Areligious

I confess that I am areligious, and I take umbrage at the fake-definitions given by failing dictionaries that carelessly cast aspersions on my belief system. The devious Miriam-Webster defines areligious as “noncommittal or professedly neutral concerning religious matters;” while the not-to-be-trusted Urban Dictionary gives this completely misleading version: “Having an aversion for or a lack of interest in all religions and religious beliefs.” Not content with that slander, they go on to say: “ An areligious person is one who has become frustrated listening to proponents of one religion or another and finds the labels athiest(sic) and agnostic inadequate.” I must confess that I don’t know who the athiest people are nor what makes them the most athi. That the Urban Dictionary doesn’t have a spell-check program is proof that it is failing.

Unlike M-W or the UD I define “areligious” by using the prefix “a” as the ancient Greeks intended. That is, “a” equals “without.” Many more learned than I have wrestled with and written whole volumes on the meaning of atheist and theist, agnostic and gnostic, but being areligious, I find those labels not so much inadequate as boringly incomprehensible, and my eyes glaze over when I attempt to read those volumes. Interestingly, those failing, fake-definition dictionaries are able to get it right in the case of “amoral,” which they define as without morals. In the interest of getting it right, I would like to point out to who would call me amoral because they find me wanting in respect for religion: “immoral” is the adjective you want.

I confess that I am without religion, and I object to those fake-definitions because I am interested in and have studied many religions with at least as much attention and fascination as I skimmed some sketchy notes on the transhumance patterns of the Nuer in an ethnography course long ago. Nor do I profess neutrality in religious matters. Speaking of the ancient Greeks makes me think of the Olympics, and, well, let’s say I think of myself as an Olympic scorer of religions. I give positive points to some parts of all religions and score some religions higher than others. I deduct points for some parts of all religions but only disqualify cults, especially cults on steroids. I do not get frustrated listening to proponents of religion, only debating with zealots (more on that later). To those who would admonish me with the cliché, “Judge not, lest you be judged,” I would say, “read the whole quote: ‘Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you.’” And I would add, “Fair enough. You can use my standards to judge me.” To those who would accuse me of hubris, I would humbly agree.

I was not always without religion. Before I was born, my family engaged in a months-long resurgence of the 30-Years War over the form of Christianity my siblings and I would be immersed in. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my father’s family was Catholic, and my mother’s Protestant. My father’s family won the first battle and my mother, in order to be married by a Catholic priest, signed a kind of rider to the Treaty of Westphalia, pledging that all her children would be raised Catholic. I don’t believe my mother was punished for breaking the treaty, not on this plane, and neither do I believe some Catholic god’s enforcers on a higher plane have broken her angelic thumbs. I don’t know why my father agreed to that treaty. He represented the more exuberant anti-Catholic wing of their relationship because, he claimed, the Sisters Without Mercy beat him in school. Like our recent ex-President, my father placed such a high value on truth that he rarely used it, but such a low value on fiction that he was quite generous in spreading it around. Without more information on my father’s abuse claim my sympathies are with the Sisters. My brother, sister, and I were raised as good little Protestants.

I can only suppose that my anti-Catholic father agreed to the wedding arrangements to please his fiercely Catholic mother, my devout grandmother, who became a divorcee. Well, her husband left her, divorced her, and remarried. My grandmother also remarried, but to a Greek Orthodox man. The Orthodox Church had no prohibitions against divorcees remarrying. I remember going to the Orthodox Church for my step-grandfather’s funeral. I was six or so and impressed by all the stained-glass windows and the unintelligible language of the priest.

I, of course, have no memory of my first five years of religious life. When I was in first grade we moved to a new neighborhood in North St. Louis and my brother and I went to a Lutheran school for the best of reasons: the public school was going to hold my brother back because our move was badly timed. All I remember of that school, apart from having a crush on my teacher, was marching in the snow across the schoolyard to the Lutheran church. I remember nothing about what went on inside the church, only that it was dark. Outside, to show my affection, I hit my teacher with a snowball.

