My Trip to Christendom

Tell me all your thoughts on God,
‘cause I'd really like to meet her,
And ask her where and who we are.

Tell me all your thoughts on God,
‘cause I'm on my way to see her.
So tell me, am I very far? Am I very far now?
-Dishwalla, "Counting Blue Cars"

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I’ve been writing now for several months and I’ve made more than a few allusions to God and religion, but I don’t think I’ve ever spelled out my own personal thoughts on the subject. From my perspective, a person’s thoughts on God are important and I will almost invariably raise the question during the ‘getting to know you’ stage. The interesting thing, I think, is that I’m not at all concerned with whether or not they believe in God, per se. I’m more concerned with how they reached their conclusion.

Some people, I’ve found, believe whole-stock what their parents taught them. Others feel quite the opposite. Still others had religious awakenings later in life, high school or college maybe. Some others are still searching. Some others never began searching. Some concluded that they cannot know. A few have concluded that he does not exist. A few have concluded that they are to love him with all their heart. I’m probably none of these, but here’s my story.

I was raised in an Orthodox Christian home. We went to church every Sunday. I attended Sunday school after my church grew large enough to have one. At some point in time, I even taught Sunday school. When we first started going to Church, the congregation was about 50 people on any given Sunday. It may have doubled or tripled in size by high school.

From 3rd grade through college, I had a Catholic education. In elementary and middle school, it was an order of nuns whose name escapes me at the moment. In high school, the Christian Brothers. In College, the Jesuits. Even my law school had a religious affiliation at some point in the not so distant past.

When I got to college, among the other freedoms I enjoyed, I decided that I didn’t have to go to church anymore. I didn’t particularly care for it growing up. Religion, to me, became a solitary, intellectual exercise, as opposed to a communal, celebratory one. I turned to philosophy to answer the question of God’s existence once and for all.

I read all of the arguments. Aquinas. Anselm. Origin. Augustine. Pascal. Descartes. Kierkegaard. I wasn’t particularly moved by any of them. Perhaps it was my stage in life, but I was drawn more to the skeptics – Hume, Freud, Frauerbach, Marx – and finally the existentialists – Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre. It was with Sartre that I closed the book on the question of God’s existence. He basically argued that it didn’t matter. Whether or not God exists, one must still choose how he is to live his life. That is to say, God does not function, as most would want him to, as guarantor of one’s actions. Good is good and bad is bad, regardless of whether or not God exists. Put in another way, wrong did not become right because God proclaimed it so. There was, of course, the alternative position raised by Christian existentialist Dostoevsky that if God does not exists, then all is permissible. I, however, sided with Nietzsche who argued that even if God did not exist, human artists could invent the good by which we were to abide. The task then became to create an ethics.

That’s in part why the clubhouse was first created – to help me figure out how to live life, to answer life’s big questions. But, as it’s evolved, I’ve tended to avoid the big questions, as such, and, instead, cut and paste little truths from my every-days so that the entire project will speak something true about the whole of my life. Still, the big questions invariably creep in every now and then, especially the question of God’s existence, which I shelved some seven years ago.

My most recent awaking came when I entertained the startling possibility that I went about the problem of religion all wrong. I went about looking at it from the outside-in. That is, if God exists (out there somewhere), then I will believe in him (in here, in my heart). What originally followed from this is that I was to find out if God existed in the objective world. But suppose I were to look at it in the inverse, from the inside-out. That is, if I have a subjective religious spirit (in here), then what does that say about him (out there)? Interestingly enough, the impetus for this inversion of my thought process was a line from a Miller Williams’ poem – “I let him do it because it made me feel good/ To have somebody think that way about me. / It had nothing at all to do with him.” – about a woman cheating on her husband!

This is, of course, what Descartes was up to centuries ago when he argued that our notion of god is a priori (literally, ‘prior to’ experience) evidence of his existence. It was his thumb-print on our souls, if you will. The fact that I don’t “believe” in God is secondary to the fact that I have a religious spirit, the Cartesian thumb-print. What I’ve noticed is that some people do not have this religious spirit. Others do. I wondered, then, if I was actually more similar to a theist than non-theists, and whether or not, as a consequence, I’d feel more at home in a community of people with religious spirits. In a word, maybe I should go to… church.