But I know darlin’ that you do

 

The idea, the notion, of God is something that’s been in my life from the day I was born. My parents were, and are, believers, and part of the early 70’s Pentecostal movement that sought to have a deeper, more personal relationship with the creator than what the traditional denominational church offered.

 

But from an early age, I never felt part of it. One of my dimmest, yet most enduring memories is from when I was four or five and I had my first existential experience. “Why wasn’t I born a cow?” I wondered. “Why am I a person?”

 

Questioning was and is part of my makeup. As time went on, and we went to church, were read Bible stories before bed, and prayed that God would intervene in just about every adverse situation, belief became something that wasn’t real for me.

 

The Bible, we were taught, was the infallible word of God, but I remember being told the story of Noah’s Ark and the flood that was supposed to purge the world of evil and thinking it didn’t make any sense. “You’re telling me they got every species of every animal on the planet onto a small wooden boat?” How could something that’s so obviously a myth be considered the word of God?

 

But when you’re a kid, and well into your teenage years, you’re powerless. You go to church because your parents tell you to and, in my case, you get taken out of a public school where you’ve been happy and have great friends and placed into a small, fundamentalist Christian institution where “Christian studies” is a mandated part of the curriculum, and a Bible is one of the textbooks you’re expected to carry.

The result is that I felt that I had to hide who I was. I had to learn how to conform, to be seen to adhere to the expected norms, dogma and ways of thinking and behaving. And that takes a toll. Not being able to be your true self has an impact. It does damage and the reality is I’m still dealing with the fall out all these years later.

 

One of my good friends, a person I met early on in the church years and whose lifelong friendship has been one of the only good things to come out of a fundamentalist upbringing, says I need to get over it and move on. But I can’t. Who I am today is a direct result of those years.

 

Mental illness runs in my family. It’s not something that’s ever discussed, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Developing an illness like schizophrenia has both genetic and epigenetic components – epigenetic being the life circumstances and experiences you have, particularly when you’re young.

 

And I know that all those years of having to hide, of having to not be true to myself, of not feeling like I was ever good enough or lived up to my parents’ expectations, was a contributing factor in the debilitating illness that emerged. Maybe it would have manifest itself anyway, but the fact is I lost nearly 20 years to schizophrenia, and it’s only recently that I’ve been able to rebuild and become a contributing member of society again.

 

It's for these reasons that I am so opposed to belief and organised religion. It does so much damage. It might work for some people, but are they actually being rational about it? How can they reconcile their faith when it’s so obviously based on myth?

 

I think people who believe do so because the idea that this life is all we have is too confronting for them. They want to think that, despite the hardships of existence, they’re going to be rewarded with some sort of never-ending bliss in the afterlife for putting up with life’s bullshit. Bullshit that God, if he is, in fact, an all-powerful entity, has the power to fix but chooses not to. 

 

I’m not hard and fast against the idea of there being a God. But I think that if he exists then he’s not, as Nick Cave sings in his gorgeous love song Into My Arms, an interventionist God. And I also think that God, if he exists, is cruel and emotionally needy by both abandoning us to the horrors of the human condition when he could fix it, and also by requiring that believers pray and worship him, telling him just how great he is. 

 

The obvious question, then, is as a non-believer, how do you find meaning and transcendence, however fleeting that transcendence is? I find meaning and transcendence in music and poetry, art and literature. And I find meaning in the love I have for my kids and my close friends, and the love they have for me. Because to love, and be loved, is really all there is.

 

When we die, we cease to exist. There is no afterlife, no heavenly reward. But we do live on in the hearts and minds of the people we loved and who loved us.

 

And that’s true immortality.