I'm a born-again atheist. Actually, I identify with no denomination at all, atheist or otherwise. When asked "What are you?" meaning what religion I am, I say I'm a recovering Catholic. That response is borrowed from the one dry alcoholics give when asked about their addiction. They mean they dare not see themselves as former alcoholics because they believe that without constant vigilance they are in danger of become drinking ones again. That's why they say they "take it one day at a time."
I've always been struck with amazement when anyone tells me they saw through Catholicism or any other religious belief in their teens or early 20s. I have spent eight decades of my life getting to that point, dogged by a nagging fear any thoughts deviating from the doctrine I had been brought up on were put there by the Devil. Just a couple of years ago, I could not have written this essay.
What happened? Why now? Why not at 64 or 24, when I stopped going to church?
When I was actually 24, I literally walked out of a church. It was at Sunday mass. The young priest was giving a sermon as was customary halfway through the service, but this one was over the top. He harangued the congregation about sin, their sin. Sin was always part of any sermon. But this one was sick, especially coming from the mouth of such a young man. And it was being delivered with the passion of the closing speech to the jury by a prosecutor demanding the death penalty.
I had heard some hair-raising performances on the same subject from all sorts of clergy—parish priests as well as nuns, Jesuits, and Redemptorists (an order of priests who made sin and hellfire their specialty, hair-raisers I later recognized in the chapter in Moby Dick where the preacher regales his congregation with a description of hellfire and other torments of the damned). Such performances—verbal horror movies—were a form of entertainment for the faithful, I see now, a pornography of terror. I had served as altar boy during the sermons of such men who, despite the fear they intended to create, first softened up their audience with amazing humor. To my surprise, afterward in the sacristy, the professional stand-up comedian and thundering voice of eternal torment became another man entirely: morose, silent. Much later in life I saw the same thing happen to professional comics when they left the stage.
But listening that Sunday morning to the sin-obsessed rant of such a young man, someone who had apparently never heard the words forgiveness or mercy, was the final nudge I needed to turn my back on that religion. For some time I had been standing in the backs of churches on Sunday mornings, leaving as soon as I had satisfied the minimum requirement for not missing mass—a "mortal" sin, i.e., one serious enough to send you to hell. But I didn't storm out of the Church like a defiant Martin Luther. I skulked. It would be 60 years before I felt guilt-free of my apostasy. What I had done that day was only half conviction and half something else, and my conscience, formed under men and woman much like that priest, if not as strident, kept whispering in my ear that I actually acted from selfish, even cowardly motives.
The philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach wrote, "all religions, Christianity in particular, were expressions of an alienated human self-consciousness of itself... The characteristics of a transcendent Divinity, His infinite love, justice, and mercy, for instance, were," according to Feuerbach, "the best elements of humanity as a species, attributed... externalized and alienated to a mythical supreme being." In other words, we create God in our own image in order to embody ideals we can aspire to. The ancient Stoics, heavy influencers of early Christianity, had the same values but did not find it necessary to externalize them beyond their own humanity.
It seems to me that this is just what was done in the case of Jesus (real name: Yehoshua ben Yusef), though it happened over a period of many years, under the influence of Saul/Paul of Tarsus and Greek so-called Neo-Platonic intellectuals. Out of an itinerant rabbi preaching that the kingdom of God was at hand and humankind should prepare itself by loving one another, the "Church Fathers" created a God. They fought among themselves for centuries afterward about the nature of that God—totally divine, half-divine?—calling those who disagreed with them nasty names (their favorites being "idolator" and "fornicator"). They burned each others' books, and well into the fifth century killed many more "heretical" Christians than pagan Rome did. They made of Jesus's mother a goddess and at the same time expurgated her from almost all references to the woman herself, a single mother of eight who after becoming pregnant with Jesus at the age of 15, married a poor widower and left her wealthy family in Sepphoris to live in a backwater village of Nazareth. Those "Church Fathers" also made of her a perpetual virgin, robbing her of her sexuality and excising the role she played as the mother of not just one but of several sons, two of whom died for the "good news" first announced by their cousin John the Baptist. As in the case of Jesus, she was diminished by being deified while at the same time portrayed as the simple country girl we see in European art, a mere incubator for divinity rather than as a strong Jewish woman at the head of a movement that would change the course of history.
