Just speculation

Question: “Sew, what did you mean when you said that you no longer "subscribe to your life-long belief in God"?

Sounds odd, doesn’t it? And it was a bigger surprise to me than it is to you. Here I was a life-long-, even 5th generation-Christian Scientist. Never tried to be anything else. Didn’t want to. Tried to be loving to the practitioners of all faiths, but never had any great love for atheism or atheists. I didn’t quite want to trust anyone who doesn’t believe in God. Never wanted to be part of that at all.

But I got to thinking about it and most people have some kind of religion though they are all different, and they all believe that their religion was given to them by God and is the best one. This has given license to hate and kill thousands of adherents to rival religions in the name of God through the centuries. Then I look at Christian Science even and the huge pendulum swings the church takes—from progressive to fundamentalist over and over again. Why is that? It occurred to me that the sacred head of the most logical (and what I’d believed was the most truthful and real) religion there is, is being steered by mere human beings (no doubt doing what they feel they are being divinely lead to do) but humans just the same. God is not really at the helm of the Mother Church. Hmmm. How puzzling.

I look at 9-11, Katrina, a zillion catastrophes through history, including just a few days ago the I-35W bridge in Minneapolis collapse dropping a bunch of cars and their occupants into the Mississippi river and I wonder, God must not have the power to stop terrible things from happening even though tons of people pray. The power of God works in dealing with the clean up after things happen better than keeping stuff from happening in the first place. Lots of good will, generosity, helping hands come from all directions to help out and clean up the mess, and all of those hands are human, not divine. If God is omnipotent and loves us, surely He could stop some of this.

Or—maybe God is just a figment of our deep desire for good things to happen even in the midst of all the bad, and that desire just motivates the human beings to do heroic things that seem miraculous and encourages the human healing processes. I don't know.

Now I’m still grateful for all the good I’ve received from healings I had with the support of Christian Science practitioners. A huge part of the practitioner’s compassionate work is in calming their patients and eliminating their fears. As we know, fear is the major factor of any illness, injury or accident. It’s toxic. Mrs. Eddy knew its danger and advised us to fight fear first. After the negative influence of fear is gone the rest of the healing is easy, or at least easier. The body’s natural recuperative ability can then work to take care of the rest. I used to attribute that healing to God, but now I don’t think so.

As you may know, last year (2006) my teacher Mario started his sabbatical from teaching to do some reading and personal study. Eventually (about September) I asked him what he’d been reading and learning. He was very reluctant to talk about it with me (in retrospect I see that he was trying hard to protect me and the association while he was still sorting out for himself what he’d been learning), but after a while I became insistent to know and eventually he gave in and told me.

If you know him, you know he’s inquisitive. Explores everything and works very hard to get at the truth. Those of you who've worked with him know he has the uncanny ability to cut straight through the bullshit in any situation by challenging common assumptions everybody makes. I guess it was only a matter of time before he did just that about religion and God. He told me he had been reading some books by atheists among others.

I asked him if it was to find out what atheists think. “No,” he said. “To find out what I think.” Now to me, that’s a pretty gutsy and intelligent thing to do (if you dare!) to read books that are basically anti-what you believe in order to sort out whether what you believe really holds water. He said he felt it was worth his time exploring this, so I asked him to send me some info.

He forwarded an article from the Atlantic Monthly (December 2005) “Is God an Accident?” It explains that “human beings come into the world with a predisposition to believe in supernatural phenomena." Scientists came to this conclusion after doing extensive experiments on the behavior of infants. (Supernatural phenomena meaning spiritual stuff.) This relates to our ability to think of ourselves in a dual way--seeing our bodies as one thing and our minds as something connected but separate. We can see ourselves from both perspectives, both spiritual and material. So the article is saying that our ability to think this way is really hardwired and part of our nature as human beings, not just something we were educated into believing in churches or growing up at home. (Later I read Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell which goes farther about how this duality is integral in man’s invention of religions. More about that in a minute.)

