On Losing Faith and Finding More after the Dust Settles

(Disclaimer: This is a long one.)

My relationship to religion, like many Americans who grew up a certain denomination of Christian, has always been a complex one. For some context, my mother was at one point a practicing copyright lawyer and extremely well read, and she encouraged an attitude of learning in me in a very young age. I devoured books (the Harry Potter/Percy Jackson series was the first in a long list of YA literature I would conquer), as well as magazines like the National Geographic, when I could find a copy. Regardless of her education (and mine), she still insisted on taking the family to church. 

For me these services were long, anxiety-inducing, and aggravated a question in my head after a few years. I got the idea when I was around 11 to ask my mother "Why do we go to church?" which she seemed almost delighted to answer with another question "Why do you think?". She had fed my curiosity and my skepticism; I asked her questions like "How could God create the universe?", which I understood was created by the Big Bang, and I never got any kind of satisfying answer to the question. I remember a kind (but parental) dismissal of my questions, maybe a defensive mechanism on her part to terminate the discussion. I could never reconcile the idea of a just and loving deity in a world with so much suffering. At this point I no longer believed in God, and so me and Mom fought on me going to church for the rest of the time that my family lived in Arizona and my parents were still together. In my present, church service has become the thing in much of organized religion that I have the most revulsion to. It has been many years since I realized I was an atheist, and very recently realized that I am persuaded by the arguments of gnostic atheism. 

The thing that has motivated my recent re-examination of this topic has been discovering my discomfort with death. I want you to undertake a little exercise with me. Try to imagine a truly empty death. Try to imagine not just the complete absence of sensation, but nothing to sense with. Death will not be like sleep. Sleep is warm and filled with dreams. Sleep is breathing. Sleep is being alive. Death has no dreams. It is not warm, nor cold, for that matter. It will be nothing. Existence will cease. If you notice a kind of discomfort with that thought, that's good; you have strong self-preservation instincts. The brain (or ego, or self, or what have you) would rather not consider the possibility of non-existence. It is an almost primordial fear. In that context, religion makes sense as an evolutionary defense or even as a human tool. What do you do in the face of overwhelming danger? The fight or flight response activates. You either run, or you pick up a rock or a sharp stick and you fight back. What do you do against an invisible, unstoppable force? You make tools, you build a ritual that will hold it back. 

Many people who get away from their own religions (including me) face an unconscious fear of death, and try to ground their own understanding of spirituality. We come to something else. If you're Christian, you might go to the Muslims, the Jews, the Hindus, the Buddhists, or even the Wicca. Then, if you're still dissatisfied, if you still can't believe even in the most benign of spiritual structures, you settle for a vague *sense of spirituality*. If this still can't settle you, then you get to the final step. We're at acceptance. Death will not be righteous; beautiful; a next step; a return; a rebirth or a judgement. I think, if it cannot be these things, we can at least try to make it peaceful.

All my love,

-Rockport