The Personal and The Political Part 2: God and stuff

So for a long time now, I've had kinda a running gag going about why I moved to Iceland and left the Excited States of Hysteria behind.

I aways quip that "I'm a bi-sexual Anarchist Atheist, wouldn't you move?".

Now, I've already talked about my being Bi, so I figured while I'm feeling all sorts of open, I'd launch into the other two things that make me a triple-threat minority despite my white skin and blue eyes.

Now, unlike my sexuality, which I can't remember choosing and can't, despite years of trying that drove me to the absolute brink, unchoose, becoming an Atheist and then an Anarchist were choices of a sort. But they didn't feel like it.

I'd always been troubled by the faith I was raised with. No matter how many feel-good sermons I sat through, no matter how often I was told that Jesus loved me, religion was always a dark and troubling presence.

I remember being terrified to think certain thoughts, lest "the devil gain entry to my soul". Of course this made it damned near impossible not to think those thoughts. If I found myself alone, in quiet silent surroundings I would panic at the thought that The Rapture had occurred, and I, at 9 or 10 years old had been found too sinful and wicked to be taken with the chosen few.

Then there was sex.

In the religious environment of my youth, sex was bad. Not just naughty or "dirty" but flat out bad. Nudity was more harmful to minors than videos of executions (I still remember how some schools showed footage of Ted Bundy's execution in the class room) and harder to find. Sex was all but criminalized.

So there I am, going through puberty, finding out that not only am I sexually attracted to girls, but guys as well, more or less guaranteeing me a first-class ticket on the Hellbound Express.

I lived in a guilt-filled bubble of barely suppressed panic, until one Ash Wednesday a sermon actually set me free.

For most of my childhood Lent meant no candy and either no, or at least restricted TV, things like that. Sort of an Americanized Kid's Fast. But that Ash Wednesday, with our usual fire-and brimstone priest off sick and a young Irish priest filling in on the pulpit, I had the second great epiphany of my life.

I sat there, with the black ash cross streaked across my forehead and listened as the priest told his flock (I always hated being compared to a sheep) that this year they shouldn't give up the things that made them happy, the things they liked, but rather the things that made them sad, troubled, or stressed.

*I'm still trying to figure out if the priest was really Catholic, it was the least "Veil of Tears" sermon I've ever heard.*

I decided then and there I wasn't Catholic anymore. Most of the things that troubled me did so because of the Catholic/Christian guilt I felt for aspects of my being that were, simply put, human. Telling myself it was OK to be human was a major relief.


Despite this, I wasn't an Atheist yet. God had been such an integral part of my upbringing that I couldn't yet imagine existence without a deity.

So I went God shopping. Stealthily borrowing books from the library on Hinduism (I was incredibly effected by Gandhi at the time) then Buddhism, then Islam, then Wicca, then Baha'i, ad infinitum. I'd check out a book at a time, with a bunch of other, more innocuous titles, and hide the religious stuff in the cover of another book.

I studied the bejeesus out of the many faces of God.

Then, one summer, one of the more innocuous books changed everything. I read Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower, a book about a young woman raised in a religious household who finds her own path to "God". While I agreed with much of Butler's heroine's philosophy, the most liberating thing was that she found her own path.

It didn't take long after that for me to come to my own conclusion. Unlike a lot of Atheists, my atheism is not based on a denial of the existence of "God", but rather on a very simple, succinct ethical point: No being worthy of my worship would desire, let alone demand, said worship.

I just decided that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that either "God" was simply a bully, or, if as I had oft been told, "God" was "pure love", then my worship or obedience had no bearing.

Thing is, once you deny the "highest authority" it does tend to cascade.

Next thing I know, I'm an Anarchist...

More on that tomorrow.