Religion

I'm a Pantheist, which means that to me, the universe is sacred. My religious views are complicated, though. I'm an atheist, because I don't believe in anything supernatural — there are no gods, no ghosts, no afterlife. But I am, like Einstein, a deeply religious nonbeliever. And you could say that the word religion is being misapplied in my case, since it traditionally means a body of belief about the world that includes a deity, but I just don't know what other word to use. I have the same awe for nature that traditionally-religious people have for their gods. It feels like religion to me.

I was raised a Liberal Quaker, so I would say I grew up just barely Christian. In First Day School, we learned about Jesus helping the poor and telling people to love their neighbors, and I had a book of Bible stories for children that I read sometimes, but that was the extent of my religious education. For the most part Quakers don't believe in hell, and I was never taught that Jesus was literally born of a virgin or literally rose from the dead, or that Jesus was truly divine. I never took those stories literally; I think I thought that Jesus was an important figure with good things to say, but not much more than that. And I am so thankful that I was never indoctrinated with all of that mythology as literal truth like most children of Christian parents are. I was never taught that Quakerism is the One Right Way, so I was free to decide for myself what to believe.

So when I was 13, after a brief period of agnosticism, I became an atheist. I think what tipped it for me was the realization that the idea of God makes much more sense as plain old mythology — just as wrong as belief in Zeus or any other deity — than it does as actual truth. Humans need stories to provide explanations for things, and in the absence of real explanations we just made up stuff. But now we know where the universe came from, and how the diversity of life was formed, so that old story about God is obviously just mythology.

When I was in high school, my interest in the environment got me interested in earth-based religions, and I began studying Wicca and other Neopagan religions, while my interest in the writings of Daniel Quinn got me interested in indigenous cultures and their animist religions. There were times in that period when I really wanted to believe in magic, and in the possibility that the universe could somehow hear me and respond, but I was always skeptical in the back of my mind, and eventually, after I saw how the pattern of hits and misses looked just like praying to God, I gave up on that. My theological differences with Wicca were too great for me to stick with it; I was annoyed by the insistence on the male/female dichotomy and the belief in silly things like astrology and tarot. I couldn't believe in a personal, conscious, omnipotent deity, or in reincarnation.

I think I was attracted to Wicca for aesthetic reasons, for the earth-worship and the candles and the occult symbology. So I took the things I liked about Neopaganism and I adapted them to fit my own religion. I was similarly inspired by the earth-worship of animism, and my study of Native American religions in particular had an impact on me. What I figured out is that there's a lot more to religion than just god-belief; if you just take that out, you can still have all of the other stuff. I like the ritual and the symbology, and I don't have to believe in anything supernatural to have that.

I like to do rituals with the moon phases and seasons (although I'm not very regular about it), because our modern world separates us from nature's rhythms so much, and that's a way to remind myself what's going on outside. Celebrating the seasons and the moon is a tradition going back tens of thousands of years, and it makes sense in a way that celebrating the birth of some invisible sky god doesn't. I don't think it's necessarily important that I do rituals, but I like to do something symbolic to express my spirituality. I think the need for ritual is a universal human thing; even atheists like to have weddings and funerals and gift-giving on birthdays.

Organized religion has been, by and large, bad for humanity, and I do want us to get past these irrational dogmas. But I don't think that religion will ever disappear, even if no one believes in gods anymore. Pantheism, I think, has great potential for being the type of religion that we can move on to after we've let go of traditional deity-centric religions. Pantheism meshes seemlessly with science because every new discovery, rather than conflicting with "faith", can be embraced as a greater understanding of the universe. And above all Pantheism encourages environmentalism by teaching us the value of the natural world, and we need to care about the environment if we want to survive.

related rants: Astrology, Anthropocentrism, The New Tribal Revolution

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