Do you believe in God?

Do you believe in multiple Gods?

Do you think that belief in God must include participation in a particular religion?

These are the questions I have always asked myself and only this year, do I finally feel like I have the answer.

God, yes… Religion, nah… not for me.

I did not grow up in a religious family. While I was told I was “christened” in an Anglican church, I had no idea what Anglicanism was. We did not go to church on Sundays. I don’t even know if anyone in my family believes in God. It just wasn’t a thing we discussed.

I don’t know why it was never discussed. We are not one of those polite families who keep religion, politics, or other prickly topics out of conversation.

To be honest, I’m not even sure if my aunts and uncles attended church as kids either. I think I once heard something about my paternal side being part of the catholic church, but that would have been long before I was born.

I suppose I have never really bothered to ask them.

So, it seems especially odd to me that I would have this life-long curiosity about God and religion without having any basis for it.

Perhaps you feel the same way? What drives folks to seek out God and religion and spirituality?

Is it an age thing, as we draw closer to death – to find comfort? Is it a loneliness thing, and wanting to feel part of a community or something larger than ourselves? Or maybe it is wanting to have faith and putting the control of your life and outcomes into the hands of a higher power that is the driving force.

Not for me.

I have been interested in God and religion since a young age. I am far too introverted to want to be part of some big community and I have a very strong locus of internal control… I believe that my actions and decisions are exactly why I am who I am.

I guess what it boils down to is that I have no idea why I have been so interested in God, religion, spirituality, and everything else that comes in the bundle.

I suppose I have always been fascinated that so many people are able to have faith without proof. I know the whole point of faith is you don’t need proof, but I mean that premise just seems like such a made-up concept to get people to follow along.

I guess I have always felt the same way about religious texts.

I don’t really understand when people say that the bible, for example, is the word of God. Is it?

At the very least we can all certainly agree that religious texts are written by humans. Really, we don’t even know for sure that the chapters are written by the folk they are attributed to.  

I know that some religious texts are meant to be the recorded word of God, as heard by someone that God communicated with directly. But how can that even be trusted? Wouldn’t it be the interpretation of that human that we are reading? Have you ever played broken telephone?

I think something that has also always bothered me about religion and religious texts is that we take these writings and rules and hold them as true and exacting. To the point that we are willing to go to war and kill people who have different beliefs!

That is a pretty wild concept when you really think about it.

Why would a God need people to fight over their rules? Why wouldn’t a God just intercede and let us all know what the “right” rules are to live by instead of allowing humans to create multitudes of waring factions?

It just doesn’t make sense to me.

How is it that people think their religion is the “one true religion” when for example, it is a newly developed religion? Or a religion that was created so that a king could get a divorce? Or a religion developed by a science fiction writer?

I am obviously not capable of this blind faith when it comes to religion. I know that now.

I tried. I really did.

I lived in Toronto housing for a large portion of my childhood. One of the cool things about that in the 80’s and 90’s is that a lot of services came directly to us in the neighbourhood.

For example, there was no library near us for quite some time, so we had a bookmobile that would visit the apartments every other week.

Another great example is transportation. It is always an issue for those struggling with finance, so services would send school buses to the apartments on Sunday to bring folks to their local church.

As you know, I didn’t have a church. But some of my friends did.

On one Sunday, a friend invited me to attend a Baptist church service with them.  It was lively, and fun and there was lots of singing.

But it had a mostly black congregation, and I didn’t feel comfortable because a few of the men had made gross comments to me like the classic “once you go black you don’t go back”.

I was nine at the time.

I didn’t know exactly what they were saying to me meant, but I knew it was creepy.

I thanked my friend for inviting me, but I did not go back.

And obviously that isn’t an indictment on all Baptist churches… it was just my particular experience that started my red flags about religion.

When I was about 12 years old, I attended a Greek Orthodox baptism/christening. It was really interesting. There was burning of holy oil, and it smelled so amazing. But the ceremony was in Greek, so I had no idea what was being said.

Another time when I was about 14 years old, I was invited by a friend to come to their Catholic Church service. It was Easter so apparently it was a very important service. I remember a lot of standing and sitting. No singing. Half the service was in English, and half was in Latin.

I didn’t feel any connection to the sermon. It was an odd choice for Easter, I think. He spoke about the increasing “homosexual’ problem in the city. This would have been 1995.

It didn’t feel like the word of God being delivered. It felt like a man in black, on the pulpit, spouting his personal belief and using the word of God to back up his hate.

I have never understood the religious belief that God is all powerful, all knowing, etc. But for some reason, he is unable to deal with people being gay and it is somehow up to man to fix it.

Big red flag for me.

Everything I knew of the bible and Christianity and Jesus/God, for that matter, was that we were supposed to be kind and charitable to each other. That courtesy was supposed to be extended to everyone.

