Flying Pink Elephants and the Church of Good Music

So, where I last left my de-conversion story, I explained how learning about other religions made me seriously doubt that Christianity could contain the entire truth. I felt as though religion was culturally constructed and not something that was absolute. At that point in my life, though, I wasn’t ready to give up the idea of God. For a while, I was a universalist. I believed that all religions were just ways of people getting in touch with what was essentially the same deity. This deity went by different names, but I believed that all religions were just human constructs to allow people to have access to the same God.

There are some people who can just stop there. Universalism works fine for them and they are happy believing that all Gods are more or less the same. My problem with universalism was that it is very difficult to put a face on such a transcendent God. Think about it: if all of the gods from an incredibly diverse array of religions are really all just manifestations of the same God, then that God has got to be able to transcend all of the millions (billions?) of religions in the world. This God has also got to be able to transcend pretty much all of human understanding. I didn’t feel like I could grasp that kind of God. How could I pray to such a God? How could I possibly know what such a God was like?

Because knowing this God was so difficult for me, I slowly stopped praying. I went through my days and realized that I could actually get along just fine without God. And this is how I came to be an agnostic. I felt like God was the pink elephant thought experiment I’d done in a philosophy class.

The thought experiment goes like this: Suppose that there is a tiny pink elephant flying in your room. This elephant is invisible. It cannot be detected by the senses in any way. You can’t smell it, see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, or measure it. How do you know that the elephant is there? How can you interact with the elephant? You can’t. You really can’t even know that the elephant is there at all. You can’t prove the elephant’s existence, but conversely, you can’t prove its nonexistence. What do you do? Well, the practical thing to do would be to go about your life as if there were no elephant.

This is sort of the way that I feel about a transcendent God. If God transcends all human understanding, then how exactly can we interact with this God? How would we even know that this God exists? We don’t. We can’t prove this God’s existence, but we can’t prove this God’s nonexistence either. However, it seems to me that the practical thing to do is to go about life as if there were no God.

And yet, sometimes I wonder if it would have been easier for my friends and family if I would have stopped at universalism. I probably would have been more open to going to a Unitarian Universalist church, and I feel like my parents would be a bit happier if I were attending some sort of church. I’m also surrounded by a culture that declares that everyone must believe in something, even if that something isn’t the Christian God. I also feel like it would easier to break the news that I’m not a Christian to my friends. I could have told them that I at least believed in God.

I’m also wondering if I missed out on something by giving up on the Christian God and just God in general. I know that it probably has more to do with the fact that I want to make my parents happy than my actually feeling discontented with life as an agnostic. I feel like a girl who has broken up with her boyfriend and now that she’s not with him anymore, she’s remembering all of the good times and forgetting all of the bad times, which were why she broke up with him in the first place. Inevitably, I know that if I started going back to church, I’d end up just as disgusted with Christianity’s intolerance as I was before. Still, I feel like I ought to believe in something.

I was thinking about this in my car today, and I realized that I do believe in something. I am a firm believer that, no matter how bad I feel, if I listen to a good CD while I’m driving and sing along to it, I will feel better. Perhaps I could make a religion out of this belief. It chief deities will be a trinity of my three favorite singers. Since two of those three singers are women, I guess it will be a matriarchal religion. Under these three singers will be a series of lesser gods and goddesses, who are all of the others artists whose music I enjoy. This religion’s canon will be compiled of all of the songs that these artists have written. It will state that the human condition is one of joy, love, frustration, and sadness, and whatever the situation, there is a song by one of these gods or goddesses that will express exactly what the adherent is feeling.

These facetious thoughts cheered me up, but they also reminded me of something that I once wondered about religions. I once had the thought that the reason that there are so many religions might be because each individual person has their own needs and different religions fulfill different needs. Perhaps this is why Christianity works so well for some people, but Buddhism or Islam is a better fit for other people. Perhaps this is why no religion at all suits some people just fine. Just like not everyone will like the same singers that I do, not everyone is going to like the same religions and worldviews that other people share. This is why I think that it’s ridiculous to take an exclusivist view of religion. (Exclusivism is the view that only one religion has the absolute truth and that all other religions are completely false. Only adherents of the one true religion will be rewarded by God in the afterlife, and everyone else, no matter who they are or how they have lived their lives, will suffer eternal punishment.) Considering all of the different kinds of people that there are in this world, all with their individual needs and hopes and desires, there is no way that just one religion can satisfy every single person in the world.

At the same time, however, nonreligious people can’t expect that no religion will be a good fit for everybody. Some people need religion. Some people don’t. And there has to be a way for these different kinds of people to somehow get along with each other. As I said in my last post, I’d like to be part of the force that helps these people get into dialogue with each other. I’m just not sure how to do it, but any suggestions would be welcome.

