Among the religious faithful (a term that describes the overwhelming majority of Americansi), there are many degrees of fervency and zeal. At the far end of the spectrum are the biblical literalists, those who believe that every word in the current edition of whatever scripture they follow is divinely inspired and immune to interpretation or alteration. At some ideological distance are what I consider the culturally religious, those whose religious identity is determined more by their parents and community than by any frank consideration of the details of the particular faith to which they subscribe.
Many people close to me are in that latter camp, and while they perhaps don’t consider themselves necessarily religious, they attend religious services on holidays and accept their religion’s label without argument. They give little more thought to their being Jewish or Christian than I do to being American, effectively adopting religious identity as a subspecies in their cultural taxonomy.
This happens easily enough. For much of my childhood and adolescence, I was a “Christian,” but not because I had faith in Christianity; rather, I didn’t believe I was anything else. I wasn’t Jewish. I wasn’t Muslim. I wasn’t Hindu. I was a regular old American, so I guess I had to be Christian.
I continued that identification for some time, despite my feeling even in early childhood that the stories I was told about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus seemed awfully far-fetched. So I did my best to squelch my doubts, which nagged at me like an itch in the back of the throat, demanding but never receiving satisfaction.
When I was in college, I even flirted with the idea of converting to Catholicism from the less regimented Methodism I was brought up in. Something about the pageantry of it, the choreographed moves, and the question-and-answer script between parishioners and priest appealed to my obsessive-compulsive nature at a time when I was suffering an unholy depression that had to that point proven frustratingly recalcitrant.
Many of my friends were Catholic, and I’d attend mass with them on Sunday evenings, the first part of a brief tradition that culminated each week in a drunken dinner at a local restaurant, a meal peppered with brash and overloud talk, often about the member of the church’s choir we’d most like to have sex with.
Much of my attraction to the religion came from the feeling of belonging I had those evenings, bolstered by my Catholic impersonations during Communion, after which I’d carefully cross my body, trying not to betray my interloping. It was like learning the secret handshake of a rival fraternity, crashing their party, and getting away with it. So much of Catholicism is choreographed that it is relatively easy to sniff out those who don’t belong. And I very much wanted to belong. Somewhere.
Fortunately for me, converting to Catholicism is a bit of an involved process. Some preparation, including education in the catechism, and a Catholic sponsor are among the things required for new recruits. But my interest died on the vine before my heart could become ripe for the Catholic harvest, and I soon made coherent the susurrus of doubt that had whispered static underneath every sermon and Sunday school lesson I’d ever heard. The fall from meager faith to apostasy, it turned out, had a pretty soft landing.
After all, the consideration of changing faiths had brought the issue of belief itself to the forefront. And the Catholic script provided the benefit of a creed—the Apostles’ Creedii—for me to gauge my beliefs. Having found that I agreed with almost none of it, my direction was clear. I certainly wasn’t a Catholic, and I wasn’t much of a Christian, either. If belonging was something I needed, I’d have to find it under someone else’s banner.
There are differences in some details between the Catholic picture of Christianity and the views held by the faith’s other sects. But those details, while a historical source of contention, are minor when considered relative to Christianity’s differences with other religions. The Apostles’ Creed serves as a fairly reliable algorithm for evaluating Christian faith for all sects, a flowchart whose affirmation is required for one to be truly in step with the Christian party line. Let me reproduce it here:
Many people close to me are in that latter camp, and while they perhaps don’t consider themselves necessarily religious, they attend religious services on holidays and accept their religion’s label without argument. They give little more thought to their being Jewish or Christian than I do to being American, effectively adopting religious identity as a subspecies in their cultural taxonomy.
This happens easily enough. For much of my childhood and adolescence, I was a “Christian,” but not because I had faith in Christianity; rather, I didn’t believe I was anything else. I wasn’t Jewish. I wasn’t Muslim. I wasn’t Hindu. I was a regular old American, so I guess I had to be Christian.
I continued that identification for some time, despite my feeling even in early childhood that the stories I was told about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus seemed awfully far-fetched. So I did my best to squelch my doubts, which nagged at me like an itch in the back of the throat, demanding but never receiving satisfaction.
When I was in college, I even flirted with the idea of converting to Catholicism from the less regimented Methodism I was brought up in. Something about the pageantry of it, the choreographed moves, and the question-and-answer script between parishioners and priest appealed to my obsessive-compulsive nature at a time when I was suffering an unholy depression that had to that point proven frustratingly recalcitrant.
