Midwestern Goddess

And then last night I realized something.

I’m hooked again.

We are not our thoughts, yet my mind regarding this matter keeps going in circles and circles and circles.

And so – I’m just going to rest in the moment.

I don’t know if there is a God.

I sure as hell don’t believe in the Christian God.

I attempt to follow the Dharma.

And that must be enough.

So, I spent way too much time last night talking this over with my husband.  But, I feel a bit clearer on what I am really exploring:

1) Does “God” in any way shape or form exist?

2) If so, do I equate “God” with the Christian God?

3) How do I define morals as being essential to life?

4) How does one have a healthy, positive spirituality that is not God based?

My husband told me that my equation of Christian God in all of this is probably because that was what I last left.  That was the last stopping sign on the journey.  I also was indoctrinated to it through religious abuse, so I need to have compassion with myself for having this keep coming up.

I also have to have compassion with myself that this questioning process may last longer than 30 days.  And that is okay.

I can’t believe how much joy I have in this journey.  I don’t really understand why, to be honest.  It’s sort of like the first time you come home and you realize it’s yours.  You can place your coffee cup on the end table, choose not to put your laundry away, and eat nothing but left over chinese all week and there is no parental unit to tell you what a worthless piece of shit you are for doing so.

So, I guess my shoes are off and my stinky feet are on the couch and I’m philosophizing about life with a cup of chai in my hand.  Wanna have a chat?

Today I met with a friend of mine that I haven’t seen in two years.  She’s Christian.  It works for her.  She was a bit shocked about my experience, and it led me to think about something….

Why am I angry at this concept of “God” and it seems I am only angry at the concept of a Christian God?  I am not having this discussion about Zeus, Thor, Artemis, or any of the other Gods I’ve researched in my day.  I am totally dismissing them from the equation.  When I am talking about God, mentally, I am having the mental construct of Christianity and all the bells and whistles that goes on with that.

So… today I confront the fact that I am going on a journey to be Godless and where I am is being Christian-Godless.  Wow.

This totally intrigues me.  I have often noted that people who worship “other Gods” have a habit of tacking on a pair of breasts and a vagina to YHWH and call him Goddess.  Not a lot of difference there.  Even in my delvings of neo-Paganism, perhaps, deep down in the back of my mind I was thinking about paganizing a Christian concept.   Because honestly, I’ve spent about as much of my time as a Wiccan/Neo-Pagan as I have as a Christian.  Just felt guilty as hell for doing so.

How to proceed?  How do I pick myself up from this ton of bricks that has fallen on me?

Well, I enjoyed the rain today.  I like the serenity of watching it hit the ground.  I didn’t have those thoughts in the back of my mind telling me I should be “doing something” or I “shouldn’t be enjoying this rain” because it may upset someone, somewhere.  I enjoyed it for what it was.  Rain.  Rain doing rainy things.

And I totally enjoyed conversations with friends today without feeling terrified.  I remember being so filled with anxiety (and it wasn’t that long ago) every time I talked to someone.  (I often wonder about if that was tied with people who like to “critique” what/how you say something.  Perhaps I had too much of that happening during my formative years) Today I didn’t have these feelings.  I just enjoyed being “in the moment” with the person.

I am having much joy from this journey – I think because it’s like mentioning the elephant in the room.  It’s there.  Let’s talk about it.  Perhaps religion DOES poison everything it touches.  Perhaps God is NOT real.  Perhaps its for those reasons alone that I am enjoying what I am exploring- and being unafraid of the consequences of asking the question.

Or perhaps it’s just damn fun to explore?

I was lying on the couch last night trying desperately to sleep and came up with the idea of blogging about this.  I wonder what other people do who take this journey?  Do they talk to other people, do they stop reading the books that they enjoyed?  I tossed, I turned.

God for so many people is a non-issue.  Really, if you think about it, a God-concept is.  Whether or not God exists does not change the fact that I go to work Saturday, or that I have a 4 year old I have to make lunch for today.  I still must do laundry, kiss my husband, and figure out how to live life in a positive way that helps others – this does not change whether or not God exists.  Yet, I have seen many people use their belief system as a badge of rightness (and to judge other people for wrongness) and may have been guilty about it myself.

What does God mean to me?  If I exclude all my emotion from this and what society would have me say, intellectually I would say God is the answer to the great mystery.  We don’t know how the universe started.  Hence, God.  We don’t know how evolution really works, hence God.  I don’t know why I missed getting hit by that car while I was at work, hence God.  God is the mushy playdough that we stick into the cracks of our lives that we don’t understand and can’t hope to figure out.  We call that God.

