When I was a teenager I struggled every day with the effort to be acceptable to the Christian God. My mother, although not exactly a fundamentalist, listened (on radio) and watched (after we had a television) every Billy Graham crusade that she could. She occasionally sent in a little money to get an aluminum cross or a glow in the dark Jesus. The standards for me were, as I realized later, totally unrealistic. I was supposed to not get involved with girls romantically, and even less so with boys. I could have friends, but not many, and I was kept from going to school because of “health concerns.” My father attended church and sang in the choir (one of the biggest snake pits in churches.) My father was very proud of his bass voice.
My mother feared that my interest in biology could lead me astray, but she did not forbid it. After all it kept me away from girls (although she did not seem to mind my association with the landlords daughter, who was a bit of a tom boy and with whom I traded postage stamps and looked for bird’s nests in the citrus groves.) I was home-schooled and so in my teen years I had basically two friends (the other being a citrus farmer’s son who lived nearby) until we moved to near Somerton, Arizona, and I lost even that association. This was not too strange to me because in my earlier years I had no playmates and the fields and deserts were my playgrounds. Finally in my thirties I met the love of my life by some happy accident and we had two daughters and eventually added a foster daughter. Between these and my work (which had its bad moments, but was essentially fulfilling) I finally made a life.
In my early days I really tried to believe, and even read the King James Bible from cover to cover. I reached manhood with the distinct idea that I was certainly damned and would never be saved. However, events caught up and because of a series of almost accidental happenings, which I have mentioned in earlier diaries, I wound up in college, my first class being a lab in Zoology taught by (as I found out later) an Atheist. I became friends with both him and his wife, who was also a student and with whom I often had lunch. Obviously I had discovered that Atheists did not have horns and little by little my attempts to believe fell away. Still, I resisted becoming an out and out Atheist and to this day I hold the idea that I simply am not privy to the reason for “life, the universe and everything.” I instead suspect that in fact such knowledge may be unknowable to us jumped up savannah apes.
The above, which has come up at least in part in other diaries, lets the reader know my biases, such as they are, and may explain why I can be friends with people of quite disparate belief systems, from the Wiccan priestess with whom I used to have coffee occasionally, to the Catholic priests, Jewish rabbis, Methodist, Lutheran, and Presbyterian ministers that I knew in the Interfaith Council (I was a Quaker representative for a time), a Muslim graduate student, and the Buddhists that I met at the Zen center, as well as Atheists. If they were not fanatic and tried to push their views on me I could go with “maybe so.”
However, I got to despise fanatics and cultists. As a scientist I realized that belief does not overcome reality in proximate questions. Hurricanes happen when chaotic weather conditions are right, not when some god is angry. But on the other hand I cannot find ultimate answers through science. What, if anything, happened before the Big Bang? Is there a purpose to life? Is there a god (or goddess?) Why did life evolve? Why is there something when there could be nothing? Are we alone? Only the latter question can, as far as I can see, ever be answered at all and that one cannot be answered negatively unless we find some way to examine every world in the universe.
I spent some time out in the field with my Muslim grad student. She was devote and by her belief she was not supposed to be alone with a man other than a relative or her husband. I generally tried to get her my then current female employee as companion in the field, but often I had to be the person to go with her, or send my male employee, who was a tall, blond, blue-eyed Germanic type (he had played a Nazi prison guard in a university play and he was very convincing!) When I was out with her I saw her go from wearing a hijab and long flowing robe to the hijab and blue jeans. It turns out there are a lot of spiny plants in the desert and she was ripping her robes regularly. She once said to me “I know Allah understands my need to do field work and forgives me my transgression.” If we only had more religious people like her! Just before she returned to the Middle East she said goodbye and hugged me! Another no no. I am not at all sure why she did that, but I much appreciated the sentiment.
Both of our daughters have been readers for the Passover Ceremony, although we are not Jewish. I once put together a worship service for the Council with a Presbyterian minister, and when I was Clerk of the local Quaker Meeting I attended both a Catholic pastoral center dedication at the invitation of the Bishop and a Holocaust remembrance ceremony at the local temple having been invited by the Rabbi. As clerk I signed a wedding certificate as the officiating minister for two of our attenders. New Mexico accepted my signature because clerks have been recognized as valid clergy.
Religion can be a source of consolation, but in the wrong hands it becomes a horror and/or a shill. The problems with some religious people is that they take something that they believe to be true and make it universal and absolute. Because President Biden, who is a devote Catholic, recognizes that as president of the country he has no right to dictate his beliefs to non-Catholics, he gets pilloried by hypocritical bishops, who may have little experience with everyday people and who seem to not recognize democracy as a system.
Some Atheists may be no better. Some seem to believe that they can alter society to get rid of all religious ideas, but in the process they create a religion themselves. Some seem to believe that we humans on this speck of dust we call earth will eventually become as gods. Considering the messes we have made on earth I find this view to be unrealistically utopian. However, this does not mean that religion cannot be criticized and a truly religious person should not allow doubt to creep in and be open to changing their beliefs.
We live in a pluralistic society and as religions are based on belief, not data, it seems best to not spend much time, as Jesus put it, worrying about the speck in the other person’s eye, while you have a beam in your own. Perhaps we should include respect for any belief that is not obviously harmful to society, such as human sacrifice or inquisition.
To sum up my attitude: I don’t know and neither do you! As Darwin said (although somewhat sexist):
“Let each man hope and believe what he can.”