading, and re-reading the passages. (Nothing can really get him to understand why Jesus would, of all things, condemn a fig tree. I told him that the Catholic priest in Anaconda used to say it was to show Jesus was a normal man with anger and passion, but the more I think of it, it’s probably just out of context, and or a stupid story…but still…)

With so much God floating around it seemed perfect thatlast night Alisia would say how from time to time she envies those with undying commitment and belief in Heaven, Hell, God, Jesus, and so on. The believers seem pretty happy and fulfilled in a faith-based initiative that “God” is the answer to everything. (What makes a hurricane? God. Why does Plum Creek own most of northern Maine? God.)

Her statement caught me off guard because I know that feeling all too well. Atheists and theists each have this place they can go to where the answer is simple. For the believers, miracles did it. For the non-believers, something logical caused it. But when you’re agnostic things sometimes remain unanswered. For instance, I’ve always believed in the evolutionary theory proposed by Darwin, but it leaves one gaping hole: What caused that first cell to form? It’s the one part science can’t figure out, and believers call God – at least as far as I care to delve into the whole idea anyway.

Being enough to one side of the argument would leave a lot of things less murky, most assuredly. But as I said this I realized, again for maybe the hundredth time, why this feeling of envy subsides, and usually leaves me feeling okay where I stand.

I thought of how everyday I need medication to control my asthma, how I was jaundice at birth and needed ultra-violet light therapy to kick-start my liver. I thought of how I lived for 9-months in a womb without being ejected too early, how the fertilized egg that became me latched on to my Mammy’s uterus, how a single sperm from my Dad made it to that egg, how my parents had to want kids, how they had to meet, how my Mom had to survive a car wreck to get to that moment, how my Dad had to survive being a premature triplet in 1956. I thought of how both lived 25 and 29 years respectively to get to the place where they made me, and I thought of how my Dad needed to divorce his first wife and how my Mom had to decide on being a mom to his 4-year-old son. (Take a breath…I know I need one.) And when I thought of all of this, how odd, and even absurd my existence really is, I thought of how odd it is that 6.6 billion other people do as well. And this made me think of something a friend once told me:

We’re all just fibers in an afghan or a rug. Just these threads that move over and under one another, and are forever moved when they run into each other, and exist only because of how they’re all connected.

Then I thought of how to be on that couch, huddled next to a few candles, Alisia and I both had to move to Missoula, be introduced by our mutual friend Alex, and actually like each other… the odds, again, felt daunting, wholly improbable, but real. I thought of how some people would look at this and say that God meant for it, others would say it was the random outcome of every event leading up to it. But something inside of me felt sated that the “how” didn’t, and doesn’t, matter. At all. It just matters to be there in the moment.

I don’t care why I’m here or why anyone else is. We are, and that’s enough. The “rug” seems to be a very nice picture to think of. And as far as miracles? Well, like I said, we were all somehow born, and given that the fertilization of an egg is nearly impossible; I think it’s pretty amazing. Maybe not in the same league as sea-partings, but amazing anyway.

And with those feelings I felt confident in ending any kind envy toward the theists and atheists. I don’t give a shit either way. I just know that I woke up today and could breath, and could think. And that’s good.

The only real lingering question I have now is why the hell Jesus would nuke a fig tree? It just seems like a stupid idea, nuking a fig tree just because…

Damnit…