Religion and self-loathing

I've been reading Going Jesus for a while. I know it seems strange for me to be reading such a blatently xian blog, but Sara really interesting and not at all trying to evangalize and convert, so it's kind of interesting to watch someone for whom there actually is a god.

Recently, she responded to a comment by a reader who said that xianity creates self-loathing. She said:

Actually, I think my particular brand of self-loathing has more to do with the twenty-plus years of messed-up secular life I lived before coming to faith. It's not really rooted in the life I have now, it's more old...stuff

[...]

Jesus doesn't cause the self-hate; Jesus is a way out of the self-hate, but the only way out is through. Forgiveness is not just a bitch to give, it's a bitch to accept.

Now I have no doubt that this is Sara's reality, but I find it very interesting that her reality is the complete opposite of mine. I'm going to try to explain this by describing how religion created self-loathing in me, and atheism freed me from it.

Let's start with the fact that I have always wanted to "be good", in the sense in which one tells a child to be good. I've always strived for behaviour that would earn me praise, or at least look impeccable and beyond reproach on paper. The problem is that what religion told me was "being good" was, for me, self-contradictory. I firmly believed that to be good I had to do what parents and religion told me, but I could not do some of these things without blatently not doing others.

It all comes down to the fact that, for me, there is no god. There simply is not. No deity has every made itself known to me. I have had people tell me that there is a god, and I know that some people actually have a god and aren't just saying, but none of these higher powers have ever stepped up and made their presence known to me. If we assume that a god is omnipotent (which I think is the basic qualification for being a god), any god that wants me to believe in it should be able to present itself to me in a way that would be convincing to me; none of the many attempts in my lifetime to convince me of the presence of a god have been effective, or have even been enough to think twice.

So when I was as small child, I was told that there was a god. I could accept this, because what grownups tell you is the truth. Say please and thank-you, don't run with scissors, and there is a god. That's fine. However, religion required more than me saying "Yes, there is a god." Religion required me to actually have faith in this god. Where belief can be more passive, faith has to be more active. That's where I started running into trouble. When I started reaching out to god in the stronger way that having faith requires, there was nothing there. I could take the existence of a god as an abstract fact, like there's one proton and one electron in a hydrogen molecule, but I could not have faith, pour love and prayer and spirituality, into this void. It wasn't even a void like a black hole - it was like when you scroll off the edge of a Sims neighbourhood and there's just grey. It wasn't even cold and bleak - there was quite simply nothing there.

Now remember, I wanted to be good. A good girl says her prayers. But I had noticed that saying my prayers didn't work. It's like talking into a telephone that isn't connected to anything. So I felt hypocritical about saying my prayers - I didn't know the word hypocritical yet, but I felt like I was putting on a show so people would tell me I was being good, and I felt in my gut that that was being bad. But if I didn't say my prayers, I would also be being bad.

A good girl says grace. If I didn't say grace, I would be defying my parents and my catechism and being bad. But the fact of the matter was that I wasn't thankful to god for my food. I wasn't thankful to god because god hadn't even come up and said to me "Hi, I'll be your god this lifetime," and, to be perfectly blunt, sometimes I wasn't even thankful for the food. I knew that I was supposed to be thankful, but I wasn't, and saying I was thankful wouldn't make me thankful. So saying grace would be lying, which is bad and wrong. But not saying grace would be defying my parents and religious teachings, which was also bad and wrong.

In Catholicism, you have to go to confession before receiving communion. So I went to confession like I was told because I wanted to be a good girl. However, I couldn't think of anything to confess. The only sin I could even think of having committed was having said grace when I didn't believe what I was saying. But that couldn't possibly have been a sin, because my parents and my religious teachers told me to do it. So I made stuff up. The priest gave me a couple of Hail Marys and Our Fathers. I left feeling dirty and never went to confession again.

However, I still continued to go to church every week because that's what you do to be good. I also continued to take communion because that's what you do to be good. But I knew I wasn't doing it properly so I was inherently being bad, but if I refused to go to church or communion I would also be being bad. It then occurred to me that throughout the mass I was lying. I didn't believe any of the refrains, I did not believe in one god the powerful almighty the creator of heaven and earth of all that is seen and unseen, and I didn't even wish peace upon the random strangers whom I had to shake hands with. Now, as an atheist, I would be able to honestly wish peace upon them, but at that point I simply did not, for whatever reason, care if they had peace or not.

This process of realizing that there is not a god for me began around the age of six, when I started studying catechism. I didn't have the EQ to process what I was feeling or the vocabulary to describe it. All I felt was these constant conflicting messages about how to be good - by obeying my parents and religious leaders, or by being true to myself and not lying? No matter what I did, I could not be good - and I HATED myself for it! I started having recurring dreams of going to hell - I was falling and falling and it was getting hotter and hotter - pretty scary when you're six!

Believing in god would have made things so much simpler, but I am unable to just start believing in something on command. Everyone was telling me god was there, but it simply was not. It's like that episode of Star Trek where Captain Picard is being tortured and told there are five lights when there are really four. To be good you must not lie, you must be true to yourself, and you must fervently and passionately believe that there are five lights, base your life around the fact that there are five lights, and, on various appropriate occasions loudly affirm that there are five lights. I wanted to believe there were five lights so that I could be good. I kept counting them over and over and looking closely with a magnifying glass in case there was one I missed, and trying to convince myself that perhaps that speck of dust could be counted as a light, but no matter how hard I tried there were four. And as long as there were four lights, I could not succeed at being good.

Around the age of 10-12, I decided that I would go through the motions of pretending there was a god, pretending there were five lights. I tried to convince myself that I was being a good obedient child by going through the hypocritical motions, but I still felt guilty about it. I knew that sometimes it was appropriate to put on a show of being respectable for the sake of other people, but I also knew that a deity would be able to see through that. Again, I didn't yet have the words for this, but I knew that pretending to believe was disrespectful to the people who did believe, and I felt guilty every time I tried to obey my parents by making a false show of piety.

Around the age of 14 or 15, I saw the movie Schindler's List. Afterwards, I was moved and horrified and frightened that such great evil can exist in the world. I suddenly felt this great need to pray. Every other time I've ever prayed was because I thought I was supposed to. This time I needed to. I prayed and prayed, but nothing happened. It was still like talking into a disconnected phone. It was still like the grey void outside the Sims neighbourhood. It wasn't like talking to someone who's pretending not to listen. It wasn't like talking to someone who can't hear you. It wasn't like talking to an empty room. It was like trying to talk, but you don't make a sound - jumping up and down and waving only to realize that you're invisible.

This led me to realize that I was an atheist.

I announced that I would no longer be going to church or saying grace at dinner. In our house we had a rule that you can't open your xmas presents until you've gone to church, so I flummoxed the grown-ups by saying that if that was the case, I would simply not take any presents. By all appearances I was being bad, but I felt at peace. I knew I was being honest and true, and coming as close as I possibly could to truly being good. The dreams of going to hell stopped. Now that I was no longer caught up in this pattern of self-loathing, I was able to actually become compassionate. I started putting time and money into helping others because I cared, not because I was obligated to put something on the collection tray. I was able to put all the energy I had been spending on hating myself into actually becoming a better person. I can look myself in the eye and respect myself because I am no longer trying to live a lie of someone else's creation.

I'm sure that people who do have a god benefit greatly from it and are able to use whatever it is they get from it towards improving themselves. I'm sure they greatly appreciate having that fifth light to help illuminate things for them. But over here in my corner of the world, I'm proud to announce that I have four lights, and I can see just fine.