Spirituality, as Gilad Azmon has asserted, is a natural human characteristic. What it specifically amounts to is a matter of personal experience. For some it is a state of mind that can be acquired through deep meditation. Others find it in the music of Bach, Brahms, or the Grateful Dead. What it is not, is dogma. Spirituality is individual, free. Religion is doctrinaire, repressive. Dogma presents a basic narrative involving so-called articles of faith along with strict rules for attaining salvation from hellfire—or reincarnation as a cockroach.
When I read the "synoptic" gospels" (meaning the first three, without John's), I find portraits of a living, breathing, flawed human being. When Jesus rejects the plea of a gentile woman to cure her child, he says, "I don't cure dogs." Undeterred, the woman says that sometimes her children feed their own dog under the table. Jesus relents, maybe the only time he ever showed any sense of humor. I see him smirking at the woman's cleverness.
His best friends seem to have been Lazarus and his sisters Martha and Mary. He seems to have had a relationship with that family much like the ones I saw parish priests forge with married couples and their families. One day on his way to visit, Martha runs to meet him on the road, falls on her knees, breaks into tears, and begs him to come quickly because her brother Lazarus has just died. Jesus raises her up and tells her to go home and that he would be there shortly. Then Mary comes running down that same road, falls on her knees, breaks into tears, and begs him to come quickly. At the sight of her weeping Jesus starts weeping himself.
This is the same Mary he was in the habit of talking with while Martha was doing housework. When Martha complains that she had to do all the chores while her sister got to shoot the breeze all day, Jesus tells her there are Marthas and there are Marys in this world. Martha must have bitten her tongue and made some angry noise with the dishes.
He also enjoyed the company of educated people. He dined with them sometimes. His mother was the daughter of a well-to-do man and received some education herself. Rather than feeling like a country bumpkin in the big city, Jesus must have felt comfortable with such people. Indeed, he must have visited his grandparents there on a regular basis. Nazereth was also close enough to Sephoris to afford employment for him and his brothers as day laborers (he was a techne, the Greek word for skilled laborer, not just carpenter). He used metaphors about housing construction in his preaching. During his time in Sephoris, both as visitor and worker, he would have come in contact with people of many nationalities and religions, not just Jews.
To boot, his mother traced her ancestry to King David, the lineage of the promised Messiah, as well as to the Jewish kings who ruled Judea during that nation's period of independence a couple hundred years earlier. As such, Jesus had a target on his back because Herod, the king of the Jews, was nervous about his own legitimacy and tried to eliminate any Jewish man who had a purer bloodline to David than he did. Jesus's brother James (Yaqov) was murdered himself after he became head of the movement his older brother had started, Jesus having done the same thing after his cousin John was beheaded by Herod. Mary was well aware of her ancestry and must have told her children about it.
Why is her essential role ignored by the Christian church, edited out, including from the gospels? Why at the same time accorded semi-divine status, the faithful's advocate, and go-between God and themselves ("Mideatrix of all Grace")? It's because she was a woman, and women were seen by the church Fathers not just as inferior beings but a major source of sin for men, starting with Eve in the Garden of Paradise. But it's also why the Christian church had to make her an associate member of the Trinity, putting her on a pedestal so high she could be safely ignored as a very human woman who played an essential role from the moment she gave birth to her first son until her death (or "assumption into heaven," which was made official dogma by the pope in 1950). That's why she was a "perpetual virgin" denying her sexuality. Sometimes she is even exempted from having to urinate or move her bowels. Christianity was constructed by males who despised women, and Christian men largely still despise women to this day. But, in those days, anyone who was anybody had a virgin mother.
