My anecdote

I’m just here to tell my story. Not really sticking around, can’t really give a care, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have feelings about my experiences with this church. I heard about the site from the radio program which I assume you are well aware of. I’m not mormon, and neither is my family.

However, my grandmother, formerly baptist, married an LDS man after her prior two husbands died, and converted. This man has been dead for about 9 years, but his family still cares for my black widow grandmother 😆 and they accept her, mostly, as their own. It is very loving and she is lucky to have them to care for her at the end of her life. And for her part, she has basically adopted her husband’s children and grandchildren as her own.

My “family,” if you want to call it that, is not baptist. I am the child of two athiests. No siblings. In late years my mother has been on a “spiritual” tack (Agápé, Religious Science, positive thinking stuff like that), but while I was growing up god and church was just this weird obsession of others. My father, who divorced my mother when I was small and married a different woman, is non religious. Can’t blame him…

…because I never could grasp religion. The fraternity, the morals, the honour, the cameraderie, that all makes sense. Where I get lost is god and Jesus and scriptures and let’s not even get into golden plates and the bureaucracy of this church. There is that episode of King of the Hill (I loved that show…) where the hillbilly tells the main character after fruitlessly searching for a new church, “you need to get in touch with god, not church.” This adequately describes my feelings about the religious aspect of church. If I am to be judged by some omnescient being for my adherence to a religion’s regulations, just send me to hell, post haste, get that over with. So no, I don’t literally believe in heaven and hell, though my belief in the bacteria in the soil of mother Earth is neigh unshakeable.

Well, I don’t have what you would call a life. No meaningful friends. No girlfriend. Never had one. I’m 29. At this point people look at me and assume I get some inner pleasure from being alone and childless. Well, I don’t. It tortures me, because I never saw my life this way. It happened, and I am the mechanism by which it happened, that and almightly god, who made me what I am, and I am fairly certain my fate is to be 85 and pretty similar and then one day I’ll die and if there is a funeral it may be attended by people who didn’t know me in life well enough to even call me or describe me substantively to a third party. Sound…dramatic? Fatalistic? Well, I’m not getting any younger, and jack [****] is happening in my life. Anyway, the religion story.

I told my grandmother about my problems and at some point lived with her for a year before she kicked me out, god save her frigid heart, and she suggested to me a few times that I try the church. Now I have no problem with this intellectually. Sure, I’ll try that. I’m not bigoted against religion – I just find it about as hard to believe as that the Earth is flat, some guy in the bible lived 900 years, there are 72 virgins waiting somewhere, et cetera. I spoke to missionaries a few times, and they were nice people, whom I would have been honoured to be friends with, but the gate between them and I, the price, was being “converted.” Not that I care about that – sure, I’ll join. But the bible. It…I don’t believe it just because it says so. I question. I analyse. I make choices. It’s my life, not god’s, and if god wrote the bible he has to work on his composition and resolve the various vague passages and contradictions that plague it.

So for people today, with brains, the bible and religion isn’t about…understanding or “believing” things, but having faith that it is so, somehow it is so, that’s the way it is, it doesn’t all have to make sense and some things are beyond the understanding of mere mortals no matter what that priest tries to explain. Or maybe what truly intelligent people do is not worry about the pledges and the details and just revel in a family that acts as if they are being judged by a loving, moral creator.

At another time I was living with my father and his family. I was unhappy and he didn’t seem to know then, any better than he does now, how to help me “get a life.” His reaction was to take us to a church. Just him and I, his family was not involved and that’s what he wanted. He made it really awkward for me. The church was one of those evangelical protestant ones, and they sang about Jesus on and on, sometimes in catchy songs, mostly modern. To him, church was a social device to get me to be involved somehow in the community. I sort of felt I should sing with the songs, not everyone did, but why not? My dad sat there and daydreamed about finance, and I felt embarassed. My life is an embarassment, literally. I would like to just turn embarassment off, but there it be. In the end, I moved away from him and got other help from other family. I’m not saying the church was a bad idea, but it wasn’t…I was so self conscious. I’m afraid there was no point to the whole thing in the end, as I had feared at the time, although my mother would scold me and declare that I had made it that way by my very belief.

There is that South Park episode. I’m not talking about the musical; never saw it, I’m sure it’s great but that’s not the subject here. Surely you are familliar with this episode, however severe a sin watching South Park must be. Certainly my grandmother isn’t aware of the show, and wouldn’t begin to consider its moral messages, being offended by the vulgarities, but then again my grandmother lives under a rock and isn’t particularly conversant about many things that happened after 1980. That’s pretty much how I feel about the church. Its appeal to me comes not from god’s mysterious judgment or lack thereof, but of the church’s works on Earth. I don’t agree with all of them; in fact, I feel in some ways the church is a…corrupting thing that has consequences its members are not prepared to be honest with themselves about and face. Nevertheless, consider the good. I have, and I envy (ooh, sinful) what church members have. They have much.

I just wasn’t prepared to lie to myself and others and profess belief where there was none. Sure, some have. Some do. I have integrity, which is something rare, to myself and others. I rely not on any fear of judgment, not on any fear of ostracization, it is just what I am. I am, above all, honest. I believe not in the bible. I am an agnostic. I feel there may be what we could call god, but who knows? It probably isn’t what we think it is. What is the universe? We will never know, and to consider the matter is a complete waste of time because we will be long dead before any answers, if even possible, were to be revealed.

I imagine the universe as this microcosm in a droplet of liquid existing in a much larger area, like a colony of protozoa breeding in a crevice somewhere in a great, dark cave. Of course, it would have to be a very large cave to contain the universe in small crevice – the universe growing perhaps by virtue of the spread of the liquid and the addition to it from the cave. There also would be the matter of time, which is great no matter what place our universe exists in. This is my imagination on this subject. And god…what is it? Why are physics? There are no answers, certainly in no bible.

Anyway…not sure if I just offended everyone on this website, but one of the valuable life lessons is not to stress over what others think. I will always feel an admiration for how the church helps people and of course what happened with my grandmother. At the same time, it is alien to me. The whole thing – I watch people from behind a glass window and wonder how it would be like to live their lives. Glass menagerie. Thanks for reading and have a great day. :wave: