God Is Dead And I Feel Fine

If the title & subtitle combined didn't make you think of at least one of two absolute bops by REM, I have already failed.

When I was a kid, I brought up the Santa Claus issue with my mother. I'd really been mulling the whole thing over and decided it didn't make sense for numerous reasons. How on earth was this fat guy booking it down everyone's chimney every night? Why did his writing look suspiciously like the all-caps style my father wrote with in his office? I'd done my research and come to a conclusion: Santa was probably not real.

My mother, assuming I was going to come to this conclusion sooner or later, spilled the beans. Even though I was sure in the way only kids can be that I was right, it was still shocking to hear it from her mouth.

"But you can't tell your younger siblings, all right?"

"Okay." It felt like we were in on a secret together. This was fun. There was a pause as I mulled over the groundbreaking discovery I'd just made.

"So… the tooth fairy isn't real either?"

My mother shook her head.

"The easter bunny?"

Again, a negative.

"God?"

She looked horrified. "Of course God is real! That's different, hon."

I accepted this, sensing I had committed some weird kind of faux pas. But I was confused by her shock. Everything I'd asked about seemed to be on the same page to me: they were all beings I'd never seen that the adults in my life had talked about with conviction, powerful beings that could dole out gifts- and punishments as needed.

Later, my confusion was resolved when, spacing out on the pew in front of me on Sunday, I realized my parents wouldn't go through all this elaborate trouble of pretending year-round that God was real if He wasn't. I mean, mass was an hour long! Therefore, God= probably real.

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This thesis would come into question multiple times throughout my growing years, each time growing less and less firm. It wasn't that I thought my parents were lying to me- they were clearly telling the truth as they knew it. But some things weren't adding up. I would quest out in search of answers, and engage in an adolescence stacked with fulfilling, only slightly circular conversations like the following:

Me: "What about other religions? They also think God said different things, and they have different books. Are they going to heaven?"

Holy Person: "Well, no, because they're wrong."

Me: "How do you know?"

HP: "Jesus."

Me': But they don't know about Jesus."

HP: Exactly. That's why they're not going to heaven.'

Me: "That just seems unfair and sad."

HP: It's certainly sad. And that's why we need to spread God's love over the world."

Me: "How are we so sure those people aren't the ones with the right idea instead?"

HP: "Because God said so."

Me: "How do you know God said so?"

HP: "It's in the Bible"

Me: "How do we know the people writing the Bible were telling the truth?"

HP: "Because God said so.'

Me: "Where?"

HP: "It's in the Bible."

Eventually, the adult in charge would resort to telling me I just needed to have faith. My ultimate problem, I was informed, was that I was letting my mind do the talking. Not everything can be intellectualized, I was told. Sometimes, you had to let go and let God.

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It turned out I was clean doing faith wrong. I mean, I thought I had faith in some things. When my parents said they loved us, I never doubted them. When daytime ended, I had faith it would get very, very dark and the moon would come out, even if I couldn't see it.

'Those are things you have proof of,' I was told patiently by any number of religious instructors who probably hated me. 'Faith is when no proof is needed.' I tried to imagine if my parents never said I love you and never acted like it; if I'd never seen a single nighttime in my life, and there was no evidence or footage of such a thing occurring. "How would you believe in it then?" I asked incredulously. "Because," I was told, "You just would. It's a decision."

Suddenly I understood that while I'd grown up thinking the words faith and belief were synonyms, now I realized they weren't. Faith was when you decided to believe something even if you really didn't. It didn't make sense- but it was too important to make sense so it didn't need to. It was hard to understand- but the challenge was giving up trying to understand. Faith was a beautiful thing. Faith was walking on a tightrope with your eyes closed and being just fine because you knew God would catch you. How did you know? You weren't supposed to ask that, because faith was not about the how. Asking questions was not a faithful activity.

The faithful had a secret that I wanted to learn. They might seem blissfully and willfully ignorant, but I was also jealous of them because they always seemed really happy and sure of everything. They had an instant supportive community with their church and youth group, and they were always saying reassuring things like 'everything happens for a reason' and 'they've gone to a better place' and 'love one another, no matter what'.

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I did not personally grow up in a fundamentalist household. My parents and most people at my church were what I thought of as 'the normal type of Christian'. We didn't do intense things like go to church every morning like this other family on our street. Most days, we didn't even talk about God and I don't know if any of them have read the entire Bible (I wouldn't have, if not for morbid curiosity). No, God for my parents was something private and sacred. Belief was quiet and self-assured. They were of the opinion that the Bible is not to be taken literally. We didn't even have an oddly cultish youth group at our church. We were, of course, Catholics.

For this reason, as I got older, I'd bring heavy questions to my parents or to other like-minded people instead of religious authorities, learning I'd have much better conversations. The answer would be very different from whatever my early religious teachers had said. God was a much more abstract concept; religion was really just a framework in which to celebrate God in the only way we knew how. The other religions, I was assured, were no more or less than people having different theories of how to reach the same goal. They just didn't realize they were after the same thing, and it wasn't really about all that outdated stuff about who was right or wrong. God wasn't any of that bad, old-testament bologna. It wasn't important. The only important thing was just believing in God, not the details.

These answers took some weight off my shoulders, and it was with this renewed conviction that I entered the ranks of the proudly 'spiritual but not religious' crowd. I decided not to get confirmed and to discontinue going to church. It just wasn't for me. On the heels of these decisions, I felt an overwhelming sense of freedom.

