I'll start with a letter I wrote to Stars and Stripes, that was printed in the July 11th edition and which I am sure I'll be hearing about sooner or later.
Incidentally, my choice for letter title was "Religious (in)Tolerance", I suppose they went with the title they wrote to increase inflammatory value.
I have grown tired of fundamentalist Christians who assume that theirs is the only religion in the United States. I've heard more and more complaints from them recently, between the confusing U.S. Supreme Court decision on the "Ten Commandments in court" issue and the Air Force Academy religion scandal. It seems like the evangelicals consider it freedom of religion to tell you that your religion, being different from theirs, is wrong, but it's oppressive and an attack on them when you try to tell them to please go away.
Non-Christians get Christianity thrown in their faces enough in this country as it is. Christians don't realize what it's like, but it's annoying when seemingly every event is opened by a leader of a faith you aren't part of offering a prayer to a God you don't believe in. I have to tolerate mandatory formations being opened with an invocation by the chaplain. I don't have any say in whether I have to be there for it; I have to stand around in formation while the Christians have their heads bowed. We get daily Christian devotional e-mails from my chaplain sent basewide, but you'll never see a basewide e-mail present devotionals or uplifting thoughts from other religions.
With the Air Force Academy scandal, Republican members of Congress seem to be complaining plaintively that academy students are being oppressed because they can't tell Jews that Jews will burn in hell. This, they claim, is a sign of intolerance toward Christianity. What? No, it's the other way around: Students and chaplains telling non-Christians they'll burn is religious intolerance from Christians, not toward them.
The evangelical Christians and their recent gains in the field of political power really scare me. It scares me that recent events have shown that there are religious fanatics in the academy, because those are my future lieutenants and captains. I fear for my own religious freedom when I hear about what happened at the academy, because that's the future leadership of our military. Will I have some supervisor down the road looking at me mistrustfully because I have "Pagan" on my dog tags, and treat me differently because of it? Will he be backed up by his boss, and his boss' boss, all the way up the chain of command to the president and members of Congress?
People say it won't ever happen because of the Constitution, but as anyone familiar with the Uniform Code of Military Justice can tell you, when you enter the military you have a different set of rights then a civilian.
I also wrote a letter to the editor of Stars and Stripes last year on the topic of religion and separation of church and state, for which I actually received, in the mail, a thank-you card from a U.S. veteran currently living in Canada.
Politics aside, respect the ACLU
I was raised by fundamentalist Christians. My dad is not too bad, but my mom is everything that's bad about Reconstructionists. I was taught all manner of crap when I was growing up. I was homeschooled to ensure that I was not exposed to sex ed, evolutionary theory, or religious pluralism. I was taught that gays and witches and liberals all serve Satan and are part of his plan. My education concerning other religions, both in 12 years of homeschooling and at yearly week-long intensive summer religious indoctrination camps, went only as far as to tell me why every other religion including atheists and probably Catholics are wrong. Here's a hint: Because many parts of those religions disagree with the Bible. Now, of course, these days I do not find it surprising that a Hindu's religious beliefs do not correlate closely to the teachings of the Bible, but back then, I was convinced the Bible was meant to be taken literally, and was for everyone. I remember a book we had in our family library, called "Why so Many Gods", which says slickly and simply what is wrong with every other religion. I saw it again recently and it made me sick to my stomach. Must be those demons in me. I had few subjects in my homeschooled education. They were "History", "English", "Math", "Science" (Seven Day Creationism of course), and, lest we forget, "Bible". I was taught Bible as a subject. Every textbook was ordered by mail from an outfit in Arizona called "Alpha and Omega". My parents controlled my exposure to the outside world completely, myself and my 4 younger siblings. Forget cable, we didn't even have broadcast television because my parents couldn't control the commercials and we might see something offensive. All we had were videos, and they had to be parentally approved. I didn't see a PG-13 movie until after I'd turned 15, because if it was PG-13 then there must be something sinful in it. I could go on and on. And on.
So what was it that broke the shackles, so to speak? Well, my parents let me go to the library on my own, and to the bookstore. And there I read books. Chiefly from that time, I remember graphic novels from DC-Vertigo, like "Sandman" and "Books of Magic" and "Hellblazer". They had horrific scenes of sex and violence, they dealt with mature sacreligious themes, and they were water in the desert to me. For once, I wasn't worried about the morality of it, all I knew was that those comic books were damn good. There were more books of course. My dad, I don't know if it was on purpose or not, encouraged me to read science fiction. Fundamentalism cannot stand in the face of a whole lot of science fiction. I read 1984, I read Fahrenheit 451 and watched it with my dad, I read Animal Farm, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Martian Chronicles, and so on. I am an avid reader, and I always have been, and the reading of all these comics books and science fiction books has done me a great service. It reinforced my imagination, and it encouraged me to ask questions.
Imagination and a questioning mind will always defeat drab fundamentalism.
I joined the Air Force at 17, and had all the stereotypes of other people and other religions broken. I met a Wiccan and a Hindu in my basic training flight. I was shocked that a Wiccan was allowed in the military and that the Hindu did not have cow dung in his hair, and I was also shocked to find that they were pretty okay guys. At tech school, my first roomate ever was a Wiccan, and a decent guy. I was stunned that he did not participate in blood sacrifice of infants under the full moon. My Christianity became steadily more liberalized (though I wouldn't have said so at the time), until I reached the point after two and a half years where I realized that religion in its purest sense is nothing more then a lenses through which your personal light is shown on the world, and it is not the lenses but the light that matters. When you reach this point, which I think all truly intelligent people must at some time, you realize that it does not matter what religion someone holds. The Bible is meant to be figurative, as are all holy books, and there is no religion that knows absolute Truth, because all religions are formed and guided by men, and men are flawed, thus are all religions flawed. At this point, after realizing that it really doesn't matter what religion you associate yourself with, after realizing that I did not believe Jesus was a deity, believing as I did that the Bible's literal veracity could not be confirmed because of the chokehold that state-sponsored religion held the Bible in for at least 1500 years, believing that hell and original sin were both concepts that simply do not make sense, I knew that I couldn't call myself a Christian. I wouldn't feel comfortable with the term, not after my upbringing, and not when I considered so many of the "pillars" of Christianity to be dubious at best and outright lies at worse. I tried Buddhism for a while, but it didn't fit either, for a reason that can simply be described as "I like my stuff". Now I am an eclectic solitary neopagan, and have been for 2 and a half years, and I am very happy with it. It fits.
