As a child, I always had a deep reverence for the Presbyterian Church I attended in the Philadelphia suburbs. It wasn’t so much the religious teachings that inspired me as it was the ambiance – creaky wooden floors, hard brown pews, arched doorways and windows, a pleasant musty smell, rich stained-glass, colorful tapestries, graceful floral arrangements, stirring organ music, and other artifacts found mainly in houses of worship.

I felt peaceful in that space, even if the droning minister in the pulpit was a bore. At age 13, as I was being confirmed on Palm Sunday, the minister collapsed and died of a heart attack in front of us.  Despite this emotional experience, I soon began to question in myself many of the church’s teachings. Why, I wondered, do I always have to go through Jesus to get to God? How is it possible that everything could be done in Jesus’s name? Most preposterous to me as I reached my teen years was the notion that somehow almost 2000 years before I was born, Jesus had died for my sins. I remember thinking, that doesn’t make any sense. If anybody’s going to die for my sins, it’s going to be me.

My creeping doubt came to a head during the early 1960s, when our next minister participated in one of the first civil rights marches, in predominantly Black Chester, Pennsylvania. This outraged the White Republican church members, many of whom were in upper management in large Philadelphia-area corporations. Having somehow received a sensitivity gene in a family with an extremely bigoted father, at age 20 I was proud of what our minister had stood up for. But my support and that of my mother in a subsequent church tribunal was not enough to save the minister from losing his pastorate. Hypocrisy abounded in that church. I was ripe for change.

When I was 23, I converted to Reform Judaism shortly before I married a Jew. This seemed like a natural progression to me, since Jesus played no part in the Jewish religion and I could be directly connected to a God that seemed less vengeful and more whatever I wanted him or her, or it, to be.  I also became painfully aware of anti-Semitism, my first taste as a formerly clueless WASP of the sting of discrimination.

Judaism had it’s own set of mesmerizing artifacts and rituals, but after another 23 years my commitment to theism seemed to have run its course. I yearned for a spirituality that I could practice daily without the pronouncements of some venerated supernatural being on high.

Living at the time in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I had my pick of religions to try out. I attended Siddha Yoga services for a time, and then the Korean Zen Buddhist temple. The latter seemed more to my liking. Buddhism has no gods. It’s more a sane psychology for living than a religion in the typical Western sense of the word. Many people who attended services at the Zen temple were also Christians or Jews or other theistic religions. They had no difficulties incorporating the Zen lessons into their theistic dogma.

In 1998 I moved from Michigan to Florida. While there are ethnic Buddhist temples in the state, none are easily accessible for me so I practice on my own. Living in the so-called Bible Belt, I again feel the discrimination of being in the minority.  Only recently have I begun to identify myself publicly as an atheist.

Years ago, when I was living in the Northeast US, religion didn’t have a prominent place in the national discourse.  We all coexisted amicably without the need to force our religious views on each other. There was no public outcry that spoke of the Christian foundations of our nation.  It was clear to all of us, without having to talk about it, that religion was something separate from the public sphere.

These days a very vocal minority of fundamentalist Christians has been trying to change that. Their inaccurate interpretations of our founding documents threatens to turn us against each other in a way our founding fathers never intended.

We are not a Christian nation, though many Christians worship freely here.  I, like everyone else, have had the luxury of worshipping however I want. Or of not worshipping at all.  No one should be discriminated against for what they do, or do not, believe.  Religion and spirituality are private matters and should stay that way.  That practice has served us very well for over 200 years.  Why mess with it now?

Technorati Profile

No related posts.