The Church, God, and Me

The year is 2020, and geopolitics is still attending to religion like a Christian attends to a hungry lion. Religious people of all kind are still saying and doing terrible things explicitly because of their beliefs, and religious people continue to face torture and death for their beliefs - perhaps their identities. I'd like to talk about these things, I feel uncommonly qualified to speak on these things. But first, let me explain why.

I am a devoted churchgoing atheist. I go to church at least twice a week, between choir practices and services, and because I tend to volunteer with a lot of the other activities it can add up to much more (my record is 5). My father is/was a United Church minister, and this has always been a part of my routine. The United Church is a very progressive church, so I never seriously believed in hell, have always been pro-LGBTQ, believed in evolution... the lot.

I don't attend church to broadcast my atheism, so I don't. I occasionally refrain from certain lines, change words where there are patriarchal remnants, and challenge particularly egregious claims by my neighbours. But primarily I attend to be in a community of people who aren't all my age and education level - a community not all grad students have. There's more to say about the strengths of church structure, but I've got a whole other half of my sliced up baby to dissect.

I do broadcast my atheism, though, one of those AM channels that nobody wants to listen to. There was a time when I believed in some higher power, but not in recent memory and never the God of Abraham. I believe the nature of consciousness is sacred and worthy of admiration, even praise, and with some mental gymnastics that gets me through a lot of services. However, the claims of the organized religions are laughable, and destructive to a modern society. The Biblical and Quranic depiction of the afterlife is/are probably the most evil concept ever believed by even one person, and in this case it is believed by one billion plus.

I have read the Bible, the Quran, and the Book of Mormon each from cover to cover. I have argued the finer details into the wee hours of many mornings. This is not going away. This is my hobby horse.

Neigh