Religion

A friend of mine in middle school laughed when I told him I was a Christian. He didn’t believe me until I pulled up photos of my confirmation. It's not that he had anything against people of faith, he later told me, he was just surprised because I didn’t fit the Christian stereotype. 

This would be an excellent transition into a rant about how people shouldn’t make assumptions and anyone can have a religion, but I’m not going to. Like it or not, pretty much every identity you can have has a stereotype to match, and it’s fair to assume that when it’s an identity you can choose like religion, some other qualities might tend to covary with it while others might not. For example, being a liberal who spent his weekends playing occult themed tabletop RPGs on and often made jokes at the expense of fundamentalists, I didn’t really seem like the perfect model of a young Baptist (though now that I’m an Episcopalian, I might fit that bill a little better).

There isn’t a whole lot of religion in the student body of Grinnell, it’s a niche interest that’s under represented even in religious studies classes. Again, there’s some prime rant fuel here that I’m not going to touch. Mostly that’s because the whole “why isn’t everyone just like me?” argument doesn’t work so well when your faith is inspired by a constant fear of death.

Still, I wonder why other people at Grinnell are so willing to accept that there’s no afterlife, or to not care if there is one or not. For me, existential fears are like an infection that I can’t stop pressing to see how bad it hurts, and it hurts pretty bad. To think that we’re just organic robots acting out whatever inputs nature and nurture enter into us, that all the billions of people who have died and will die will mean nothing once they’re forgotten, that even the strongest feeling of love is just a flood of neurotransmitters biologically programmed by the dispassionate science of evolution, it’s overwhelming, isn’t it? It’s more than anyone can handle. So most people don’t think about it. But I can’t not think about it. 

Here’s what I believe: Humans used to have a lot of questions about how the world works. So we came up with some really incredible stories. Then some buzzkills found out the real answers and sucked the joy out of storytelling, saving a lot of lives with improved technology in the process. But we’ve still got one question that science hasn’t answered, that science can’t answer because any answer just begs the exact same question: where did it all come from? If matter and energy can’t be created or destroyed, then there must have been some starting point. There must have been some intelligence at the beginning, something that wrote the natural laws and built the atoms and activated them with energy.

I’ve been told by people who are braver about their faith than me that this explanation is religion with faith bled dry. That’s a fair point, but not entirely true. There’s one question of faith left on the table: did this intelligence intend life? It’d be consistent with scientific evidence to say no, that we’re just some mold that happened to grow on a planet just the right distance from the sun. That the trillions of stars and planets and even maybe other universes matter so much more than our tiny drama taking up a speck of time and space. But that’s depressing beyond words, so I’ll say that this intelligence cares about us. They have somewhere for us to go after we die. Maybe they even speak to us, guiding us towards choices that make the most of their creation (though I don’t think they ever have the final say on what happens, there have been too many tragedies for that to make sense). 

I think this intelligence at the start of the universe is beyond human comprehension. The same way we can’t logically conceive of something coming from nothing, no doctrine will ever explain them. But we can come to that understanding on an emotional level. And for me, that emotion comes from a miracle worker from Galilee. By all metrics He was just another story by people before science, except that He didn’t explain a thing except how to be a decent human being, something science has yet to unanimously contradict. And why couldn’t He have been born in a manger, healed lepers, told God’s word, died on a cross, come back for an encore performance, and ascended to haven? It makes about as much sense as something coming from nothing. And it feels right. 

Which is all extremely easy scratching into paper as I procrastinate studying for finals. It’s a little harder living in the real world, explaining why I can’t be at cross country practice on Sunday morning or putting a few bucks in the offering plate or worrying about death. And that’s just a fragment of all I know I’m called to do. But keeping it in mind as I go through the world, sometimes it almost seems to make sense. And that’s all I’ll get, so it’s all I’ll ask for.