So now I have 20 or so years of looking at fundamental Christianity from the inside, and 2.5 years of looking at it from the outside, and overall I can't saw how happy I am to get away from that. I've found that I have a tendency to make Christians lose their faith the same way I lost mine, simply by voicing the tough questions in such a way that it seems I am simply saying the way things happened for me. It's true, but hearing those questions make them either question their beliefs or recess themselves into "the conch of blind faith" (to shamelessly steal a term from South Park), and even blind faith loses its taste after a while. I can't say that this bothers me, because I know that it was hearing the hard questions that got me out.
I have found that my best analogy, especially since I am a mechanic myself, is to say that God can't hold us responsible for sin, not if he made us and is omnipotent. If we were created, then we are like anything else created, we are machines. If somebody designs a machine and it does not function as intended, that is not the fault of the machine, it is the fault of the designer. Only an idiot would say that a car with square wheels is the fault of the car. The most common counter I've heard to this is that we were designed with free will. The answer to that is simple. If you design something with free will, with the ability to make choices, you had better content yourself with whatever choices are made. If God intended us to have free will, then exercising our free will, no matter what we are doing, fulfills God's plan. Also, if someone were to build a robot that went insane and murdered, say, 6 millions Jews, it would be the fault of the person who built the robot, not the fault of the robot itself (though of course the robot would be destroyed). If that robot had free will, well, what kind of idiot designs a robot with the capacity to kill 6 million people?
This, I say to them, is why those few Buddhists that do believe there is a God believe also that God must be incredibly evil, because having made the world he is responsible for everything that happens in it.
I'm certain that if I lived a few hundred years ago, Pat Robertson and Fred Phelps would have to fight over who got to put me to the torch first.
So why, then, am I an eclectic solitary neopagan? Well, eclectic pagan means I take religious concepts from any religion, based on what rings truest to me. The great thing about us eclectic is that no two of us are alike. We love getting together and talking about what we believe, because we learn from our differences and we just might hear something else that rings true. I consider this a vast improvement over any religion that, hearing about the beliefs of another religion, says that "Well, parts of it are right, and parts of it are wrong". Stark comparison does not permit change, and change is life. Personally, most of my beliefs are traditional Pagan, with some Native American shamanism, a bit of Zen Buddhism and some Hinduism. I also have the belief, or theory, or what have you, that humanity giving importance to a concept creates a god of that concept, the archetype of it. Hence why throughout history we have had many gods in many cultures for the same underlying concepts; gods of war, love, sex, the harvest, the hunt, the home, death, birth, and so on.
I also think that recent, newer concepts have developed into gods. Computers are certainly one of those concepts. In times past the witch doctors and priests communicated with the divine for the lay people, because the lay people couldn't understand or comprehend the divine, but they knew it had to be very important. Most people now do not understand computers very well, but computers are crucially important to them. Those who are skilled with computers become priests of a sort, who intercede with the computer on the behalf of the technologically illiterate. There is even a name for this new class of priest, the nerd. There are varying degrees of initiation into nerdhood, like assembling your own computer, installing an OS other then Windows, learning how to defrag and it's importance, and so on. It my shop right now we have 11 people, and 2 of us know anything about computers. Any time the computers are doing something mysterious or are confusing and confounding our coworkers, they call on us to commune with the computers and make everything right again, and we do, and their esteem of us increases.
Now, for the solitary part. I have never been comfortable following the leader, especially in religion. I cannot reconcile myself to following a Wiccan Priestess any more then I can reconcile myself to following a preacher's words. I have a few reasons for this. First is my problem with any organized religion. Organized religion requires people to shut up and go along with what the leader is saying, or leave. It requires sheep and shepherds, and as I have no desire to be a shepherds, nor could I stand to be sheep, I will have no part in it. Next is the problem I have with acknowledging any other human as a religious authority. Saying someone else is legitimately a pastor and you yourself are not means that you think that in matters of religion the pastor is more experienced and more educated then you are, or else you would not be submitting to him. Religion is too personal for this. No other human's religious experience is any more meaningful or valid then your own, and yours is as valid as anyone else's. My third problem with organized religion ties closely to the second. I do believe that all humans have inherent flaws. As such, any instruction I receive on the matter of religion will be flawed, because it comes from a flawed vessel. This is not true of, say, math, because math is concrete, or of literature, because literature cannot be concrete or it loses its creativity. But how often has science and medicine been distorted by the whims and views of those teaching it and of the society of the time? The world was once considered flat, you'll remember. Anyway, I do know that I too am flawed. But it is better to, if I am to try to commune with the divine, have only one layer of flaws between me and it, as opposed to one for me, one for the pastor, one for his seminary, and so on. I do not want anyone to come between me and my ways of worship.
Well, as I imagine I have said entirely too much at this point and many of you are either looking to hire me or looking at your keyboard as you sleep, I'll cut myself off now. But believe me, I could say so very very much more.