I grew up in a house with an absence of God.  Wait, that is not entirely true. I once, late at night, stood outside my mother’s bedroom door and heard her call out to him. “Oh god, oh god,” she said.  My dad often cursed “Jesus H. Christ” when he was pissed about something, so in a way god was around, but as a family we did not follow him.  I did ask my mother once why we didn’t go to church or worship god, and she told me the journey was mine, I needed to discover on my own what to believe.  So, here is the story of my journey.

When I was six, my very best friend was a Jewish girl named Rachel.  I spent most of my playtime at her house, and because her mother made way better snacks than my mother, naturally I was attracted to her home over mine. Rachel was the first person to tell me about God.  She told me that God made the world and people, and that he lived in the sky on a cloud somewhere and watched over us, and when we died we got to go up to that cloud and be with him and watch everyone down here on Earth.  I thought this was pretty cool…I couldn’t wait to die and get to that cloud.  She also told me that Jews don’t believe in Jesus.  That was fine by me, I didn’t know much about who Jesus was, so what did I care if Jews didn’t believe in him?

But then Rachel told me that Jews don’t believe in Santa Clause.  That statement made me stand up in protest.  What kind of crazy religion was this?  No Santa? No white-bearded man riding on a sleigh bringing me presents?  It was then that I rejected Judaism and, sadly, I also rejected Rachel too.  I just couldn’t be friends with a non-Santa believer.  Later, much to my horror and sadness, I found out that Rachel was right, there was no Santa.  It was not the last time I was duped, but finding out I had been lied to about Santa, did make me wary of future stories that I would hear.  I would never take anything at face value again and I would always make sure I dug a little deeper.

My next encounter with religion was in the sixth grade. We began studying Greek mythology in social studies and I loved it.  All those glamorous Gods with petty human emotions in charge of their own piece of the universe.  Gods mingling with humans, creating part-human, part-god offspring, having fights with other gods over trivial stuff and getting into all sorts of trouble…it was intoxicating.  My favorite was of course the big guy, Zeus, the head honcho of all the other Gods.  He had that cool thunderbolt that he hurled at liars, and even though he was married he had numerous affairs.  Hypocrite?  Hurling his thunderbolt at liars and than cheating on his wife, well yes, but I later learned I learned that hypocrisy ran rampant in most religions, and most Gods are hypocrites.  At least Zeus was a sexy Greek god.

At the end of the unit on Greek mythology, after I was completely hooked on these Greek Gods, I asked my teacher where they went?  How come we don’t follow these Gods anymore?  He told me that it was only mythology; stories made up for people to explain the Universe.  They were not real Gods.  People stopped believing when they realized it was ridiculous and replaced them with the real God.  I thought, bummer that these Gods weren’t the real ones – they were so cool.

God did not come up e again until college.  My next-door neighbor was a fun-loving gal named Mary.  She was a big girl, who had a big laugh, a big heart, was a big drinker and was way big on god.   (She eventually quit school to become a nun.)   After drinking one night it came out that I didn’t care much about God, and Mary freaked.  From then on she spent many evenings listening to Amy Grant crying and praying for my soul.  I was touched that this new friend would worry so much about me, so I thought perhaps I should look into this God thing and pick out a religion that would best suit my sinful lifestyle.

The following semester I signed up for “World Religions” and assured a much-relieved Mary that I was going to find me some God.  There was a problem.  There are 19 major religions in the world, which are divided into 240 large religious groups, and there are 34,000 different Christian religious groups alone.  How was a girl to choose?  And more important, what if a girl chose wrong?  I mean what if I spent a lifetime following a Christian life, and turned out God was really a Hindu?  I would have wasted my religious life, and pissed God off to boot.  But I had promised Mary I’d find my way to heaven so I figured I should look into some of them a bit deeper.

I started with the most popular one (I always like to be with the popular crowd anyway) – Christianity.  Because there are so many different Christian religions, and all of them seem to be at odds with each other, I thought I’d better just read the Bible and from that I would find out which one was the right one.  After all, the Bible is the “word” of God so he ought to know which one is right.    I am honest enough to say that what I actually read was the Cliff notes, that bible book is big!  Fortunately it does have Cliff’s notes!

I got into a few of the chapters of the bible and found out that God is jealous, petty and just plain mean.  He brutally orders the murder and rape of thousands of people, and even sends his son (who is himself) on a death mission to save a bunch of people who might not want or need to be saved.   I’m sorry, I need a religion with a nice God who wants people to love and take care of each other, not one that orders death to anyone who doesn’t worship only him.

