The Great Unifier

Do you practice religion?

If there is one thing that we can all agree on, it’s religion. Not.

Do I practice religion? It’s difficult to say really. I wasn’t brought up to be religious. My interest lay in logic, and reason, and science. I was a big fan of star trek. Arthur C Clarke was my all time favourite author. There was no Sunday school for me, no baptism or confessions. The school dutifully served up parables and had us singing hymns with all the enthusiasm of a stale loaf of bread. I was led down the path of atheism.

I had to be an atheist. It was the only thing that made sense as a reductionist consciousness living in a material universe. Anything else was an absurdity, wishful thinking, or a means to control the gullible population.

And yet, my relationship with God was always a strong one. How could it not be? We are one with the divine.

My very earliest memories, from my very earliest years, they are obviously very vague. How can we process and store the vast amounts of experiences and sensations without any context? We can’t, but there are still memories. I remember being a toddler, barely able to walk or talk. I remember being shoed away from the things that weren’t for me, dangerous or fragile. But at that time, I remember the presence of God, always there, speaking, indistinguishable from the rest of the world.

I’ve had more than a couple of paranormal or spiritual encounters. Warnings on high that have saved my life in one way or another. Ghosts, premonitions, inexplicable things in the sky, and even a broadcast message from the future, I shit you not.

If you find yourself paying any sort of attention to the nature of what it is to be alive in the universe, we come across all manner of intractable problems. Questions such as why is there something and not nothing? What happened before the big bang? What even is consciousness?

It turns out that we’ve been asking these questions for thousands of years, and the more we learn, the less we can be certain of anything at all. Quantum mechanics tells us that the universe doesn’t even exist when we’re not looking at it. It’s almost as if all of this is in our head.

Nothing came from nothing, Cordelia, but the universe did. The unfathomably massive entirety of everything is thought to have a net energy of zero. In aggregate, the universe doesn’t exist. Everything leads to metaphysics.

Religion is villainised by atheists as the domain of ignorance and they shower it, and its followers, with ridicule. They attack its values and lore with nitpicks, but in doing so, they miss the point.

I certainly didn’t arrive at religion from a place of ignorance. I had the full atheist mindset for a long time, and it was only with thorough questioning of everything that I realised that atheism was the lie, not religion. The bible is not a means to control, though it undeniably can be hijacked by the ideologues for nefarious ends, but that’s to miss the point. The bible isn’t a blueprint for a kind society, it’s a guide on how to live a good life, and it’s purely serendipitous that a great society will emerge from a population that lived a noble and courageous truthful life.

Do I practice religion? Well, I don’t go to church, but I do practice gratitude, when I remember. Gratitude for the life we have gives us solace and serenity. I also try to live by truth because lying splits our spirit across multiple versions of reality, of which only one is true and the rest cannot last. Jesus taught us that we must go through hell to know heaven. If we think not of the afterlife, but as analogues for daily life, we know that nothing worthwhile is ever easy, nothing in abundance has value.

It’s possible to assimilate these lessons without incurring religion, but even a narrow thread of intellectual integrity must admit that there is a ‘why’ to be accounted for, and that is a question only for religion. And when recognising this, the benefits of practicing religion become obvious.