Then, because we are human we want to box that.  We want to give it a name, an outfit (toga, dress, tentacles) and have it neat and wrapped up in a perfectly acceptable package to our senses.  God is like Grandma, and also has white hair.  God is like the mean principal who beat you before it was illegal to harm a child.  God gets compared to anything and everything around us, and can no longer be the grand question mark that was its beginning.

God for me always … just was.  Or is.  Just one more denominator to figure out in a world that was already to complex and confusing to hope to understand.

Or… is it?

I was raised, very early on, on the desperate need to have faith.  Not just any faith – I was raised to have an obsessive desire to find Jesus Christ by two non-church going Fundamentalist Christians who had the ultimate fear that perhaps they hadn’t done enough, said the right words, believed the “right” doctrine.  I was raised to have faith in “Jeeezuuuussss  Chriiiiiist” and no other would do.

Do to this belief, and a lack of desire to get me baptized (which would have guaranteed my entrance in to the ultimate after life, an orgy of harp playing and moaning in ecstasy about how wonderful J.C. truly IS) I was forced many times to kneel, over and over, and reaccept him.  I was told that 7 was a magic number, and if I could hopefully die before age 7 I could go to heaven.  I would have been bound for hell due to my unwet status, unless, maybe, one of those magic incantations would have opened the Golden Door for me.

I needed faith to counteract not being baptized.  That much was clear.

But…….

Where?  What?  How?

I did not understand how going to heaven and worshipping a Narcissistic deity is some kind of “ultimate afterlife” at the time.  I started exploring New Age religions that had deities that were openly crazy, rather than the knife-behind-the-back-never-know-when-he’s-going-to-get-you kind in Christianity.  I, who knew that there must be SOME faith out there, SOME how that would calm the storm inside of me, started what seemed to be a never-ending quest.  I never stopped too consider an important possibility.

Maybe God doesn’t exist.

Maybe ANY God doesn’t exist.

Maybe MY God doesn’t exist.

Maybe God ISN’T. (as opposed to I AM)

Enter last year when I encountered a woman who had been healed by Jesus who was incapable of healthy relationships with other human beings.  I’m not faulting her for that – God knows (hehe) I also have my issues with two-legged deer, but she went over and beyond what was considered dysfunctional.  My husband and I did not handle it properly – waited too long to talk to the pastor, etc.  As a result the woman in question was able to place strategic people, plead her case, and essentially close the door of OUR church to us.(Yeah, we were card carrying members to.  I think part of the problem was we didn’t have a ton of money to give, and Christianity is nothing if not a business.)

I went from this situation into feeling – experiencing – extreme emotional pain.  I found it-odd.  I have always dissociated myself from my emotions as a coping mechanism, so to feel this was totally new.  I had encountered something I was unprepared for – that the faith that was instilled in me as a child was just as evil and dysfunctional as my childhood.

My husband and I had some synchronistic events happen -enough that we thought that it was time, perhaps we could go back.  (The woman in question has moved 2 hours away and no longer attends this church- a big factor in our decision.)  We met with the pastor and were told that if we came back we had to pretend we were new.  We were not to talk to any people that we knew before.  We could not mention anything that had happened.  It wouldn’t be “good for the church.”  (Initially this wasn’t his reaction, so my husband and I feel he was “prepped” by someone on her side before meeting us.)  He fished a bit to see if there were any other churches we had attended they maybe could shove us into to meet his “Christian duty.”

Yeah, I can have my church back.  I just have to be a goddamn liar to get it back.

Thanks, but No Thanks.

From that experience I started clinging to faith.  Desperately trying to figure out what the right one is.  Christianity isn’t.  If there was a God-this situation would have never happened.  There would have been some sense of justice.  I have heard the excuses that there is a flesh nature, they don’t have to change, etc.  I don’t believe even Christians truly believe in a God – or why do they act the way that they do?  They wouldn’t.

Christianity is political.  Pure and simple.

So, now I rest in a place where perhaps there IS no God.  Perhaps God does NOT exist.  Instead of running to another theism to try to make sense of my world, perhaps I just need to come to terms with there is no sense to be found in the world.  This is what I am going to explore.

So as a result I am going to start a 30 day blog experiencing life through someone who chooses not to believe in God.  Some entries may be thoughtful, some short, some really redundant – but I’m going for the exploration of a topic that I have for a long time been very afraid to face.

How would my life be different if I didn’t believe in God?