Collective Dissonance

It is weird to not to believe in “god”.

Every so often, you’re placed in situations where a bunch of people start talking about their beliefs, how they pray or worship or attribute every success in their life to a higher power. Undoubtedly, you’ll find people within this group who will start to nod and share their experiences regarding the same subject matter, and everyone there just “gets” it.

I don’t get it.

This very thing happened to me today. I’m taking a summer class that involves learning leadership and management techniques…basically it’s a required class I need for my degree. Today, we were supposed to come in and talk about a leader, based on our impressions from reading their biography/autobiography. I came across a autobiography of Jack Welch for six bucks, and used it to complete the assignment on the cheap, but today I had to sit there and listen to everyone talk about their leader of choice.

Religious leaders or leaders who were devoutly religious seemed to be the norm for the way the day was going, and person by person, you could just feel the churchie vibe grow, like they understood what it was like when an aforementioned leader led the football team in prayer and bible study, or the Pope upheld the values of the great Catholic church. It was obvious that these people felt something.

I felt nothing.

It gets a bit awkward really, the whole feeling of being the outsider and the knowledge that you’d be the first one to be ostracized from the group if you chose to reveal your position as the evil person who doesn’t believe that everything we do is because of some supernatural being.

I’ve never been truly religious, though I admit I have faked it to gain acceptance into social circles during my childhood. My parents were never ones to go to church, and I wasn’t even aware that there was some weird belief system in place until I walked through the steps of grade school. It was odd, coming across a sea of people that had dedicated their young lives to something I’d never heard of before. I didn’t quite know what to make of it, and treaded cautiously into the future.

As I grew up, the pressures to become one with the lord grew stronger, and for some reason it was an acceptable question to ask each other what church one was attending. I would make up churches, of course, or I would pick a church once obscured to side of the road background blur. The revelation that you didn’t go to church was, of course, an invitation to save one’s soul, but my ten year old soul was just fine.

As I grew up and I started to learn what I believed in, I realized that I couldn’t bring myself to believe in “god”. The logic was just too strong, and since I hadn’t grown up in a strong belief system, I didn’t suffer from the years of brainwashing in my childhood that emphasized religion, so off I went, a clean young boy who didn’t believe. As I continued to grow older, my viewpoint strengthened. After all, I believed in all the things churches didn’t, like LGBT rights and women’s rights. I didn’t believe in fate, nor did I really understand why this Jesus person had so little faith in me that he died for my sins long before I was born, and then used some Houdini shit to escape his tomb.

I just wasn’t god material.

This was all well and good until my brother started dying. My brother, faced with a terminal illness, had begun his descent towards death, and faced with the prospect of death, became very religious in the process. Dually faced with the grief of losing their first born son, my parents also began to walk down the path towards religion, and I guess you could argue that all three became born again Christians.

This left me in a very awkward situation.

For sixteen years up to this point, what I believed in had never been directly questioned, and I was allowed to live my silent life free of religion. This changed very quickly. I think that since they all walked towards the light that they expected me to go too, and to an extent they tried to drag me along with them — albeit kicking and screaming. I never really stood up and quantified what I believed, perhaps knowing it was not the best time to be sharing my religious insight with the masses. Instead, I went along to the events I had to go to, such as the baptism of my brother, and consequently the funeral of my brother.

In between, there was mostly a lot of praying. I don’t think that I ever prayed along with them, failing to see how wishing that things were going to get better would actually impact reality. Perhaps if I had prayed with them, prayed long and hard, my brother would still be alive. Logic and medical science would disagree, though. I remember the Sunday after my brother died, my Dad woke me up to go to church, and finally I made a stand and refused to go. I told him that I refused to be a part of something so horrible that it caused people around the world to kill each other for no reason based on the word of a loosely translated book. My position apparently became upsetting for him, and off he went to meet my mother at church without me, though not without a few comments in passing.

Over the next few years, I would continue to be pushed towards religion by numerous familial calamities, and a girlfriend that I think was uncomfortable with the notion that I didn’t really believe in anything. I continued to push back, though, choosing my battles as they came and supporting others that needed to be supported in light of my viewpoints. I tried to find a happy medium, and I often sacrificed my viewpoints for the well-being of others.

Those times were very hard for me, as I struggled to maintain this delicate balance where I keep the peace between everyone, but don’t compromise my values in the end. It’s never easy to be the agnostic/atheist. The world isn’t supportive nor conducive to us, and the terrain can be filled with land mines.

For instance, one day in the past year, I got into a discussion over religion with my mother. It peaked with her asking the question, “Well, you believe your brother is in heaven, don’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

I had told her the complete and honest truth. I don’t know if my brother is in heaven, and the knowledge either way doesn’t affect how I view what happened to him. A lot of people quantify the loss of others by saying ‘at least they’re in a better place, or they’re with god now’. That doesn’t bring me any solace. Death is death, and I think I do a disservice to my brother by choosing to believe that everything is peachy keen because he’s floating in the stars somewhere with a mystical being that created the world and has the power to control everything in it.

Instead, I choose to use the memories of my brother as a reminder to live, as a reminder that life is short and that we ought to make the best of it, for as far as we know, it’s all we get.