A year later we moved to our all-white South Side Dutch neighborhood, switched allegiance, and went to my maternal aunt’s whitebread Protestant church, just a few blocks from our house. I went to Sunday School in the church basement on Sunday mornings and when there was an evening service on Christmas Eve got promoted to the upstairs part of the church, one floor closer to heaven, I suppose. In keeping with the whitebread mode Christmas Eve service was at 8:00. No midnight mass for us.

Despite the early hour, I always had a difficult time keeping my eyes open during the evening service. The audience, well, congregation, sat in the dark facing the pastor who stood on a stage illuminated by tall candles. Staring at the little golden flames in the dark make my eyes water, and I literally and metaphorically cursed the lit candle rather than the dark.

I only remember my last Sunday School teacher, an inoffensive man with remarkably offensive breath, like that of a fire-breathing dragon that cannot achieve ignition of its fetid fuel. Four or five of us pre- and early-post-teens sat around a table in the church basement. I tried to sit far from the foul-breathed teacher, more a mouse than a dragon. All I remember was that we were supposed to learn the names of the Books of the Bible in order. I can still name three but don’t believe I ever progressed much beyond that. I felt bad for my failure but even worse for the poor Sunday School teacher who seemed to take it as his failure. He tried to prompt me, his miasmic breath flowing across the table and assailing my sense of smell as he enunciated Kings and Chronicles and Psalms (not the three I remember in order). Now that I cast my mind back, I vaguely recall memorizing a few Psalms. Possibly all our time was taken up with memorizing. Even more possibly, our teacher must have expended some bad breath on explanations of some religious conundrums, like cramming two of every animal on some homemade boat, but I don’t remember them. I do remember chafing in church because during good weather I longed to be outside playing with the unoppressed neighborhood kids who didn’t have to go to church, and during bad weather I longed to stay in bed.

My mother and father made us give thanks out loud before dinner, but not before breakfast or lunch, thank heaven. I memorized the Lord’s Prayer and religiously and for years silently recited it as I lay in bed before falling asleep at night, a habit that lasted until I went away to college. As far as I saw, no one gave thanks in the college cafeteria for the vegetables cooked until they were less lumpy than the mashed potatoes or the liver and onions fried to a leathery toughness. Not theology students, my friends and I spent a surprising amount of time discussing religion. We eagerly adopted the personas of the educated elite and bravely professed to be above faith-based dogma, but I suspect that a few prayed in quiet moments when only god was watching.

In my short military career I must have spotted various camouflaged chaplains going about their business, but only remember the priest who mumbled an explanation of Just War and why what we were doing in Vietnam was right and necessary. I know some GIs went to some kind of services when possible, outdoors or in holey (due to shrapnel) tents, but most of us were sleep deprived and preferred to prolong those luxurious moments of Just Peace wrapped in our silky poncho liners on our firm cots when possible. Years later, a friend asked me if the old saw about the lack of atheists in foxholes was true. I explained that I never saw a foxhole but often took shelter in sandbag bunkers or behind other handy objects, and in those clamorous moments my thoughts were wonderfully concentrated on the physical world and I never got around to polling anyone nearby on the atheist question. My friend patiently explained that she was asking about my opinion on god. I suppose I gave her a sermon on my firm belief: I do not bother my pretty head about the existence or non-existence of god, which, if there were one (or more) and if she were a just god who didn’t play favorites, she couldn’t possibly care what I, one of her more insignificant creatures, thought. (In my more Buddhist-leaning moments I use the pronoun “it” instead of “she.”)

