Your God is dead and no one cares
If there is a Hell I will see you there
Heresy, Nine Inch Nails

Such is the harsh tone that rings through Heresy, a song from the masterpiece of an album, The Downward Spiral.  What I would have considered a heresy to listen to many years ago I now find delightful.

I’m prompted to write now as a figure from that shadowy past has sent an email announcing his impending marriage.  He was hoping to reach a person who really no longer exists.  Such is the radical shift from fantasy to reality.

I prefer to burn my bridges.  I ran into another of the people who was a friend of that version of me caught up in the delusion, and I explained my move to atheism.  I’m not sure he could quite fathom it at the time.  It seems utterly pointless trying to create a new friendship based on something different than what was there before.

The feeling that runs through Heresy is the attitude I have towards my time of make-believe.  It was another way for me to avoid growing up and facing reality.  The only way I can gather my self-respect now is to utterly condemn my past.

Fate dealt me a blow of circumstances that led to a life of fantasy.  My contempt towards supernatural belief systems grows steadily, as I consider my wasted past, and as I see the stupendous folly that exists in the world by virtue of religion.

My mission is to face reality, and to encourage others to do the same.  I hope to see others liberated from the vices of the god in their minds, and the auspices of religious authorities.

Crossposted from my new blog, the edge of sanity

Religion, in my experience, placed a noose around my neck and made me a slave.

Intellectually and emotionally I was bound and restricted.  Limited to a narrow framework with which to receive and perceive the world.

Life revolved around the afterlife.  Heaven mattered more than earth.  All my thoughts and actions were judged by how much they were pleasing to the great deity.

And yet what is life?  Fuck, procreate, die, leaving a genetic legacy.  Looking from the perspective of bacteria up through the animal kingdom, you see waste, violence, damage, death, destruction, disaster.  Kill or be killed.  Predators and victims.  And you call this the creation of a benevolent god?

Sorry guys, we evolved from apes.  We will die and we will be dust.  We will join the legion of the dead and life will cease to exist.  I know, it’s a hard thought.  Took me long enough to finally let go of the illusion of life going on.

Without this whole bullshit guilt around sin, I can now finally live freely.  The religious freaks will probably pray for my soul and lament at just how hedonistic I will become.  All the while I feel free to practice a new kind of morality, one that is respectful for all of life.

The religion that I knew was immoral.  Anything that places such a vice on life should be discarded, mocked, ridiculed, and destroyed.  Life is now so much more pleasurable, though I still carry the scars that are slowly healing with time and hedonistic delight.

My health was failing me, I hated my job, and my social life was slipping away.

Money was slipping through my hands, and I moved back in with my parents, who always seem to have a dark cloud hanging over them.

Life sucked hard. And it’s in times like these that people reach out for something that might give them hope, that might inspire, that might open the doors for healing and restoration.

I linked through to a website by the name of Evolutionary Christianity. A series of podcasts was about to begin with a large number of science and religious figures who all had interest in the odd crossroad between the two domains.

The series gave me something to think about, something to ponder. And I was drawn back to the one figure who had inspired my original faith crisis, Brian McLaren, author and popular figure holding a niche market in evangelical Christianity. The more I read and listened, the more I figured that I might just find love, joy, and healing within the realms of Christian faith again.

And hence began my short but passionate love affair with Jesus. I became a fervent church goer, Bible-reader, home-group attendee, and infrequent pray-er. My collection of faith related books began to expand, while I pushed aside all the secular books that did not aid the affair.

In the end it was really a one-side affair. The people who claimed to be followers of Jesus and speak so highly of his love weren’t overly accommodating to a sick and desperate soul. I didn’t find the elusive community I had been seeking. Instead I simply found disparate individuals celebrating the same delusion.

There was no mountaintop experience. The promise of faith was fool’s gold, all shiny on the outside and rough on the inside. I spoke to leaders and counsellors within the church who offered me very little.

One counsellor though actually made a big difference. She led to my finding the path out of depression and into actions that would lead to employment and a life with more joy. Her techniques were largely borrowed not from her faith but from her psychology degree, and as soon as I focused on the things that would actually make a difference, I no longer required the fantasy of Jesus.

As a staunch believer I would have defended Jesus as very real, God as supreme, and non-belief as delusional. Yet I now understand faith as merely a frame of reference, a way of seeing and relating to the world, which really is the basis for all mythology and belief systems. In the end I simply found faith to be pointless, futile, and generally immature.

I fell well into faith because I have always been rather naïve and immature for my age. Faith was a way that I could maintain my childish ways of thinking. Accepting the world as it is, and working with the world as it is, is both mature and liberating.

