I was raised without religion, for the most part. For a while when I was in elementary school, my family did attend a Unitarian Church for a very short period of time; maybe a few months at most. The one thing I remember about that experience was the time the congregation was singing a hymn and my father turned to me and told me to just mouth the words because I was tone deaf and couldn't sing.
I've been to other churches over the years with friends. I remember very much enjoying attending a black church in Alabama with a friend from college once. But it was the enthusiasm of the people there that appealed to me not the religious message. And the food served after the service at the home of my friend's parents was really, really good.
I can attribute the lack of religion in my life to my mother. She was raised in a traditional Italian Catholic home. She told me what she disliked about the religion she was raised in was all the guilt it filled her with. She explained this to me by relating a story about when she and my father were first married. She said every time something would happen, she would blame my father. For instance, she would knock something off the table by accident. She would turned to my father and explain to him what he had done to make her knock whatever off the table. These incidents happened so frequently that one day (I forget exactly what the incident was), something happened and before my mother could say something, my father said, "I know. I know. It's my fault." That evidently was when my mother realized that the guilt she learned with her Catholic upbringing was why she could not accept personal responsibility for even the littlest things that happened. She did not want my sister or me to grow up feeling guilty and so we grew up without religion.
It wasn't that my mother didn't believe in a supreme being, or didn't explore religion after deciding to give up her Catholic faith. In fact, she took courses in different religious philosophies at the university where we lived. I remember her text books and seeing her study them, marking passages with a yellow highlighter. I have those books somewhere. I've always thought that one day I might read them.
I also remember the day the mailman delivered a big black book and my mother being upset because on the spine in gold lettering it was embossed Holy Bible. I asked my mother why she was upset and she said, "I ordered this bible as a reference book. It's not supposed to have the word holy on it." To my mother, the bible was a book written by men to be studied to further her understanding of religion. She also told me that Jesus Christ was a man. He was a very good man, but he was just a man.
She kept the bible. I guess it wasn't worth the time and expense to send it back. It sits in my bookcase now next to all my mother's books about art. I keep it more as a memory of my mother because I have honestly never read it. I tried a few times, but I never could get passed all the people who begat a son or daughter, who in turn begat ..., etc.
I think she settled on the idea that she was agnostic, but never gave up her interest in trying to understand religion. Some twenty years after those incidents I just related, I remember something else. I remember one day finding my mother going through the volumes of the encyclopedia. When I asked her what she was doing, she said she was making a list of all the different names for God in all the different religions of the world. She wanted to make a poster with all the different names for God on it. This was before the Internet, about two or three years before she died in 1987. How should would have liked the Internet and all its research resources. She could have easily complied her list in no time just by using Wikipedia.
I have never felt like there was something lacking in my life. I've attended church services. I never saw anything there that I wanted or thought I needed in my life. I simply found it difficult to understand what it was that attracted people to return there week after week. The one book I read about believing in God that made sense to me was Mister God, this is Anna by Fynn. Reading the following passage best described how I felt about organized religion.
After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away, Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn't a great success. She tended to regard it as a primer, strictly for infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn't much point in going over and over the same old ground. our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:
"Do you believe in God?"
"Yes."
"Do you know what God is?"
"Yes."
"What is God then?"
"He's God!"
"Do you go to church?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"Because I know it all."
"What do you know?"
"I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees"—and the catalog went on—"with all of me."
Carol grinned at me, Stan made a face, and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There's nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that's what it amounted to. ("Out of the mouths of babes ...") Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: "And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don't forget to love yourself."
The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn't everywhere, he wasn't anywhere. For her, churchgoing and "Mister God" talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn't got the message or didn't understand it or it was "just for swank."
My mother instilled in me a strong sense of right and wrong; the qualities that most people might learn in church. She taught me to be a good person. I am a good person. I am honest, kind, thoughtful, and considerate of other other people. I'm extremely polite ... to a fault. I obey the law, pay my taxes and donate to good causes. I do good deeds, but I can't tell you about them because they don't count if you tell. I have a happy, peaceful life with my husband, our dog, and our eighteen cats. I love and I am loved.
Wednesday night I was half listening to Hardball with Chris Matthews, when I heard Howard Fineman say something. I wasn't paying close attention at the time, but it kind of stuck in the back of my brain. I started remembering it again as I was transcribing the opening segment of The Rachel Maddow Show for my previous diary. After publishing that diary, I went back and watched the segment on Hardball again. It was a long segment where Chris was talking to Bill Nye, "The Science Guy," and Howard Fineman about the anti-science stance the Republican Party has taken over the years.