In El Salvador, a friend of mine and I enjoyed many cool nights sipping rum on top of a middle-post-classic earth-covered temple while we watched the distant but approaching storms blindly grope their way through the darkness with bright white canes of lightning. Watching that magical display from the top of an ancient religious structure, it seemed only fitting that we form our own religion. The rum helped. Well, it also hindered our creative abilities, and we opted for joining man’s oldest known religion. We formed a subsidiary of the Cave Bear Cult. My friend and I were, naturally, the High Priests, but, proselytize as we would, we were unable recruit anyone into the fold. Like all High Priests, we did not blame ourselves for that failure. We blamed the lamentable lack of caves and bears. 

Proof that the Great Cave Bear rewarded our faith was the undeniable fact that not once were we struck by lightning, while that same year an archaeologist who was not a member of the Cave Bear Cult was struck and killed by lighting on top of El Castillo, the big temple in Chichén Itzá.

I deny having an “aversion to” or “lack of interest” in religion. Because of my studies, I had to learn enough about a variety of religions to pass tests. For the past 35 years or so I have worked with religious people in the refugee racket. My boss and colleague, as well as friend, is a Catholic Nun. As I mentioned in an earlier post she prefers to be called a Religious, making a difficult noun out of what god meant to be an adjective. I confess that I don’t know how to make that noun plural. She and others in the office claimed that they let me work there out of pity. Or because they didn’t know how to get rid of me. Being areligious, it’s all the same to me. At some point in our little office in the basement of a building owned by a somewhat liberal Methodist Church we adopted grandiose titles to look more professional and business-like, and to impress the ignorant. She has become the CEO. I wanted my business cards to say “High Priest” but the CEO gave me the choice of Flunky or Lackey. As the former reminded me of too many of my disappointing grades, I opted for the latter. As the staff increased in size it has diminished in religiosity, composed of only the slightly religious, usually Catholic and lapsed Catholics, some on-again-off-again Protestants, one Jew, one Buddhist, a smattering of atheists, for several years we had a Muslim as the Assistant CEO, and me, the areligious Lackey. We represent clients from all walks of life and religions, which has greatly expanded my understanding of the functioning of religions.

Having interviewed thousands of refugees, my thoughts on religion have evolved. I now appreciate religion’s utility and function. I believe that for much of humankind religion is a necessity. And I appreciate Marx’s usually misquoted statement: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” I have heard the sigh of the oppressed and listened to the heartbeat of those fleeing heartless worlds.

I see that religion fulfills a need, gives a sense of community to displaced people. Loneliness is a debilitating, even crippling problem for many refugees, as is nostalgia for the homeland, even the homeland that refused to nurture and in fact persecuted those homesick people. Many profoundly traumatized Mayan men who suffered atrociously during the genocide in their native Guatemala, are enthusiastic fans of the Guatemalan national soccer team, even though no Maya are on the team and, if there were, they would no doubt suffer the same racial persecution Jackie Robinson suffered. Or worse.

In filling the refugees’/immigrants’ need for community, the Evangelical churches seem readiest and most willing. They have regularly scheduled Sunday services plus Assembly at least three evenings a week, generously giving strangers in our strange land the opportunity to pass lonely hours in a community, singing, often badly—especially if compared to Black gospel singers—hymns in their native language (or second language for the Maya).

I give some religions a few extra points on my scorecard. Tibetan monks whose hair is uniformly black or whose scalp is shaved are the fair-haired Religious (plural noun) in the SF Bay Area. I have interviewed a number of them, including one with the name of Rinpoche. I was rescued from my ignorance by a knowledgeable friend who told me that Rinpoches were the heads of monasteries and the word means “precious one” in a religious, reincarnate sense. The Rinpoche and minor monks I met were all sympathetic and likeable and I felt privileged to work with them. The Rinpoche got a job in the kitchen at a Ghanaian restaurant. I thought that was quite a come-down for him, but when I visited him at the restaurant he cheerfully informed me that he loved the food because it was so different from the fare in his monastery. It actually had flavor. It contained spices. I was happy for him, but his delight and the delight of others in their sensual indulgence of American food (i.e., Ghanaian, Mexican, Indian, etc.), did not rehabilitate my negative impression of Tibetan Buddhism. Several had described their intense loneliness when taken from their families as children and sent to remote retreats where they were raised in austere, not to say cold, conditions in unheated mountain monasteries. A cruel system, I thought. And the icing on that cake was: no spices or sugar in their food, but plenty of Yak butter tea. Yummy. And always anti-authoritarian, I didn’t approve of the Dalai Lama, whom I considered a medieval Papal figure ruling over the oppressed, poverty-stricken people of Tibet, albeit from exile.