I went away from my exploration of religion and God in my later teens and early twenties.

I did not believe in God.

I was fine living my life without God and religion. It was what was normal to me. I did not feel any sort of longing or missing piece.

But when I was in my 3rd year of university, a friend who was also a coworker started talking to me about her own experience with religion and I was intrigued. I had tremendous respect for her as a person, so I agreed to come along to a service.

My friend came from a deeply religious background. Her whole family on both sides as far back as she knew were Pentecostal. In fact, they held very important roles in the church all throughout North America.

I attended my first service with her and was a bit of a mixed bag for me.

The service was really fun. They had a live band that played along to the religious songs that everyone belted out throughout service. The message was really positive, happy and I felt mostly welcomed, truly.

Mostly welcomed.

The parishioners of this church stuck to the Pentecostal rules pretty strictly. Women were not to wear pants, nor makeup, nor cut their hair. Clothes that were allowed had to be very modest.

It was definitely a patriarchal society, taking the bible literally at every turn.

Red Flags for sure.

But I had so much respect for my friend, and she had lived both inside and outside of this religious world and said she was much happier inside. So, I tried to understand.

I still wore pants and makeup and cut my hair.

But I did attend church twice a week and bible study once a week to really try to get deep into it and see if I felt that connection to God.

I did not.

In service, people would often shout out, speaking in tongues or other languages and I just thought it was ridiculous. I really tried. I opened my heart and prayed and begged for God to let me speak in tongues too so I would know it was all real.

It didn’t happen.

I was even baptised as an adult to see if that could bring me closer to God.

It didn’t.

At some point, I was pressured into giving a “testimony” about how the church had changed my life. I made something up and I don’t even remember what I said but I just didn’t want to let my friend down.

I think maybe other people feel like that too. They just go along with whatever religion they are indoctrinated in because they don’t want to let someone down or be the outsider.

It isn’t worth it.

If you see the red flags, if you don’t agree with the message, get out.

After nearly a year of trying, I stopped attending the church.

But it wasn’t even all the red flags that got me to stop. I was too weak of character back then.

It was because my grandmother had recently passed away and they announced that in the church as a way to ask for thoughts and prayers of a passed loved one. It is actually a very nice sentiment.

At the end of the ceremony while I was waiting to leave, a man approached me and asked if my grandmother had been baptized. I said that no, I didn’t think so. And he said – Oh too bad, she’s going to hell then.

That was it for me.

I never went back.

And not only did I never go back, but I never even considered God or religion again.

I was happy to be back as an atheist or agnostic or whatever I would be called. I even joined the Humanist Canada society at one point; so steadfast in my anti-religion stance that I was.

Fast-forward to this past year, and I am now 43 years old.

I am talking to a friend who is a psychic-medium by profession.

I tell her that sometimes I get these repeating messages in my head that I don’t understand. For example, I kept hearing in my head over-and-over a message for a childhood friend of my cousin’s that I barely knew!

It was incessant.

Finally, I sent him a FB message saying – hey, I know this is weird but I think I have a message for you… He actually received it really well and said that he completely understood what the message meant.

It happened a few more times, four times in total to be exact.

The fourth time was actually a message for my psychic medium friend, which is why I was talking to her about it in the first place.

She also received the message well and told me she had been dealing with and talking about those exact issues for the past few days.

This was all super weird to me. I didn’t believe in God or Angels or messages from beyond.

But she listened to me and suggested I read the book “Conversations with God” by Neale Donald Walsch.

I borrowed it from the library the next day and it changed my life.

To be honest, I don’t love the author’s writing style and I will say straight up that in some parts it can be a difficult read because of it, but if you can stick with it, it is pretty amazing.

The author purports to have conversations with God where he asks questions to God in his head, God answers and the author writes it all down.

Where have we heard this premise before? See above, way up, earlier in this post!

What was different here was the information relayed. The basis of which was exactly a 100% match to my own beliefs about what God would say and want if they existed.

It allowed me to understand that you can have a belief in God or a relationship with God without having to participate in religion.

The two do not have to go hand-in-hand.

I can continue to just be a kind, caring, and charitable person because I want to and because I should… not because it falls in line with what the religious text of the day says.

Of course, I will write more in other posts about the book and what it says and its impact on my life.

But for now, I will say this:

I finally feel free to explore this side of spirituality without being told what to wear, or who to listen to or when to bow down or which people are unworthy of kindness.

In fact, this is the first time in my life that if I was asked to describe what it feels like to be close to God, I would actually have a genuine and personal answer.

And I mean, to each their own, but for me…

God, yes… Religion, nope… no thank you!

Remember, you don’t have to be an expert to have an opinion!

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