introduce yourself/How I left religion (aka: heaviest intro ever?)

I became alive in the ides of July in 1983. Billie Jean was at the top of the charts (beating out let’s dance by Bowie, but we’ll get to that another time). Also, no one knew what health food was yet there seemed to be a new hot aerobics VHS every 3 weeks (IE: Richard Simmons was even cooler than he is now). This is all approximation of course. I wasn’t old yet so my memory is a little fuzzy.

I grew up in the Midwest. Parents divorced when I was 3, which was a big deal, but I didn’t know about it until I was more like 30. Attachment theory and cutting edge neurobiology information was pretty murky for a while there -maybe like 3 wacko therapists in LA knew about it and that's it. My mom was pretty unkind and religious at the same time. She had primary custody of us kids. I think I was part of the "latchkey generation" which means I was home unsupervised a lot at an age where you're probably supposed to be. No one cared in the 80s and 90s though. Social services was not the galactic empire it is today.

We went to church a lot. I believed in God and Jesus but had some pretty important questions like, "How do we know this is the correct deity? We were just that lucky?" I kinda put them out of my mind because religion is a culture and we all want acceptance. Amongst frequent verbal, emotion, and spiritual abuse I managed to get kicked out only 3 times. When I was kicked out it was usually for something quite terrible like asking why I can't clean my room later and hangout with my friends now. Pretty striccccct household. My mom could make me cry until I was 18, which is pretty dope if you think about it in terms of power and how long I cared about her acceptance. I lived with my sister for a while because she's pretty nice and knew mom kinda shat on me often. I was in a toxic relationship at that time with a girl who cheated on me like 12 times. Also my boss at work was an ex cop who told me he hated 20-something men (me), and would set me up for failure a lot at work. So not doing to great on all fronts and then I had a brilliant idea... "Mom, I'd like to go to a religious college." This was the best worst idea I've ever had.

It solved the problem of hating my life and needing to leave. I thought choosing a religious school would get me more support from religious parents. I also though that I could pray and stuff while I'm there so God could tell me what the heck to do with my life (spoiler: still haven't heard from Him/Her). This "amazing" idea ended up backfiring pretty badly.

College was cool because I played music with other musicians and started writing my own while I was there. Besides that, it was the unintentional cure for religion. This place had required chapel every day. It had tons of different speakers saying different things about God that weren't really compatible. It had professors who couldn't answer the simplest theological questions. It had a class that assigned homework like, "talk to someone about Jesus and write a paper about it." The immersion was so intense and the environment was so insistent that I cracked.

Remember that movie Castaway with Tom Hanks? There's a scene where Wilson is floating away and Tom's character is screaming "WILSON!!!" because he's losing the only thing on the entire earth that was keeping him connected. That's how leaving religion felt/feels like in a nutshell. It's not an active choice I made. It was just seeing all the little cracks and inconsistencies. It was also the idea that you can't point an gun to someone's head and say, "Genuinely believe this in your heart of hearts or I will blow your brans out!" A lot of things made more sense if I asked the question, "Does this seem like something a petty and quite terrible 12 year old would do or an omnipotent being that is the embodiment of pure love?" It is a bit shocking how often it is the former.

After the disillusionment I dipped my toes into some new age spirituality ( dat quartz crystal tho). My skepticism didn't allow much of that to take though. I've always been quite introspective and I posted a long thing about human connection one day and a former classmate said "this sounds a lot like Marshal Rosenberg." I watched a few videos of this person and discovered one of the best things I currently know about: Nonviolent Communication (or NVC). I have been a practitioner who has done structured practice for 4 years, and 12 weeks of intensive advanced empathy training. It basically flips language on its head and talks about how understanding feelings and needs are at the heart of everything, but we tend to lead with judgements, and argue about rightness and wrongness. This communication model further demonstrated to me that God (or our attempts to define God) seems quite the opposite of actual love. Love requires shared vulnerability and is not about domination or power structures. It is quite radical and wonderful begin with a primary goal of understanding each other. I also became very interested in developmental trauma, neurobiology, and somatic experience (dirty semi-accurate summary: The mind doesn't have to be the thing that fixes the mind... that really gets me good).

I read a lot and think (probably too much) about how this all weaves together. Perhaps religion is institutionalized developmental trauma. Perhaps God is the construct of an absent father figure that we want to be loved and accepted by. My most recent thought about God is that it is a disturbing construct that is referred to as love, (God is love, is a pretty common phrase). Disturbing because the more I learn about human connection the more the opposite seems true. God as advertised is a horrible torturer. Remember when God obeyed the devil? Satan: "I bet Job wouldn't like you if you tortured him and killed his family!" God: "Ok fine I'll torture him a whole lot just to prove myself to you, Satan lolz."um... wut? God demands credit for everything you do and the acknowledgment that without God you are worthless and unworthy and if you don't believe correctly you will suffer for eternity. This goes against basic developmental needs that an individual needs to learn about internal resourcing, self confidence, and personal power.

How to wrap something like this up... I am not true atheist. I'd say I left the backdoor unlocked for God to come over any time and get me on board with something that doesn't feel like a petty 12 year old invented it, but I haven't heard anything yet. I want to explore human connection. If there is a God I think it's more likely to be found in exploring just how deeply we can connect with one another though understanding and shared empathy.