I got to meet HH as his staff and many monks irreverently call him instead of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. He was giving awards to a number of deserving people and through a bureaucratic error included me. The event was to take place at an exclusive hotel on Nob Hill, which no doubt made a good impression on the rich funders who were invited, but a bad impression on me. Before I accepted the invitation I whined to a friend whose opinion I value one evening over cognac and chocolate. He opined that he approved of the Dalai Lama because he was a force for good in the world. As my friend was in the anti-torture racket, worked with victims of trauma, and had delved more deeply into the sigh of the oppressed than I, I threw his opinion onto the scale and accepted the invitation, with reservations.

Over coffee and pastries in the courtyard of the ritzy, hilltop hotel, HH’s handlers informed all of us supplicants that we were not to try to shake hands with him. He was elderly, and they were afraid that one of us might pass on some communicable disease (this was pre-COVID-19). They told us to simply accept our award certificates, nod, and move on. Seemed reasonable. Well, as I waited my turn, I saw that wasn’t happening. HH was the aggressor. With both hands, he grabbed everyone by the hands and even embraced one person, an African woman with AIDS who devoted her life to assisting people with AIDs. I was moved by that significant embrace. When it was my turn, HH grabbed my hands in his, bowed slightly, and said something I didn’t catch, while I bowed slightly and mumbled something I’m certain he didn’t catch. Despite the mumbling, it was all very moving. I was impressed by his bravery and warmth, and I gave HH a 9 on my scorecard. Leaving the exclusive hotel, I had to run a gauntlet of Chinese protesters passing out pamphlets denouncing HH as the False Dalai Lama. I changed my score to a 10.

I regret that I didn’t have a chance to ask HH what he thought about sex and sexual orientation. Or gender. As far as I can see, all major religions struggle with these issues or simply handle them dogmatically and miserably, denying the miracle of human sexuality and human variation and earning a negative score on my card.

And I thank god that I am areligious.

Well, I as a High Priest, but never a zealot, I am aware that the Great Cave Bear’s teachings on the sex and gender issues were lost during humanity’s toddler days, but I can say with confidence, extrapolating from hunter-gather societies, that She considered the oppression of women a sin.

In my unbiased opinion, a number of religions merit negative scores for certain events. Some merited negative scores in the past but are making decent cases for do-overs. I am always in favor of redemption, as long as there is sincere regret, confession, and restitution, where possible. As an example let’s examine some sinful skeletons in the Catholic Church’s closet. The CC’s skeletons are numerous, egregious, and heinous. Think: the dark ages, the inquisition, the crusades, the 30-Years War, support for Nazis and fascists during WWII. Well, for the Catholic Church all that seems to be in the past and the church no longer considers teaching people to read a sin, or teaching that the earth revolves around the sun (think Galileo) is a sin. They might still think that leaving the church is a sin, that my mother committed a sin when she reneged on the treaty to raise my siblings and me as good little Catholics, but they did not burn her at the stake. Some in the Catholic hierarchy surely still support Nazis and fascists, but that is not official church policy. And, hell’s bells, our most recent ex-President supports the N’s and f’s (as he and his followers comprise a cult they are disqualified and do not get take-overs).

All the major religions have an abundant supply of old bones buried by their dogmas, and all, except Buddhism, seemed, at some point, hell-bent on wars of conquest (the Myanmar Buddhists are an exception to the exception). All the major religions adhered to the orthodox means of increasing their holdings in the physical world as well as in the realm of souls: through conquest, violent or peaceful. The New Testament lays it out plainly and says that Christians are soldiers of Christ, and the 19^th century hymn adds, “Onward Christian soldiers, Marching as to war.” I would be inclined to give Christianity a higher score if more of its followers followed the teachings of Christ.