Judaism was out, partly due to the whole Santa thing, and partly due to the whole mean God thing that the Christians worship.  That also wiped out Mormon, Lutheran, Episcopalian and all the other various Christian sects for me.  All of them ultimately worshiped the mean God.   I also read parts of the Koran, and unfortunately that God, who is also somehow the same God as the Christian God, well he is mean too.  Sorry no mean Gods for me.

I like science and a religion based on scientific principals sounded good to me so I looked into Scientology.  Unfortunately the only science in Scientology is the trillion of nuked aliens that were boxed up and then placed into living humans and the only way to for a person to be healthy is to take a personality test and then spend thousands of dollars to get the aliens out.  At the time I didn’t have the thousands to spend, and well it was just too crazy to believe.

I also looked a bit into Hinduism and Buddhists.  They seem to be more flexible religions and you can worship as many or as little gods as you want in the Hindu religion and Buddhists don’t believe in God at all.  Here is the problem for me.  Reincarnation.  Frankly the idea of coming back and relieving life over and over again, (although maybe next time in a skinny body), until I got it right was not very appealing and frankly sounded exhausting.    Also, what if I got demoted and came back as a chicken?  The truth is I have no consciousness of the millions of years before I was alive, I don’t need consciousness of the millions of years after I am dead.

All of these religions seemed so crazy and illogical and frankly none of them provided any proof that any of these Gods actually existed.  I got duped with Santa; I needed real proof of God.  So, the day came when I had to break it to Mary that there was no God.   Needless to say she didn’t believe me.  “You can’t think too hard about all the ins and outs of religion you have to just trust, you have to have faith,” she told me.

Here is the problem, as I see it, with “blind faith.” If someone came to me and said I must buy a house, I must live in this house for my whole life, but I can’t look it over too hard, and I can’t fix anything that is wrong with it, I just have to have “faith” that it is a sound house, that I can live with the things that are wrong with it – I would say “no way.” I’m going to have this thing inspected, I’m going to look in the basement, check out the roof, and if there are things wrong with it, I’m going to fix it.  I would never buy a house on blind faith; I would expect proof that it was a good deal.  Yet I am expected to give over my life and soul to some god based on faith, with no proof that he was really there.  Sorry, no way.

Mary was sad that she had failed my soul and she continued to pray for me (which was nice) and I was sad that I disappointed her.  But truthfully I was sad that she also disappointed me.  That she would not look into this God thing, but continued to rely on nothing but faith.

People are horrified when I tell them I don’t believe in God.  How do you have morals? How do you live without knowing the meaning of life?  How do you cope with no promise of a glorious afterlife?  How can you deal with all the questions left unanswered by science?  Here is how.  I stand at the side of the Grand Canyon and I am awed by its beauty and the millions of years it took for it to get that way.  I can become wonderfully overwhelmed with the knowledge that the Universe is a delicate unpredictable thing and am amazed that it all works, well sort of.    That I, as insignificant as I am in this universe get to spend this brief amount of time conscious of it and I get to share it with the others who are here with me during the same time as me.    I find joy in the fact that the atoms that make up me are the same as the atoms that make up the flowers, the trees, the stars and all the other things that occupy this universe with me.  I love the fact that millions of years ago my precious dog, Dottie, and I shared some common animal beginning before evolution sent our species on our separate paths.

This is it, this is my life. I am only given one chance to enjoy it, to do something with it, it should not ever be squandered because it was such a fluke that I came into being.  I will have an afterlife, in the lives of my children and future grandchildren and in the lives of the other people that I have touched and who have touched me.

And no, the many scientists whose books I’ve read and whose lectures I’ve attended do not have all the answers, and would never try to provide them without the needed proof, and they are not arrogant enough to say that they do.   They would never throw down their test tubes and say, “ Shit, I don’t know how this particular thing works, so it must be this way because of magic.”

I am honest enough to say that there are times when I wonder, what if I’m wrong about the whole no God thing?  I could find myself dead, following that white light in the sky with my deceased loved ones cheering me on, and when I get to the end I could say, “I’m sorry I was wrong, I should have known you’d be real, sitting on your cloud with a thunderbolt in your hand, Zeus, could you find it in your heart to forgive me?” And I think he would.

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