Funny though it may sound, besides reading about atheism, I found that some of the connections Mrs. Eddy made helped me take another step toward embracing atheism, and without this connection I couldn’t have understood or accepted non-theism, the antithesis of what Eddy believed. She felt that the ills of the body are created by the human mind ("mortal mind"). Fear, worry, anxiety, stress are bad for you and cause illnesses, etc. The mind-body connection is real and powerful. She felt that mortal mind thought up the body and all its conditions as well as its various weird concepts of the nature of God—that God’s anthropomorphic or whatever we think it may be.

Along this line of reasoning, she might well have come to the next conclusion (though she didn’t, or never voiced it if she did) that mortal mind thought up that there is a God at all. Mortal mind is capable of all this other creative thinking, why not this? Maybe God is not a being at all, but a figment of our deep longings for security and the parental comfort we experienced as infants and young children. Mom or Dad would wipe away our tears and give us hope that there will be a happy ending after all. The concept of God is an unseen Mom/Dad that makes us feel the same way. But alas God is unseen, and unreal. Not capable of being a mom or dad at all.

Dennett talks about anthropological evidence of the origins of religions. The death of a loved one, for instance, is so painful that at some point in our development as humans, way back when we were discovering language and community, we began to think of humans at the moment of death as being or becoming spiritual beings that live on and on after they die. This belief subsequently made the pain experienced by their loved ones left behind easier to deal with.

As in my case, if my husband didn’t really stop existing the day he died (May 15, 1995) but continues living as a spiritual being and is still out there somewhere getting on with his life, happy and all right somehow, that concept is easier for me to live with (and that is how I dealt with his death these past 12 years.) Back in history when people began to find an escape from this type of pain in this way, this was the origin of religions, the belief in angels, life beyond the grave, and other spiritual beings (what is called "the supernatural"). And this includes the origin of our concept that there is a God at all—an overarching spiritual being who created everything and is ultimately in charge. A heavenly perfect father-figure. Complete with a whole wish list of abilities longer than superman’s, but without any real abilities at all.

When that clicked for me, I realized that I had been using the concept of God as, well yes, as Life, Truth, and Love as used in Christian Science, but also as a kind of an imaginary friend riding with me in the car or at home or work, for my whole life. While human life, truth and love are elements of life itself, maybe God as a being was just in my religiously-educated imagination. Even Mrs. Eddy didn’t know for sure what happens beyond the grave, but could only speculate based on what she’d witnessed on this side of death.

Speaking for myself, I'm speculating about all this too. I can’t prove that God exists. I can’t prove that He doesn’t. But from what I’ve read and discussed with friends, I’m more inclined now to believe that there isn’t really a God although I always thought so and the concept of God has been a huge part of my whole life (even on my way to becoming a prison chaplain), until the last 10 months or so. But to make myself better understood, know that I am not now calling myself an agnostic. I may not be able to prove it, but I definitely do not now believe in a God.

Moving from a strong religious belief to non-theism (what used to be called atheism) was quite a jump for me and rather quick after I started thinking about it. And I thought I would be upset changing my perception of what my husband’s present experience must be after death through this new lens, but amazingly I’m not. Allen was a great guy and huge part of our lives and love. He lived a pretty nice life and was well loved by all who knew him (especially our son and me). And that's enough. Only he knows what he’s doing now, if anything at all. Any seeming authoritarian statement about it, from a religious perspective or any other, can only be speculation based on our imaginations and our wish lists.

For a very short time after leaving CS (yes I have withdrawn my membership in TMC), I explored Buddhism. The Buddhists strive for enlightenment. But I found that it was only a soft cushion to land on (in the lotus position—ouch!) after taking my quantum leap out of religious faith, but I couldn't stay there long. I see now that Buddhism isn't anything more than another religion with another God-goal waiting at the far end of a white fog of spirituality (even though Buddhists themselves haven't quite noticed that).

But yes, I have started trusting some people who don't believe in a God. At least they are not deluding themselves or claiming miraculous healings that may or may not be able to be proven. Nor are they beating themselves up when some healings still haven't happened after tons of honest, heat-felt prayer and study on their parts or the parts of honest heart-felt practitioners. Stop beating yourselves up. It's not your fault. To put it in a kind of strange way, you were just trained to bark up the wrong tree.

I speculate that the most enlightened I will ever be is knowing that I will never be able to prove anything, but at least I'm smart enough not to go back to barking up that same old tree.