As far as conquest and (capital) punishment for deserters go, the major religions have made some advances on the path to redemption, as they mature. All have yet far to go.  Bear in mind that one major religion is half a millennium younger than its next oldest sibling.

Redeemed or on the road to redemption, all religions get black eyes and bad names from the zealots and hypocrites in their ranks, be they Catholic, Evangelical Protestant, Muslim, or Buddhist.  All lose points when they support immoral (not amoral) politicians like our most recent ex-Pres and his cultish cohorts. To those who critize our present Pres of straying from the true path, after supporting he-who-shall-not-be-named for four years, I would suggest that you build stout barriers in front of the glass portions of your houses.

Despite my appreciation for religion, I confess that I am afraid of religious zealots. My great fear is not of being in an airplane hijacked by religious fanatics armed with box cutters (not an entirely unreasonable fear), but of being snowbound with a religious zealot for a weekend (an irrational fear). Or even an evening. What could we possibly talk about? I am not a scaredy cat. I have survived many terrifying and traumatic situations, usually by cowering in sandbag bunkers or behind other objects. I have even shared a ski cabin with my friend and colleague, the Religious, for a long weekend, several times, along with refugees who had never seen snow. The Religious was more fearful than I and spent the leisure hours in the cabin trying to put a brave face on her fear of having go out again into the snow and stand for hours on the summit of a bunny hill (well, more of a gopher mound), gathering up the courage to plunge recklessly down that life-threatening slope.

Since I rely on the Ancient Greeks for my definition of areligious, it seems only fitting that I rely on them as examples for my theory on the creation of religions—which theory no doubt will offend as greatly as the Monkey Man’s “The Descent of Man.” The A.G.’s, as clearly as I’m sitting at my computer offending, created their gods in their own image, in the image of a human family. What are the Greek gods and immortals but a large extended family governed by benevolent and cruel, just and corrupt, petty and magnanimous, wise rulers often ruled by their hormones? Some lesser gods are outcasts, some were born out of wedlock or raised by a single parent. Some are rebellious, some obedient. And what is Zeus, the head of that extended family, but a typical human patriarch, a father, a general, a politician, a king? Being only human, the Ancient Greeks made their gods (their images of themselves) as they would like to have been, powerful, handsome or beautiful, and placed them on high, on Mount Olympus, just as Hollywood gives immortality to the most attractive stars whom they place up on the silver screen for us lowly mortals to worship. What is the purchase of People Magazine but an offering to those gods? Hollywood also gives its stars great powers, such as the ability to change shape. What is Zeus but a Chi–man when he changes into a swan or a bull, like Mystique or Morph? (I confess my ignorance about the X-Men. I had to google the shape changers and then wasted too much time searching for what they changed into. I would like to have come up with some brilliant examples, for a few Greek gods, but it’s been a long time since I read Edith Hamilton.)

The Ancient Greeks get points for creativity but lose points for believing their own works of fiction.

If anyone cares to extrapolate this man-creating-gods-in-his-own-image instead of vice versa into other religions, be my guest. I will not accompany you on that pilgrimage because I do not wish to be the target of an inquisition or fatwa.

As I whined earlier, I had to study, well, read, well, skim, learned and not so learned tomes about a great many religions. I confess that at first reading I was contemptuous about many native American religions and their origin myths. They were too simplistic and illogical. Childish, I thought. But I was being childish. On more mature reflection and taking into account the human condition, I have been converted to the belief that the Native Americans got one important thing right, perhaps the most important thing. They have the concept of the Trickster, the god or spirit or supernatural being who breaks conventional norms to play tricks on unwitting humans that make us look foolish. No religion should be without a Trickster. How else account for our absurdity?