I have seen the world through the preconceptions of others, but now I am determined to separate fact from fiction.

What is real?  I can look at the computer that I’m writing these words on, I can feel it, I can hear the sound of the keys I press. I could even sense a particular scent if I placed my nose close enough, and I’m sure it would have a unique taste, though I’m not about to find out.

Facts are presented to the senses; fictions are the things of the mind that have no basis in reality.  If there is no basis for a thought or idea in reality, then it is merely a belief.  I am currently going through the process of challenging my beliefs so that I may live according to what is real.

This brings the whole idea of truth back from the ephemeral realm of spirit into the here and now.  Truth is everything I perceive.  I can’t perceive of a God, so according to my definition of truth, God is not true.  God is fiction.

That is not easy for me to express.  I feel an emotional tinge when I state that God is fiction.  Yet to live in the realm of reality, I must let go of beliefs, including those about God.

If God is true, then he/she/it will present itself to me as clearly as I can perceive my own body.  Since God has yet to do this, God is not true.

So much of my time has revolved around what I like to call mental masturbation; namely the playing with ideas over and over again in a self-pleasuring fashion.  Yet I can’t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell these ideas.  So they are really useless to me.

There is so much more to experience and enjoy in the world outside of my head.  Life is to be lived, not considered.

And now I feel like my identity has been shattered into a million pieces.  Life is a lot easier when you can rest in simple beliefs and stories.

Well, almost.

I tried to do that.  I tested the waters of faith, and found them to be icy cold.

I really, really hoped that much of my problems could be solved by trusting in God, by restoring my lost faith.

And all I found was disappointment, for I again felt out of place.

I think you can only fake it if your heart really is in the enterprise.  And my heart really was not fully there.

The constructs of good religion would be the opportunity to enjoy empowering friendship to start with, and then the impulse to be a more engaged planetary citizen, demonstrating the utmost care and concern for all.

Instead what you get is this insular movement that is concerned about its particular unique system of beliefs about the afterlife, which attempts to create as many adherents to its particular style of practice as possible.  By-and-large, these movements tend to attract a fairly similar demographic of personality styles (with the odd difference here and there), so in the end it is little more than a club of mutual interest.

One of my present contentions with faith in God is that far, far too much is asked of me, which really seems unfair – a God of infinite love and benevolence naturally would be the one to carry the weight of responsibility towards finite creatures.

If you frame this relationship in terms of the parents of a baby, then you see that there is little to no expectation on the child to do anything to receive the love of the parents.  There is not even a need of response for the parents simply pour out love to the child, who gladly receives it.

If I was aware of such love, like the child I would gladly receive it.  And it’s not like I turned away from the opportunity either, and it’s not like I’m doing so now.  I stand perplexed, neither believing nor disbelieving, really just disappointed that I couldn’t get what I wanted.

So now I don’t really have faith as a big part of my life, and neither do I have any real sense of the spiritual, and really just trying to work out what it is that I want for my life.

I guess this might just be another blog silence.

Well, funnily enough I happened to be going through the oldest emails in my Gmail account.  This one is quite the pearl (I have replaced actual names with “…..”).

I am writing this just after the Sunday evening service, in response
to the ‘gospel’ message …. presented after the musical.  It is being
addressed to you as I do not know of any other Pastor or Elder (apart
from …..) who understands the clear distinction between easy
believism and the clear proclamation of the gospel including
repentance (though I am not saying that other Elders do not, merely
that I have no knowledge). As ….. was bringing his message to a close,
I began feeling extremely disappointed with what he had shared, as it
lacked the very key components of the wrath of God and repentance.  As
you well know, God’s love cannot be shared without the equalising
balance of His wrath. Christ had much to say about judgment, yet today
we hear so very little about it, in preference for an emphasis on
love.  And then I became most annoyed when ….. brought in the
‘sinner’s prayer’, which is the height and pinnacle of easy believism.

I know of a number of cases of people who once confessed Christ, some
strongly and others half-heartedly, and now do not follow Him at all.
I am sure you would know of a much greater number. Given that Pastors
would be well exposed to such statistics, it would seem that you would
certainly want to make absolutely sure that the gospel is clearly
presented, to avoid the serious repercussions of false belief.  Yet it
seems that time after time, the gospel continues to be only partially
presented, and this ‘gloss-over’ effect is overlooked by the majority.
We must earnestly contend for the faith!  I truly do want to discuss
this with ….., yet I thought it would be wise to pass it through you
first. I am sure that if John were around, he would make it an
eldership issue.

