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.

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.

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.


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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