The god thing

Half my background is Catholic. That isn't the same as practising Catholicism. I don't. There's an undeniable cultural pull, but I also get cultural identity from being a Northern New Englander. The latter identifies me with far fewer hypocrites and pedophiles.

Used to be that anti-Catholicism was the sole remaining fashionable prejudice, easily detectable in Protestants of almost every flavour (with the possible exception of Episcopalians, who are locked into ambivalence on the subject.) Even Catholics can be anti-Catholic. Now, anti-humanism is becoming the religious prejudice of choice, and I could be mistaken for a humanist more than for a Catholic.

Mistaken, yes. Apart from an interest in Buddhism (I like the idea of a religion that requires neither hate nor deity) and animism (no burning crosses there either) I'm a-religious and a-theistic. Reminder, the 'a' prefix means "without," not "violently opposed to." The hostility of the faithful to atheism is as perfect a demonstration of projection as I've ever seen. The "desert religions" have made a career out of hatred and slaughter of opponents for millennia. It's inevitable that they expect someone who rejects them would want to do the same.
Similarly, adherents of the desert religions seem incapable of grasping absence of theology. It is they who have created the straw man of "secular humanism," endowing absence of blind faith with the attributes of blind faith. Regrettably, some fools have accepted the label. No thanks, I'll pass. Absence means absence. To me, the whole idea of faith is one of those quirky bugs in human construction, a mental vermiform appendix. Like the appendix, as long as faith just sits there, there's no reason to disturb it. When it becomes swollen with toxins, you have to cut it out in a hurry before it kills you. Unlike the appendix, diseased faith wiring kills other people as well.

Reading Harold Bloom is a lot like eating my late mother's Christmas fudge recipe. I know I shouldn't. I realise the high fat and sugar content will make my teeth hurt and my stomach upset... yet I eat the stuff up. From this regrettable Bloom addiction I've learnt two things: that Harold Bloom is one of Harold Bloom's premier figures of Western Civilisation, and that "the American religion" may very well not be Christian at all. Bloom's Jewish heritage leads him to heights of paranoia on the subject that even his apostrophes can't match, but I suspect there's something in it. It's even more interesting to discover that there are some Christians still abroad in the land, both evangelical and conventional, that they rather agree with Bloom, and that they call this stuff heresy.

I do so love it when mine enemies fall out: it saves a lot of trouble.

I hold the Marxist-Leninists responsible for the survival — and prospering — of religion in the former USSR and China, and the more self-serving brand of Western consumer secularist for American evangelism as well as a piece of Islamic fundamentalism. The desert religions in particular thrive on persecution: when it doesn't exist, they'll try to invent it. Communism and consumerism alike are guilty of enabling this persecution psychosis.

If one is serious about moving beyond religion, the first step is to resist the impulse to throttle the lot and simply to indulge their fantasy. I'd like to hold an international convention of unbelievers. If we could all agree to let all these faiths have their own way (while we hide under rocks), I think they'd be gone in a couple of generations. Most would kill each other off. The survivors would have a blinding epiphany, realising that no one was persecuting them because no one really cared what boogymen they worried about.

My main problems with religions are:

A. The propensity to kill people who disagree with you. In societies that frown on random killings, that works out to keeping those people out of your neighbourhood, family, workplace or country club. Same input; different output.
B. The habit of avoiding personal responsibility by shifting it all onto God.
C. The irritating obsession with shoving one's beliefs and values down other people's throats.

I have no problem with non-toxic superstitions, whether they involve rabbit's feet, rally hats, or the choice of sans-serif or serif fonts. Should the desert religions detoxify, I'd happily expand my benign tolerance to them.

I think I'll credit my father with my skepticism. On the one hand, his empiricism posed a positive example. On the other hand, he came up with the idea of the boogyman that hid in the back of the cellar of the house we occupied when I was very small. Before we moved, those two ideas collided inside me and I went to see the boogyman. Never found him: it was just a crawl space full of dirt.

Where do I expect to spend eternity? I'll have my ashes spread in the White Mountains, where they'll nourish something growing and sustain the cycle of life for a while.