The issue of the gospel is one that eclipses our present turmoil, for
it has eternal ramifications. My hope and prayer is for the complete
eldership to come to an agreement on the essence of the gospel, and
refuse to allow any divergence to be proclaimed from the pulpit. I
leave this to your discretion, and if you feel that I am wrong in any
point, I certainly want to know.

Rejoicing with you in the Lord,

Do I really know the person who wrote this email?  Yes, it was me, but I can’t even identify with a single line.  It smells of arrogance, presumption, and elitism.  The only thing that I can read from it that remains is passion and sincerity.  Yet what a dreadful argument for the gospel, which in English is supposed to mean good news!  This is clearly the work of someone who read too much theology and yet had far, far too little practice.

There’s a whole host of reasons for this, and I won’t go into statistical data here.  The fact remains that more and more of us are boxed off from one another, and the walls just keep getting higher.

This is why I’m a huge fan of Meetup.com.  Having discovered it several years ago, I was grateful for an opportunity to join interesting activities and meet new people that I otherwise would not have known about.

Not everyone fairs well in some of the more traditional ways of making friends.  Work can be a huge disappointment, and we’re just not drawn to the watering holes (and if we are, we generally keep to ourselves anyway).  Family is far away, or if it is close it can be such a drain that relief only comes through distance.  We are not the sporting types, aside from the odd jog around the block.

Increasingly, we find our lives more and more invested online, in the virtual world.  This place can give you the illusion of friendship and can even leave you feeling satisfied……for a very brief time.  Then, when the space next to you in bed is empty, or you face another Friday night in front of the TV, you realize just how barren this world really is.

And that’s where Meetup.com enters the fray with a vision to transform cities into places where locals gather around numerous interests and find that very thing they crave….community.  Many a friendship, many an intimate relationship has been formed through this network.

One year ago having just moved to Brisbane I logged on to Meetup.com hoping to find a space for coffee lovers to meet.  While there was huge demand, this space did not exist, so I created it and adorned it with the name Brisbane Coffee Lovers (which I admit is actually copied from an American group using their own city name).  And it took off quickly.

In celebrating the anniversary, many people expressed their appreciation for the group, and how much it had changed their experience of Brisbane.  All because of my little whim to meet coffee geeks.  And I realized that my own experience of loneliness has now become the means by which lonely people can connect.

So I now christen this wonderful group with the following motto, and hope it continues in this vein:

Coffee is merely the bridge by which strangers become friends

I mean, it just doesn’t go down well to be a sensitive male in our macho-dominated culture.

To put it into perspective, I just started a new job where all of a sudden I was handed a great deal of responsibility.

Not being accustomed to such responsibility, I have found myself feeling so overwhelmed that I feel like I am on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

Many, if not most people, chase the dollars and take on the burdens to do so.  I simply cannot.  The dollars don’t mean a great deal to me, and the pain is too much to bear.

Being sensitive means that when I’m under the pressure, drinking what would amount to most as a small amount of wine will really loosen me up.  But it’s only temporary, and too much reliance on it has further repercussions the following day.

I know I can’t continue this, and know there are plenty of other opportunities more suitable.  But it certainly has taught me a bit about my sensitivity threshold.  It’s such a shame that very, very few people understand.  Imagine trying to explain to the average Joe or Jill that my sensitivity limits my job potential – they’d think I was just a lazy bum!

It’s also a really good confessional!!

Unfortunately, I often fall into spells of self-pity, depression, and laxity, such that my motivations fall away, and I move towards whatever entertainment or pleasure I can consume.  Given that I am a product of a consumerist culture, this really is no surprise.

So today I went to church feeling rather downcast.  I’ve been disappointed in my abysmal social life, and lack of opportunities to meet people.  And I wanted to put the church partly to blame.  Yet as is often the case, God brings ease and comfort in my time of pain through the actions of a very imperfect church, such that I walk away feeling strangely lighter.

And I borrowed a book through the church library called A Generous Orthodoxy by Brian McLaren (which, if you’ve been here before, would know is my favourite author). Although I’m currently reading another book of his, The Secret Message of Jesus, this is one that complements it ever-so-nicely, for it seems to be a very personal book of Brian’s journey.

It really comes down to the fact that you really shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater; the project of Christianity which can seem more of a curse than a blessing holds a lot of hope.  There’s a place for orthodoxy, there’s a place for tradition, there’s a place for truth; but it’s a truth that is gloriously generous.

My prayer is that I might catch some of this generosity such that I let go of my self-pity, get out and take part in kingdom business, which is far more surprising and inspiring than trying to ‘save souls from hell’, as is too often the case.