Many of my friends were Catholic, and I’d attend mass with them on Sunday evenings, the first part of a brief tradition that culminated each week in a drunken dinner at a local restaurant, a meal peppered with brash and overloud talk, often about the member of the church’s choir we’d most like to have sex with.
Much of my attraction to the religion came from the feeling of belonging I had those evenings, bolstered by my Catholic impersonations during Communion, after which I’d carefully cross my body, trying not to betray my interloping. It was like learning the secret handshake of a rival fraternity, crashing their party, and getting away with it. So much of Catholicism is choreographed that it is relatively easy to sniff out those who don’t belong. And I very much wanted to belong. Somewhere.
Fortunately for me, converting to Catholicism is a bit of an involved process. Some preparation, including education in the catechism, and a Catholic sponsor are among the things required for new recruits. But my interest died on the vine before my heart could become ripe for the Catholic harvest, and I soon made coherent the susurrus of doubt that had whispered static underneath every sermon and Sunday school lesson I’d ever heard. The fall from meager faith to apostasy, it turned out, had a pretty soft landing.
After all, the consideration of changing faiths had brought the issue of belief itself to the forefront. And the Catholic script provided the benefit of a creed—the Apostles’ Creedii—for me to gauge my beliefs. Having found that I agreed with almost none of it, my direction was clear. I certainly wasn’t a Catholic, and I wasn’t much of a Christian, either. If belonging was something I needed, I’d have to find it under someone else’s banner.
There are differences in some details between the Catholic picture of Christianity and the views held by the faith’s other sects. But those details, while a historical source of contention, are minor when considered relative to Christianity’s differences with other religions. The Apostles’ Creed serves as a fairly reliable algorithm for evaluating Christian faith for all sects, a flowchart whose affirmation is required for one to be truly in step with the Christian party line. Let me reproduce it here:
I believe in God, the Father Almighty,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
and in Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord:
Who was conceived of the Holy Spirit,
born of the Virgin Mary,
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was crucified, died, and was buried.
He descended into hell.
The third day He arose again from the dead.
He ascended into heaven
and sits at the right hand of God the Father Almighty,
whence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church,
the communion of saints,
the forgiveness of sins,
the resurrection of the body,
and life everlasting.
Amen.
Depending on how you interpret it, there are 19 or 20 distinct statements of faith in this creed, serving as a sort of checklist of Christian belief.iii
Like many prayers and recitations in Catholicism—and religion in general—the Apostles’ Creed is learned largely by rote, typically during childhood. More attention is paid to whether it is recited correctly than to its actual significance and meaning. Certainly, how many Christian children spend an appreciable amount of time going through this creed item by item, genuinely weighing each claim’s plausibility against what they think and feel?
Now, there are some things in the Apostles’ Creed that even I can agree with or allow for. For instance, I believe there is some historical evidence to support the existence of Jesus. I am not completely sold on that idea, but it is possible. I also think that if he did exist, he very well may have been executed by crucifixion on Pilate’s orders. And although I don’t believe it, there is the possibility, remote as it is, that he was born of a virgin. Intercourse is not required for conception to occur. Sperm can make the arduous trip from outside the body to the egg, but this is exceedingly improbable. Everything else is, I believe, totally outside the realm of possibility.
Let’s ignore for the moment the issue of the existence of God. I can’t prove his nonexistence any more than the faithful can prove the opposite, so we’ll leave that issue alone. Let’s consider an easier concept: the resurrection of the body.
Christian zeal hinges on the idea of the return of Jesus on a final day of judgment. That is when the dead will rise from the grave and stand to be judged. This point is so important that it is extraordinarily difficult to find a Catholic priest who will participate in the funeral of someone who has been cremated. But despite the clergy’s familiarity with the concept of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” they seem to lack an understanding of the chemistry of death. Whether a body is burned or left to decay, it breaks down into components from which an intact body can never be retrieved. A practical example can be found every time you fill your car up with gasoline, a product refined from petroleum produced by the natural decay of organic material over many millennia.
While the resurrection of prehistoric animals is never mentioned in the Bible—in fact, prehistoric animals themselves are not mentioned in the Bible, almost as if God knew only what humans knew at the time—the material from which they were made was virtually identical to the stuff we’re made of. Under similar circumstances, it is reasonable to believe that our bodies, too, would deliquesce into a precious goop that Earth’s inheritors could kill one another for many years down the road.