“By Our Love”

There is a children’s song that I used to love when I was little. It goes like this, “They will know we are Christians by our love/By our love/Yes, they’ll know we are Christians by our love.” Love, kindness, morality were all things that made me once believe that Christianity was different from other religions. Well, then I actually learned about other religions.

Ironically, religion was one of the things that drove me away from Christianity. Now, I’m not talking about religion in the sense of some of the ridiculousness of organized religion. Even a lot of Christians will admit that the institution that their faith has become is just absurd. No, I’m talking about other religions around the world–Hinduism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Wicca, Islam, Judaism and other religions that have a significant presence in our world today.

In my late teens, I experienced disillusionment with Christianity that reached its height when I was a freshman in college. At the time, I was still a Christian. I was disgusted with the bureaucracy and intolerance of the church, but I still believed that Jesus was good. His Church had just gotten corrupted, that’s all. (Now I wonder, why would an all-powerful God who wants the best for his children let His One and Only Holy Church become corrupted in the first place?) T hen, in college, I took a class on world religions.

It was a basic one hundred level class– almost everyone at the university has to take it to graduate, and I figured that it would be an easy four credits. I didn’t know when I’d signed up for the class that it was going to be one of the most significant experiences of my life thus far.

The professor was excellent. Throughout the course, we speculated on just what her personal beliefs were, but we never could figure them out. That’s how objective and unbiased she was about teaching. She presented each religious tradition in all its flaws and glories and she encouraged us to have the same open-minded attitude about religion. This didn’t mean that we had to blindly accept everything that each religion presented to us. What it did mean is that if she was able to put aside her own prejudices and accept various religious faiths on their own terms in order to understand them, then we ought to be able to do the same. She is probably the reason why I will not say that religion, for all of its faults, needs to be done away with entirely. If other religious people can show half as much respect to other religions as she did, then the world would be a much more peaceful place.

So, I tried to follow her attitude towards studying all of these world religions. I found them all fascinating, especially because I’d never been exposed to them before. In my Christian elementary and middle schools, we had only been taught about other religions so that we could see how wrong they were when compared to Christianity. In high school, in a world cultures class, we had touched on a few major world religions, but we had never studied them in depth. (We did, however, do a lot of study into the Protestant Reformation in high school. This was where I learned that much of Christian history has nothing to do with God or the truth. Instead it has to do with pleasing whatever political leaders happen to be in power at the time.) I was enthralled by the other religions.  In fact, some of them even seemed to make more sense that Christianity. Christianity lacked the humility of Taoism and the infinite number of chances you get to get this world right in Hinduism and Buddhism. It seemed to me, more and more, that every religion was merely a product of what its culture needed and believed and was not a divine and exclusive revelation from One God.

At the time, I didn’t really believe in the devil. In my earlier days as a Christian, I had believed in him, but a bout of depression combined with scrupulosity (a form of OCD in which the sufferer believes that s/he has sold her/his soul to the devil. There’s a lot of extreme guilty and obsessive repetition of prayers and other religious rituals. It’s very unpleasant, trust me!) had made led me to the conclusion that the devil was more of a metaphor in Christianity and not an actual entity. However, in opposition to the Christian argument that all other religions are just deceptions of the devil, I ask this: Then how is it possible that people who practice other religions are just as moral, if not more moral, than Christians? The Bible tells us that we will know them by their fruits, and the fruits of other religions can be just as good as those of Christianity. For instance, some Hindu temples offer food and shelter to the elderly in India suffering from poverty. The devil, as I understand him, is supposed to be a completely malevolent spirit, and yet he is providing food and a place to stay to people who would otherwise have nowhere to go. This is contradictory. One of the Five Pillars of Islam is to give to the poor, and yet, according to some Christians, Muslims are following a religion of the devil. This is also contradictory. If the Christian God commands His followers to give to the poor and just about every other world religion encourages this action also, then God and the devil seem to have more in common than one would expect, considering that one is supposed to be all good and the other all bad.

After studying all of these world religions and realizing that practitioners of other religions were no better and no worse people than Christians, I had a harder time accepting Christianity as the only truth. Religion, it seemed to me, was cultural and not eternal.

This realization didn’t cause me to give up on Christianity immediately, but it stuck with me for months after the class was over. It also made me more open to reading books like Karen Armstrong’s A History of God, which did burn the final bridge between Christianity and me. After reading that book, I was fully convinced that individual religions at least were merely human constructs. At that time, I still believed in God, but I was a universalist. I didn’t believe that one religion had the entire and definitive truth about God and the afterlife. It was a huge step for me, but it laid the foundation for how I eventually became an agnostic.