Going To Church, Still: Part I

I AWAKENED EARlY, and arose, never having slept well. I am part of the problem, the national epidemic of sleeplessness. There are befefits to that, but fewer benefits than detriments. Today I will attend church for what according to my calculations is at least the sixth consecutive week, a personal record by far. Never before have I attended two weeks in a row. I may continue the streak for awhile, because I am truly enjoying the experience. I think I could go to church at any Christian church in the world for a million weeks in a row and still despise the Christian religion, but still enjoy church, especially if I sang in the choir. Much, of course, would depend on the minister, and the nature of his or her sermons. My liberalism causes me to abhore fundamentalist hell fire versus salvation inerrant blblical literalist theology. Give me a liberal, new agey orientation, and I'm good to go. Love and peace. Imagine. Part of the reason I have been going is to get myself out in the community and to particpate in it. In that context I am tempted to try a bigger church, with a congregation of more than twelve. By attending a little way out in the country church I am, to an extant, defeating my own purpose. A mega church with hundreds or thousands of congregants would be tempting, would afford me a chance to meet women, which is tempting but not a priority. Never in my life have I been a regular church goer, and never in my life have I been fully committed to tracking down a woman and marrying her. I can appreciate the finer things in life from a distance, vicariously. I think i might be happy to become ensconced within any of the world's more than four thousd religions and their rituals and ceremonies, but again, as an outsider, as a perpetual visitor, not as a member. I don't like religion, and will never be religious, nor a devout votary of any religion, large or small. Any religion I might choose would have to include teaching, learning, lecturing, sermonizing. The ritual and ceremony I tolerate, but do not accept. I took communion for the first time a few weeks ago, and will probably accede to it again, not because I think it anything other than barbaric, symbolic cannibalism, but becasue it is, in a tangible sense, harmless, and, at my current church, it came to me, I did not have to go to it, kneel, genuflect, and have it shoved into my mouth. More than four thousand organized religions in the world, fifteen hundred in the United States, half christian sects, half other. And still, most religious people of the world, certainly the most devout ones, insist that theirs and only theirs is the one true faith. The idiocy of this nonsense is palpable, laughable. I depise people who think that way. Any religion, all religion, is simply the invention of the human mind, of primitve culture, an anachronism in today's world where science gives us the closest thing to truth. And just so you'll know, there is no anthropomorphic God up in the sky, looking down on us, anwwering prayers.And the Bible was written by people and only people, no more divinely inspired than Waldon Pond or Catcher in the Rye. I thank my pantheistic God that that primitive nonsense is not the reason I go to church, and never will be.