Religiosity is not high up on my menu. I prefer to think of myself as indifferent about the weighty concept of the holy. And even “indifferent” doesn’t really describe it. It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. I’m driven by the same fears of mortality, the tinyness of me and the sense of my vulnerability. Call it, maybe, exasperation or weakness. I guess at the end of the day I’m just left with the idea that the existence, or rather the question of the existence of God, is something futile, that it’s way above my head to prove or worry about and that putting a label on one’s disbelief is just the flip side of hubris, the other sect, the truly faithful, of The Knowing.
When I hear someone describe themselves as an agnostic or atheist (and they may mean something completely different when they use that term) I think about reincarnation. And not really incarnation per se but a quote I read a long time ago. As support for the idea of reincarnation the writer said that it was just as amazing to be born the first time as it is to be born again. It was a tour de force statement for me, rational/faithful jujitsu. I appreciated the cleverness and the depth of what was seemingly such a terse statement. And I was even more profoundly influenced by it when I witnessed the birth of my first son and could appreciate its implications in full.
That statement and the way that it cut through my insistence on just facially denying the idea of a god has always stuck with me. Comfort in any certainty is delusional. It’s dishonest to continue to deny the existence of some other power and, yet, constantly confront the contradictions that are all around us. I may be “science” guy or “rational” guy, but I can’t get my head around the enormity of reality, the illusory concreteness of science and the spongyness of real things, like the paradox of the beginning of infinity or the physical frontier of the universe.
That’s when I come back to that statement about reincarnation and the core of it’s message, that the miraculous doesn’t lose it’s edge because it happens frequently or because you can explain it on some visceral level. Life is still wondrous. I might question the existence of some higher power, but I might be wrong. The Me didn’t get here in a vacuum. I’ve flirted with ideas holy and red. And, maybe, that’s what we’re all doing. We’re a giant organism still trying to get it together. So, I claw from the entrails of most teachings what are, at base, their proscriptions of conduct (sins), trying to emulate what I think they seek to address, the character flaws and the selfishness of an individual to act at the expense of others. Believer or not, I try to do right and that’s all any of us can strive to do. If there is a God, She will love me for it.
Main Page
