Not a court reporting post. Stop reading if you don’t want to talk religion.
I don’t talk about it often, but I was raised Catholic, and I found a lot of value in that. It’s hard to describe having a connection to God to those that have never experienced it. It feels warm and special.
Harder still is it to describe what would lead one away from that connection. I think I was 14. With regard to the federal restriction of funding of stem cell research, I felt very strongly that restrictions on such research were poorly thought, particularly if those restrictions were for religious reasons. I thought, clearly, if God gave us free will and gave us all this wonderful science to uplift mankind, surely he wanted us to use it, cure the sick, and create a world devoid of suffering.
If heaven is free of suffering, and we are made in God’s image, isn’t it natural that we should want heaven on Earth? I think if we’re honest, most of us would wish it on ourselves. Why not others?
But my awareness of the world grew, and I came to know that there were many who would not be satisfied with heaven on Earth. There were many that enjoyed the suffering of others, especially if circumstances were right.
(As best I understand, we have in groups and out groups in our psychology. The New York implicit bias charge explains it better than I do.)
And I started to look at this world and the many, many things that happen in it. Some of the better moments can feel supernatural, like, this must be God.
But oh, my God, when you look at some of the horrible stuff that happens to people that don’t deserve it. Look at some of the Epstein stuff. The world’s richest and most powerful people were cool with it. What on God’s Earth?
And so I came to the conclusion that if God was all powerful, he was letting a lot of stuff like this happen, and, well, better to disbelieve than worship an evil God.
The interesting thing about this self-imposed atheism is that I still found myself in a state of belief at times.
Take, for example, my medical issue in 2021. There were many ways I could have ended up injured or killed. Instead, I survived, my union protected my job, and I met the love of my life two months later. There’s got to be a God to set all that in motion, right?
But then why me? What makes me so special? That I should just be lucky / blessed enough to be born to a white middle class Staten Island family in 1990 while so many starve and suffer across the world and in our country.
And if there is a God, only he knows why I spend time thinking about it. Maybe I really believe that it’ll lead to something profound.
I can’t shake the feeling that if there is a God he’d want me to tell the world he gave us free will so we could make heaven on Earth. This is human nature 101, we imagine things and then make them happen. From cave paintings to rocket ships in less than 64,000 years. So imagine a world with explosive investment in all the things that make us better people? I just think the returns are too great to pass up for all of us and our children.
We live in a world with real problems and it’s going to take a lot of courage and investment to solve them. I just hope we elect leaders that are willing to try.
And with whatever resources life grants me, I’ll do my part.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it takes to survive and not self-destruct among systems that are fundamentally broken and reshaped to serve a wealthy minority at the expense of crushing and killing the rest of us. Is that why Marx called religion the opium of the masses? (If I need to, maybe I could take up Wicca.)
I am a stance atheist and a member of the Satanic Temple. I think you have a beautiful heart, Chris. I love reading your writing. I love you for doing it.
Thank you so much.
Just a thought on free will, you can do what you intend, but can you intend what you intend? We might be cosmic billiard balls bouncing around with the same “will” as an electron in space. Molecules don’t have will, do proteins, do bacteria, do frogs, do we? I think about it too. I agree that a life well spent is one that tries to make a better world for our children to inherit. However, I’d stop before “heaven” on earth, because that can get too dogmatic and rigid. And making the world a “better” place gets debatable. Does that mean people have a better safety net or are more self reliant? Do you want your kid(s) to face no hardship, moderated hardship, or unfiltered hardship? These are life long questions, but I think grappling with them and getting no where is, in actually, getting somewhere, somewhere more farsighted. In my opinion, we’re all building the ship as we fly it, and ideas about god and free will might be more about definitions than about underlying reality. Free will, to me, is dubious physically, but understandable emotionally. If you want to delve into Free Will, Mark Twain’s man the machine is an interesting short read, and Determined by Robert Sapolsky is a very long read. I actually couldn’t finish it, though it was interesting.
Love this post. I also grew up Catholic, in Catholic school through 8th grade, and didn’t really have a big shift in identity until the BLM movement/Trump of it all. I think faith is such a beautiful thing, but I can’t say I think the same about organized Christian religion anymore. Seeing people post things like “God is good!” to celebrate another passing birthday while ignoring all the injustices going on in our world daily is tone deaf and self centered. As if the children shot in schools don’t deserve God’s goodness. Anyway, I appreciate your writing always, but this one really resonated.