I Am a Religion Addict …
by Groff Schroeder
I first experimented with miraculous beings as a
small child. The omniscient Santa Claus watched constantly, each misdeed
supposedly another black mark against my list of toys on the winter
day of reckoning under the electrified tree. Then there was the Easter
Bunny, who cared little about my behavior but who, through some unspeakable
perturbation of nature, somehow produced eggs. A Tooth Fairy squandered
great wealth in small coins nightly, somewhere maintaining an enormous
collection of human deciduous teeth. These beings allegedly visited
the world's children in a single night, apparently achieving velocities
approaching the speed of light. These were the gateway beings for
the next step in my addiction, Christianity. |
Church taught of omniscient, omnipotent beings that
eschewed candy and toys, instead dealing with an undetectable human
"soul" and providing blind forgiveness and luxurious immortality
in return for mere faith (plus small weekly cash payments). As an
early teenager without a true understanding of what I was doing, I
joined a fundamentalist church and quickly got hooked. Through vigorous
proselytizing, I pushed my new habit upon almost everyone I met. However,
numerous scriptural contradictions eventually made me recognize that
fallible men, not a god, wrote (and repeatedly translated) the Bible.
Witnessing an extended series of thoroughly disgusting but highly
rewarding misdeeds by those in positions of trust eroded my faith
in a loving or omnipotent god until even belief was impossible.
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Still, I needed a mystical being to protect me, assuage
my fear of the infinite and provide a welcoming social circle. I still
needed prayer to evade my personal responsibility to take action.
I still needed a devil so that I could blame prayer's failure to grant
my self-serving wishes upon something besides my own inaction. My
addiction progressed to harder religions, from Buddhism to Zoroastrianism.
In each religion, simple objective analysis collapsed the miraculous.
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In Sunday school, my father taught that the creator
made laws for humans (like the Ten Commandments), and natural law,
which he believed even gods follow (like gravitation and the speed
of light). He called the physical universe and the laws that model
it "God's fingerprints," and encouraged me to explore them
with science. |
Learning science, I successfully predicted the future
knowing with great accuracy and precision when and where a projectile
would land when launched at a certain angle and velocity. I correctly
prophesized product yields of chemical reactions and biological gene
expression ratios, generation after generation. Nevertheless, I was
still addicted, and for years applied science to religious questions,
eventually realizing that if the laws of chemistry and physics as
we know them are to hold, a god can only be omniscient and omnipotent
if the god is the universe. This led me to study aboriginal religions.
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I am "clean" now, no longer believing that
miraculous, supernatural beings populate (or constitute) the universe.
Instead, I trust the vast library of verified, repeatable, predictive
scientific information that models nature and founds our technological
civilization. I look to myself rather than prayer when I encounter
injustice or difficulty. In failure, I blame not evil, but myself,
striving to learn what went wrong to prevent reoccurrences. It is
more work, more challenging and more empowering than faith. Even
so, I still wish that magical beings would provide luxurious immortality
when I die - but I will not hold my breath.
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