Unbelievable

***One of my favorite bloggers is Harry T. Cook. I've been receiving his essays by email for several years now, on the recommendation of a friend of mine who is also a former religionist. What I like about Harry is that despite decades of education and faithful practice as an Episcopalian priest he eventually came to the realization that religion as mostly BS. I don't agree with him completely in that I would go further and call it poison.

In a recent essay, "Believing, We Do Not Believe, he begins with

    "Among the many readers of these essays are a number of older, mostly retired members of the clergy. They are Roman Catholics, Episcopalians, Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, several rabbis [former Christian Scientists like me] and others who can no longer identify fully -- if at all -- with their religious pasts."

 ...
    A few of them have become convinced that, for example, most of the Bible is pure myth. I think they are wrong about that, but the point is that they had to deal with biblical passages for their whole ordained ministry and evidently felt constrained to treat many of them more or less as historical reportage. Some of them express relief at no longer having to put on such an act week after week.

Speaking from experience I can say that the acting doesn't come on suddenly. It accrues over many years, and for too many years before the spell is broken life is more or less an agony as the disparity between profession and understanding becomes wider.

I'm one of those who have concluded that the Bible is mostly a pack of myths, propaganda and outright lies. What isn't in those categories is pretty good, but doesn't need the Bible or theistic agencies to give them credibility. They are constituents of what might be called secular humanism in drag. As the billboards say: we don't need a god in order to be good.

Harry goes on to recommend a book by Elaine Pagels, which I have read, where she cites an experience she had walking into a church during the depths of her faith crisis. Even though she had known that church doctrines were unsupported by science or reason, she "fell in love" with that church. I think the import of his statement is that the church provided something essential to her as a human being, a kind of comfort that helps some people bear up under their disillusionments. I have heard this also from many others who claim that the true value of religion, and its churches, is to provide that comfort regardless of the challenges life presents them.

Just as most drugs have various degrees of negative side effects, the drug of religious comfort has costs to the believer. Those costs are too high for some of us, while others struggle to bear up. Regardless, the problem is that religion always wants to point to a deific source for that comfort instead of recognizing that human nature is complex and susceptible to many influences. So many of the recent studies on the brain illustrate that susceptibility and the wide range of influences —  none of them deific. To some of us, the blatant unreasonableness of spiritual concepts is untenable, to the point of causing extreme anxiety and bizarre behavior. Maybe stalwarts like Cook can stand being in the same room with believers and their proclamations. I can't.

As I've stated before, it's not that I have found an exact replacement for the drug-induced comfort of religion. Indeed, I would have to say that the pains of living without that drug are sometimes overwhelming.

Recently I attended a funeral for a dear friend of mine. The service was held in the Unitarian church that for decades I would see from the parking lot of my Christian Science church directly across the street. Sometimes I'd deride that sect for being wishy-washy for having no real god to believe in. And yet, my recent experience at that church, and my contact with the pastor, were so comforting that I said to her: In another context this would be the church I would attend because it provides comfort without exacting a profession of faith in an unreal supernatural being.

As a person of reason I can't bear the hypocrisy of eloquence in defense of bullshit, which I think was one of my special talents during those personal Dark Ages. These days, this blog is my main antidote to the poison I spread for 30+ years as a Christian Scientist. I really don't want another platform from which to rail against religion. I don't have time for it at my age. And besides, religion is doing a very good job of poisoning itself.

I like Harry and recommend him to real thinkers both within and without the ranks of religion, spirituality or whatever label applies to belief in things that are unbelievable by nature. But unlike Harry, I would claim to be Unbelieving, We Still Do Not Believe.