Chris Matthews: Howard, I think there's a couple of things going on here. Obviously, business types think that if they accept the fact that there's a mankind influence on climate change, they're going to have to change some of the regulatory laws, CO2 emissions, they're going to have to deal with that. It's gonna hurt their freedom in the marketplace, right? There's another thing about the religious front. And you and I were trained in the Bible. We learned that it was all part of the moral lesson we were taught as children; so powerful in our lives. But the scientific nature. We always said yes, but that was important; there's important stories in the Bible, but there's also science and archeological fact out there we have to deal with, and the history of the dinosaurs. That all occurred as well. But these new people, politically, are saying, "Oh no, no, no. All answers are in the Bible. We politicians have to say so. And we have to deny the history of mankind and the history of this planet." It's frightening.
Howard Fineman: Chris, I'm not making a value judgment when I say this, but the Republican Party has become a faith based party. Starting with Ronald Reagan, there was a marriage between the Bible belt of the south, the fundamentalist Bible belt of the south.
Chris Matthews: Literal interpretation?
Howard Fineman: Literal interpretation. And Catholics elsewhere in the country who were becoming more conservative socially. They joined hands. And there are many good things that came from that, especially if you believe in the Republican Party and its success. But these people start from a fundamentally different point of view on questions such as abortion, on questions such as evolution, on questions such as climate change. They see, as John McCain belatedly said, "the hand of God in everything that happens." And they look to God first. They're legitimate concerns. For example, about genetic manipulation of the human species. Should we leave that to God, or do we as human beings take that on? There's a serious point underneath this. Okay, there is. But nobody in the modern Republican Party dares question the orthodoxy of a faith based Republican party at this point. That's what it is. It's a Bible-based Republican Party.
Chris Matthews: It's also market based.
Matthews quickly changed the subject by turning to Bill Nye and asking him a question. I don't think Matthews was prepared for what Fineman said. He seemed flustered as if he didn't know what to think about what Fineman said, or maybe he was just surprised that Fineman had said it out loud.
On her death bed, one of the last pieces of sage advice my mother gave to me was: "If you ever have a problem, write it down." Without realizing it over the last few months, I've developed a problem and I've been writing down. I've been writing it down here at DailyKos. In fact, the other day, I received the nicest piece of KosMail that just made my day:
I've been on DKos since 2009 and wasn't familiar with your work. Wasn't even familiar with your user name as a commenter. And then over the summer I've all of a sudden seen all these great diaries coming from this user I'd never heard of. Wow. You've really been on a roll. Nice work.
Yes, I have been on a roll. Even I have been amazed at how prolific I've been. I didn't know where the heck it was coming from until now. I do have a problem, and I've been trying to solve it by doing what my mother told me I should do. I've been writing it down.
The problem I have is with the Republican Party in the United States of America, which is one of the most religiously diverse countries in the world. I have a problem with this political party that has become a religious organization trying to inflict their rules and religious values on me as a fellow citizen of the United States. Thank you, Howard Fineman, for helping me to understand why I have come to despise the Republican Party, and all the lies its leaders tell.
I do not mean to be disrespectful to sincere people of faith. I have a lot of friends who are devout in their beliefs and I have always been respectful of those beliefs as they have been of my lack of religion in my life. It's not that I don't believe in God. There is a spiritual side of me that believes in a greater power. It's just that I personally don't believe in organized religion. It just doesn't work for me, but I know that it is an important part of other people's lives. I'm a strong believer in live and let live, and to each his own.
I have a problem with Republicans who ran on a platform in 2010 of "jobs, jobs, jobs" and once in office started trying to pass legislation about "abortion, abortion, abortion." I have a problem with Republicans who were elected to represent ALL of the people in their districts and have taken it upon themselves to only carry out the wishes of their religious base. I have a problem with Republicans who have become a Bible-based party, took over governorships and statehouses and starting passing laws to restrict the voting rights of the people who don't vote for Republicans in elections. I have a problem with the values this faith-based Republican Party represents. To those Republicans, I have one thing to say:
KEEP YOUR RELIGION OUT OF MY GOVERNMENT!
Oh good grief, look at the time. It's 7:00 o'clock in the morning. I need to get some sleep.