Recently an article was published in several venues that indicated that agnostics and atheists tended to know more about religion than self-described religiously faithful knew. That's an easy one to figure out, folks.
When I first began to doubt what everyone said (and at that point, I knew no one who was an agnostic or atheist), I was trying very hard to fit into the groups at high school. We were never church attenders. My mother said it was because we could not afford the clothing that we'd need to go to church on Sunday morning. My father did not seem very religious. Because my best friends were regular church-goers, but to different churches and different denominations, I wanted to be like them and tried to get my family a little more interested in church. My efforts were met with disdain, though when my little sister Sally began to be a regular church-goer (having been invited and brought to church by someone outside of the family), she did not meet with such hostility. That's when I realized that my mother simply did not want to be bothered with getting up early and herding five kids into dress clothing. It just seemed like an irritation and nuisance to her. If someone else wanted to take on the hassle, that was fine.
At any rate, once I was in high school, I did attend church often with BG (a Pentecostal) and EJ (Methodist), and I did engage in regular discussions of religion with BG, JM (Baptist), and NH (Methodist). (We had study hall together.) I had a Bible, and I tried to read it. And all about me was religion. Everyone believed, even my mother, who would tell us often that we were going to go to hell because of first one thing and then another. BG told me often that I was going to hell because I wore make-up and cut my hair. EJ told me I was going to hell because I didn't like to watch Billy Graham telethons. I certainly never heard much about the so-called "love" of God and forgiveness. It was all about hell and damnation and don't do this and don't do that.
I began to doubt the existence of any deity at all, but I kept my doubts to myself. If today's gay teens think they suffer bullying, and of course they do, they might be surprised to know that I would have likely been drug out some night by KKK members and chained to a cross and set on fire. My community would have been unforgiving. They didn't like it when someone wasn't Protestant (face it, the various Protestant denominations didn't even like or trust each other), and it was completely not accepted for anyone to be a non-believer. Of course, we had heard of such monsters, and there were vague rumors that my "weird" uncle in California might be an atheist, but that was expressed in whispers, with much head-shaking and sadness. He was, after all, doomed to spend an eternity in burning oil, with devils poking at his eyeballs with pitchforks. (I had a much less clear picture of what heaven might be like, little other than streets paved with gold, which never made a lick of sense to me.)
Because everyone else believed, and I was beginning to doubt, I began to study religions as much as I could. I still do. I was not constrained by a strong dogma of my own, so I was free to open other religion's books (forbidden territory to my friends). I was free to watch documentaries and read what I wanted, even if those things questioned what my friends and the community held as Truth. (Civil Rights, for instance, was highly questionable in my area. Women's rights were questionable. The only thing we were not to question was the Bible, unless it was someone else's interpretation of it. In that case, we not only questioned it, we dismissed it and damned it.)
So somehow, in that bastion of intolerance, I developed a sense of tolerance. I wanted others to be tolerant of my doubts, yet I knew they would not be tolerant. Thus, I was determined to be tolerant of others' beliefs. When I spent the summer of 1969 in California with my agnostic/atheist uncle (I don't know which label he used, if any), he openly questioned the existence of any god. I openly argued back, even as I knew that I was arguing more with myself than with him. His opinions and logic made sense. And I was finally beginning to realize that I was not going to go to hell for being a disbeliever. I could not go to a hell that did not exist, just as I could not go to a heaven that did not exist. All I could do was to choose to live a life according to principles I valued: ethics, integrity, kindness, open-mindedness, tolerance, forgiveness. I did continue to impose my own sometimes narrow-minded and misguided morality on others, arguing, for example, that my boyfriend and I (once I was in college) should not double-date with his married friend and the friend's mistress. I would still take the same stand today, perhaps, for other reasons, but by the time my boyfriend and I married, I allowed my honeymoon suite to be paid for (as a wedding gift) by the married boyfriend of my Maid of Honor.
I'm using the same words over and over, perhaps irritatingly so. I find myself constrained when it comes to language to use about this topic. That's the reason I always pay attention to the language of religion. And that's how I've gotten myself into this latest pickle with a relative. She had posted on Facebook that everytime she needed condeming [her own misspelling], Jesus would condem her because he was a merciful and forgiving God. I posted back that I didn't understand why she used that word and asked if she meant "convicted." She grew angry and un-friended me, and probably is now going around telling everyone what a bitch I am. Maybe so. But I am a bitch with a mind of my own and I don't wait for some supernatural voodoo to take control of my life and set it right. Sorry, world. My "religion" is open-mindedness. My "faith" is tolerance. My ideology is education. I've decided that other people's dogma is no longer allowed to hump my leg.
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