I imagine some day one of my son’s friends will mention something about church and that will probably lead my son to ask why we don’t go. The answer is simple enough: I don’t believe in god. Of course, I can’t imagine that will be the end of the conversation. He’ll probably want to know why I don’t believe in god and maybe even what I do believe in. This is my attempt to answer that.

I was baptized Catholic. I don’t have many early childhood memories, but many of the ones I do have revolve around the church. I loved church when I was a kid. I don’t remember much about the sermons, but I loved the music and Sunday school and getting to play with my friends after and eat donuts. I don’t remember having donuts except for at church, so that was a pretty big deal. I remember Halloween parties in which we dressed as our favorite Biblical figure and Christmas parties, and one year I even got to be Mary on the Christmas parade float.

I was actually a bit obsessed with Mary and little baby Jesus. Since birth I had been called by my middle name, but I even went through a phase where I wanted to be called by my first name – Mary – because it was the same name as the mother of sweet little baby Jesus whom I loved so. I don’t remember caring or thinking much about the grown up Jesus who died for our sins, but I loved singing about little baby Jesus “asleep on the hay” and smiling at The Little Drummer Boy. I also had not one but two Kid’s Praise albums which I played to death. I can still sing many of those songs Psalty, his wife Psaltina, and their kids Melody, Harmony, and Rhythm sang to me.

I was also obsessed with heaven. My dad died when I was four, and I couldn’t wait to get to heaven and meet my daddy. Until that day, though, I had him as a guardian angel. Throughout my childhood, I could feel him near me. I could feel him standing behind me with his hand on my right shoulder, comforting me, guiding me. I prayed to him more than I ever prayed to god. God had the whole world to deal with, but my daddy just had me and my siblings and my mom.

I can no longer feel my father. I don’t remember exactly when that feeling left me, but I continued to pray to him into adulthood. And, unlike god, my father actually answered my prayers. One day in high school while I was living with my sister, we were desperate for money, and we prayed to my father for help.The next day there were checks in the mailbox for both of us from Social Security where they had underpaid us over the years. We were convinced our dad had made those checks appear.

My father isn’t the only dead loved one to answer my prayers. My brother died when I was 24. One day I was at Kmart buying bedding, and I could only find one pillowcase to match the sheets I liked. I tore apart the shelves looking for its match. Silly as it was, I closed my eyes and asked my brother to produce the matching pillowcase for me. I opened my eyes and there it was. Another time my nephew had tried but failed to win a green teddy bear from one of those claw machines at a local video store. Then out of nowhere the machine sprang back to life, the claw picked up the green teddy bear and dropped it in the chute for my nephew to grab. His mother and I were both convinced that it was my brother who procured that bear for my nephew.

But was it?

*************************************************************************************************************************

Here is where I become less eloquent. Here is where things become less clear. I can’t trace my path to disbelief. I believed once and I don’t believe now, but the journey from one to the other is lost.

I do know I stopped believing in religion – stopped believing in the Bible – long before I stopped believing in god. Like Emma Thompson, I was “offended by some of the things said in the Bible” and deeply upset by the psychological pain caused to so many by it and its adherents.

The most obvious example is the gay thing. Long before I heard the oft-quoted Leviticus 18:22, it was obvious to me that the church would not approve of my liking girls. Yet I knew I didn’t deserve to go to hell for it. I knew no loving god would punish me for it. So I knew that, if the Bible really said being gay was wrong – that I would go to hell for it, well, then it was the Bible that was wrong. But it wasn’t enough for me to know it – I wanted to be able to prove it to others. So I decided to actually read the Bible. I mean, the truth was, I hadn’t read it. Sure, I had read along with certain passages during mass or Sunday school, but surprisingly little of the Bible gets explored that way.

I was at first shocked then infuriated by all the other things Leviticus said not to do that everyone I knew did all the time – like eating pig.  So being gay was a sin but so was eating bacon? Then why did everyone harp so much on the gay thing but let the bacon thing slide? You can’t just pick and choose which parts you want to believe and which parts you don’t!

And that was probably my first problem with religion – the way people cherry-picked the Bible, both what parts they want to follow and what parts they even bother to read. As Julia Sweeney notes in Letting Go of God, “For all those people who believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, or that every single word of the Bible is true . . . they can’t even have read the first two chapters of the Bible.” The story I was told as a child about Eve being created out of Adam’s rib? That’s part of the second creation story. In the first one, Adam and Eve are created at the same time. And those rules I was taught as a young child and told were the Ten Commandments? They are completely different from the rules chiseled into the stone tablets and actually called “The Commandments.” Not only were Christians inconsistent in they way the followed the Bible but the Bible itself was inconsistent.

It certainly was not the Truth.

************************************************************************************************************************

Once I accepted the Bible isn’t literal truth, I quickly decided there was no heaven or hell either. But for a while I still thought there was a god. Then there were the bigger, philosophical questions.

Ok, so THERE IS NO GOD.

*************************************************************************************************************************

So, what do I believe? I believe that, improbable as it may seem, the checks and the pillowcase and the green teddy bear are coincidences.I believe I wanted to feel my dad around me because I was sad that he wasn’t. I believe that it’s human nature to search for signs that our lost loved ones still exist somewhere in some way because it’s just unbearable to think we’ll never get to see them again. I believe humans created an afterlife because they couldn’t accept the finality of death. But I believe this is it. This life. This is the only life any of us gets, and none of us knows how long it’s going to last . . . and that makes it sacred – holy. So respect it, cherish it, and enjoy it.

And while you’re at it, try to make it a better ride for others when you can. And have faith that you don’t need some invisible friend in the sky to do anything you dream. If you need something to believe in, believe in yourself.