I find all of this much more interesting than the standard Christian narrative of the last 2,000 years. We don't need to deify Socrates to appreciate what he did for humankind. In fact, to make him superhuman would make him less powerful. The same is true for Jesus. If you see him as 100 percent human and experience him as a compelling "character" of those first three gospels, you see him in the round far more than if you keep reminding yourself of his divinity (did Jesus himself ever defecate or, God forbid, have "wet dreams"?). Christianity has denied him the very human experience of loving a woman or acting as a prig toward that gentile woman who asked him to cure her daughter. The man the evangelists created in their biographies of Jesus, whatever their intent and despite rather than because of so-called Christianity, jumps off the page as do the characters of the Brothers Karamazov, despite Jesus getting it wrong when he preached that the end of the world was at hand, indeed would happen during the lifetimes of many of the people then alive.
Moses, Jacob, and all the other main characters of the Old Testament, as Christians call the Jewish scriptures prior to the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, come across the same way. Jacob was a nasty piece of goods, even before he came out of the womb he shared for nine months with his twin brother. He didn't want to be born after Esau because that meant he would not inherit his father Isaac's wealth. We read that he held on to Esau's leg in the birth canal hoping to get ahead of him. When that didn't work, many years later when it came time for his father to lay his hands on his first-born and formally bequeath his inheritance, Jacob put on animal skins so he would feel hairy like Esau to his blind father's touch. He continued like that after his success that day, conniving and cheating. When his prospective father-in-law, after making Jacob wait seven years to marry his daughter Rachel, at the last moment told Jacob he would first have to marry his other daughter, Lia, and continue meanwhile working another seven years. The wily Jacob agreed and did so but found ingenious ways to rob his father-in-law of some of his wealth. Yet, Jacob is looked upon as one of the great figures in the Bible by both Jews and Christians. His story ends with a reunion with his brother Esau later in their lives. When Jacob is told Esau is on his way, he assumes his brother is coming to kill him. Instead, Esau takes Jacob in his arms and weeps.
How many Jews or Christians, for that matter, name a child after Esau? Yet it's Esau who was the good guy, the one who loved and forgave. Kudos, I say, to the scribes who wrote that story without any attempt to represent Jacob other than as he was.
By this time is must be obvious how much of an impression religious law and dogma has made on me. It was a long odyssey, starting with my earliest memories as a child right through to my old age. I have written about the characters in the Bible whose acquaintance I made and who stayed with me to this day. But I did not dwell on the terrors I was subjected to by religion, though they would amount to child abuse as bad or worse than sexual. I'm not the first to point this out, though I doubt many people have come to realize that is what it amounts to. The trauma is just as lasting but not as obvious. After all, the nuns and priests who did the abusing believed they were saving our souls. Once a sexually abused person feels strong enough to acknowledge what has happened to them, they must have sense of a release in itself healing. For someone who is subject to the terrorism of psychological abuse under the guise of orthodox religion the release, if it ever comes, is less immediate and, in my case at least, has taken more than 80 years.
There's a character in one of Anthony Trollope's novels, an old woman on her deathbed terrified by the prospect she might be going to hell. But the priest (in this case an Anglican one) is absorbed with more worldly matters, his own career, and barely takes notice of the terror his church created in her.
And then there was the Inuit man taking instruction to become a Christian. After the missionary told him about sin and hellfire, the man asked would he have gone to hell if no one had told him about it? The missionary says no. The Inuit responds, Why, then, did you tell me?!
Which way would you prefer? A world in which we are all atomized, discreet beings charged with the heavy responsibility of saving ourselves from damnation, the goal being to die in a "state of grace," meaning without any sin on our souls so grievous (murder, adultery, masturbation, for Catholics missing mass on Sunday) to be denied entry into heaven even if it means only spending a few million years in hellfire to purge our souls of the residue of those sins; or, would you choose a world in which we are on our own, all in it together, all there is, all our brother's and sister's caretakers, the only happiness we will ever know being today's, not some distant promise of an eternal life we may or may not get to spend in a paradise?