But something else continued to follow me.

"Catholics were the world's foremost experts at applying guilt in subtle but damaging ways." - Augusten Burroughs, Holy Blow Job

It turns out that Catholichood was really hard to dispense of entirely. I guess between the years of religious education and the emails I started to receive with ministrations from my well-meaning but clueless former teacher, attempting to help me find my way, I got a moderate chunk of that thing known fondly as Catholic Guilt stuck in my craw. Catholic Guilt does an amazing job of following you around even after you've told it you're breaking up and need some space; it's almost as if a tracker is installed at birth.

It followed me in the form of a weird kind of superstitious fog. I felt the urge to pray every night, which I obediently did. There was a lurking feeling inside of me that if I didn't do this, something vague but certainly bad might happen.

In my first year of college, my anxiety was really bad. I developed a few OCD-like symptoms, the most unfortunate of which was my need to spontaneously do the sign of the cross at the most inopportune times in order to avert disaster. I began to really, really resent these compulsions.

I went to a college that was founded by nuns, so there were a healthy number of religious students there, some of whom were my friends. I saw many messed-up things go on here. An obviously gay, obviously miserable guy married a nineteen-year-old so people would stop saying he was gay. The nineteen-year-old was all on board because she couldn't have sex if she wasn't married. It was altogether an unfortunate scenario.

I remember asking one of these friends once if she legitimately thought I was going to hell; the answer was probably, but she could still be my friend. After that, it seemed disquieting to be riding in her Jeep Cherokee laughing together knowing she thought I was destined for the fiery pits. Either this was an act of some kind of warped charity or she didn't actually believe what she was saying.

In this kind of company, saying 'I believe in God' and meaning 'I believe in the all-consuming power of love over hate' began to feel not only alienating, but a little like trying to rebrand the swastika. Why use the term 'God' when it was so tainted by the imagery of sacrificing sons and historical events like the Spanish Inquisition?

I was resisting letting go of my claim to faith because I was afraid to be wrong. I was afraid of the new void of uncertainty I was told I'd fall into without good solid faith. I was afraid of how sad I would be, how pointless life would certainly seem, how deep into depression I would fall. I was afraid of the vague but certainly bad things that would happen when I ceased to take part in my anxiety-laden rituals.

Spoiler alert: None of that happened.

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When I honestly explored the alternatives, all the possibilities I was secretly afraid to look at, that came with a God-less world, I was surprisingly.. okay.

What was so sad about this life being all we had? If it was, wouldn't it just be more precious and worth living to the fullest?

What was so scary about death being the end? Non-existence is not really something it's possible to be upset over once it's happened to you. I mean, you literally wouldn't be around to care.

And lastly, why was it that people think all belief beyond sight somehow hinges on a belief in God?

I may not be able to get on board with theism, but that doesn't mean I don't have plenty of beliefs I can't prove for shit. As a thinking animal, I am powerless not to.

Some wacky things I currently believe:

- I'm fairly certain that death does not equate to simply stopping. If it did it wouldn't be so interesting, and we wouldn't be so afraid of it. We are made from energy, and that energy has to go somewhere, doesn't it? For this reason, I am very interested in ghosts and other supernatural phenomena.

- I am convinced my mother contacted me once after she died, through my mind.

- I think the sixth sense is alive and well, though a lot of people fake it.

- Extra-terrestrial life seems more than probable to me just considering the sheer size of our universe. It seems nuts to suggest we're somehow the only life floating around out here.

- I believe the evidence quantum physics gives us that we are incapable of perceiving much of reality.

- I believe that for many people, organized religion is an unhealthy way of trying to cope with how little we actually know about our own existence.

-More than anything, I believe I could be wrong about any or all of the above (does that make me more agnostic than atheist? Whatever). We live in a world we know so little about, it'd be impossible to know exactly what's going on. God might exist. God could be truly good and beneficent. If so, I doubt he/she/they would give a shit if you believe in him/her/them or not. On the other hand, maybe the zealots are right and God is truly full of old-testament, Biblical, capital He man-rage. If so, I bet heaven is a really bad time and I can't say I'm sad not to be attending.

The difference between these beliefs and the imperative of 'faith' is that I understand all my beliefs are no more or less than opinions. They shift around based on the limited information and experiences I've had, and that's 100 percent cool.

At the end of the day, I realized the answer to the god question is just plain irrelevant to my ability to live a good life. It had no real impact on my day-to-day life. Some people legitimately believed in the concept of faith and God and that was fine. I wasn't one of them, and that was also fine. I had lost the all-pervasive Catholic Guilt and the pressure to make myself believe things I didn't, and it felt good.

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I think we're all just a little afraid of how little we know. We're afraid of the uncomfortable and we are afraid of the unknown. We profess to want to believe in something bigger than us, but only if we know the exact shape and size of that 'something'. Death is the ultimate scary unknown for a lot of people, but in a very real way, we've already experienced death so many times without knowing it. Every time we make a life decision something dies, whether it's a part of ourselves, a future possibility, or a limiting mindset. And that death is not always a bad thing. In tarot, the Death card is also a powerful card of transformation, mutation. Evolution.

The death of one's faith is often portrayed as a tragic, nihilistic point in one's life, but honestly, it was one of the best things to ever happen to me. It opened up the way for me to live harmoniously with uncertainty, to sleep soundly side-by-side with the unknown, and to truly live in the moment and be open to any and all possibilities.