Reply #56: Was I insinuating that about you? Sorry.

[hunter]

Let's see if I can dig myself into this hole a little deeper...

I think a few months back I described religion as an art. Even if one doesn't believe in God, one can accept almost any religion as an art so long as its practitioners are not reaching out and oppressing non-believers.

Many non-Catholics visit Catholic churches just to see the art. Inside the churches most of these visitors are quiet and respectful; to a certain extent they become part of the practice of the art. (Of course there are often disrespectful yahoos too who are only visiting because some tour book said they had to, and they laugh and joke around, take rude flash pictures, and generally make fun of things.) But so long as visitors are not being disrespectful, and even though visitors may not believe in God (especially a Catholic God!) for a moment they become part of that Catholic spiritual journey.

In a similar way I might be visiting an art museum with an atheist who finds the works of Edgar Degas to be spiritually uplifting. I'm not a big fan of Degas, but I'm not going to say anything derogatory about the artwork, especially not while my friend is on a pilgrimage to see his work. In fact, as I'm standing there while she silently takes it in, I myself might see something that makes me appreciate Degas a little more than I did.

Many people feel severely oppressed by the religions they grow up with and they eventually abandon them. A friend of mine grew up in a very fundamentalist household where her father's word was law, and his law was God's law as interpreted by his church. Unfortunately for my friend, she found herself sexually attracted to women. That conflict alone caused her to reject her parent's religion entirely, but not before she'd hurt herself and a lot of other people along the way. But other than being a lesbian with children married to another woman, most of her political attitudes are still fairly conservative.

Likewise, I've met several paleontologists who were raised as creationists but first engaged in the study of paleontology as a joyful act of rebellion against their parent's religion.

"Take this, Mom and Dad! Now you'll have to tell all your friends I'm an Evolutionary Biologist!"

"Um, our son? Oh he's an ev..., ahem, Biologist... something about gene frequencies, it's all so complicated these days...

The saddest souls I know are those who have abandoned their fundamentalist faith and stopped traveling down any roads of further spiritual development. They remain homophobic, xenophobic, anti-intellectual bigots who no longer believe in their god. Some may not confess this and still go to church, which would make them closet atheists, I suppose.

I once had a truly depressing exchange with a fundamentalist whose daughter had died of anorexia. Clearly this fellow had lost his faith, but he hadn't lost any of the trappings of it. He was still extremely homophobic, and had simply replaced biblical prohibitions of homosexuality with claims that it was "against nature." He was still an anti-evolutionist. And he hated Catholics. In his eyes I was pretty much damned on all three counts, I just wasn't God Damned.

I very much understand atheist's reluctance to discuss human spirituality because I've seen how some religious people will immediately jump on that and claim, "Aha! There's God in you, you just don't know it!" which is a perfectly valid reason to get pissed off.

My own spirituality is linked to my religion, but I don't see religion as a necessity of human spiritual expression. I can also see how this link between my spirituality and my religion could sometimes be a handicap, especially when I'm communicating with people who don't share it.