Do you prefer the Christian way most viciously represented by a Calvanism telling us we all are headed for hell no matter how many good works we do, except for a few chosen by God on a whim? Is that Inuit a better human being for what the missionary told him about sin and hellfire than he would have been if he had never heard of Christianity? We have slaughtered millions of our own kind (not to mention other kinds) with the full approval of a God, our God, as spoken through his intermediaries—priests, rabies, mullahs and a host of freelancers who claim to have an exclusive line to the Almighty.
The people Columbus found living in the "new world" he thought he had discovered were welcoming and peaceful. But he laughed at their cutting themselves on his sword. He enslaved and slaughtered them, then fed their corpses to his dogs. No one in the Americas had ever heard of Moses, Jesus, or Mohammed, never mind Buddha. How could they have remained so innocent and yet charitable? Were they really human beings at all, destined to spend eternity in, at best, an intermediate limbo for being unbaptized? Columbus and his ilk believed they were doing these peoples a favor by baptizing before killing them.
But we have no reason to believe any of these stories of chosenness, salvation, reincarnation, or any of the other narratives the powers-that-be inflict upon us. There are about the same percentage of people we call saints among any population, whatever their religion or lack thereof. Jesus, Mohammed, and Isaiah are right there in the lane beside us on the interstate or tending their fields in the remotest parts of the planet. Francis of Assisi, the Prophet, and Isaiah exist everywhere at all times, whatever the religion they subscribe to (with perhaps a higher percentage among those who have no religion at all). They live in the house or apartment next to ours or have no address at all. Love for one another may be at the core of what Jesus taught, but he did so with very little success except for those for whom it comes naturally and despite what Christianity has used him for.
The Western media hang on every word of the pope as if his Holiness really were the spokesperson of God. The pope denounces aggression and calls for love. Meanwhile, Ukrainians, Gazans, and Lebanese die by the hundreds of thousands, while the pope (along with all the other leaders of the major religions) feels no obligation to put himself on the ground in any of those places to stop the killing. A few years back a young American woman, Rachel Cory, confronted an Israeli bulldozer (manufactured in the US) to prevent the demolition of a Palestinian home. She was run over and killed. Should we expect less from a man who sought out the title of Vicar of Christ on Earth and got it than to stand on the streets of Gaza or Lebanon with the people the Israeli bombers (manufactured and given to Israel by the US) are killing by the hundreds of thousands? If an American teenager can be held up as an icon of self-sacrifice for confronting a bulldozer, what would be the effect of the Pope doing the same thing? Perhaps make the Israelis think twice before ordering the pilots to drop their bombs lest they commit papicide? Maybe motivate the pathetic leaders of the West to react with something other than indifference, not to mention ordinary people to demand an end to the oppression and slaughter in the Middle East and Ukraine? Seeing on television police attack little girls with dogs on the streets of the segregated South in the 1960s galvanized American public opinion far more than a thousand editorials or Papal "condemnations" made from the safe precincts of the Vatican.
When the Ayatollah Khomeini was told to take shelter in a bunker from American and Israeli bombers, he chose to die in his own modest home to show his solidarity with ordinary Iranians who had no such luxury. He was blown to bits while he was working in his study. Was that the act of a man worthy to be called a good Muslim, the leader of hundreds of millions of Shia faithful across the world? Should not the self-appointed "leader" of more than a billion Catholics show that in accepting that title (nobody forced him to run for Pope) he, too, is willing to sacrifice his life much as the man he claims to represent did 2,000 years ago? Would not that sacrifice do more to stop the carnage than a press conference to encourage the murderers to make nice as if he were talking about a squabble in a sandbox?
What have I lost now that I finally feel free of religion? Have I become a degenerate, a murderer, thief, uncharitable toward my fellow humans? I don't think so, but I suppose that is for other people to say. What I have gained, I do know, is a feeling of peace and a much more fruitful way of seeing Jesus of Nazareth, fully human and losing nothing by not being a God. If anything, I admire and take him more seriously. Not to mention the freedom to not be preoccupied with the very self-centered anxiety with the state of my soul instead of with my fellow human beings.