But just as I’d defy you to find a true tiger in your tank, I’d challenge the Almighty to conjure anything but dust on the day of the great homecoming. The idea is preposterous, and it deserves rejection.
I assume it would be far easier for God to wake his dead son after only three days down, so let’s say he knew how to do it. What then? We’re told that Jesus “ascended into heaven” to sit at God’s right hand. In other words, Christians believe that you can never find the body of Jesus because there’s no body to find. He ascended bodily into heaven. Timing must have been crucial, then. After all, over a century of aviation has failed to reveal a heaven in the clouds of Earth. No 747’s wing has ever clipped a harp and sent it crashing toward the mob below. So heaven must be somewhere else, somewhere not of this world.
But if that’s the case, then Jesus had to ascend to heaven at a specific time—and only that time. Since Earth rotates, Jesus would fly off in the wrong direction if he were delayed, for instance, by the skeptical questions and prodding fingers of the apostle Thomas. And his inconvenience wouldn’t end there, since he would need to achieve a velocity sufficient to escape Earth’s gravitational pull (almost seven miles per second) and endure untold hours of flight in the airless cold of space.
Some may claim that heaven is such a special place that physical laws don’t apply there. Why, then, was it important for Jesus to go there physically? And if he is there physically, how does he interact with the disembodied spirits blessed with heavenly admission prior to their resurrection on Judgment Day?
These almost silly reductions of Christian claims should not be seen as mere food for the disputatious. Rather, the ridiculousness of even some ideas credulously accepted by so many should impel the faithful to take the time to consider the rest of the story they’ve swallowed without chewing.
Whatever works of charity and goodwill can be credited to religion, there are at least as many (and I believe far more) acts of almost inhuman cruelty perpetrated in its name. The faithful need to recognize that their faith is not an ideological buffet from which they can pick only the palatable scraps. It is a complete package, a complete system of thought and law. Yes, “love thy neighbor” is a wonderful thought. Ordering the execution of human beings for their sexual preference is not. But each idea is given equal weight in the scriptures that many millions consider to be the infallible word of God.
Like many prayers and recitations in Catholicism—and religion in general—the Apostles’ Creed is learned largely by rote, typically during childhood. More attention is paid to whether it is recited correctly than to its actual significance and meaning. Certainly, how many Christian children spend an appreciable amount of time going through this creed item by item, genuinely weighing each claim’s plausibility against what they think and feel?
Now, there are some things in the Apostles’ Creed that even I can agree with or allow for. For instance, I believe there is some historical evidence to support the existence of Jesus. I am not completely sold on that idea, but it is possible. I also think that if he did exist, he very well may have been executed by crucifixion on Pilate’s orders. And although I don’t believe it, there is the possibility, remote as it is, that he was born of a virgin. Intercourse is not required for conception to occur. Sperm can make the arduous trip from outside the body to the egg, but this is exceedingly improbable. Everything else is, I believe, totally outside the realm of possibility.
Let’s ignore for the moment the issue of the existence of God. I can’t prove his nonexistence any more than the faithful can prove the opposite, so we’ll leave that issue alone. Let’s consider an easier concept: the resurrection of the body.
Christian zeal hinges on the idea of the return of Jesus on a final day of judgment. That is when the dead will rise from the grave and stand to be judged. This point is so important that it is extraordinarily difficult to find a Catholic priest who will participate in the funeral of someone who has been cremated. But despite the clergy’s familiarity with the concept of “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” they seem to lack an understanding of the chemistry of death. Whether a body is burned or left to decay, it breaks down into components from which an intact body can never be retrieved. A practical example can be found every time you fill your car up with gasoline, a product refined from petroleum produced by the natural decay of organic material over many millennia.
While the resurrection of prehistoric animals is never mentioned in the Bible—in fact, prehistoric animals themselves are not mentioned in the Bible, almost as if God knew only what humans knew at the time—the material from which they were made was virtually identical to the stuff we’re made of. Under similar circumstances, it is reasonable to believe that our bodies, too, would deliquesce into a precious goop that Earth’s inheritors could kill one another for many years down the road.
But just as I’d defy you to find a true tiger in your tank, I’d challenge the Almighty to conjure anything but dust on the day of the great homecoming. The idea is preposterous, and it deserves rejection.
I assume it would be far easier for God to wake his dead son after only three days down, so let’s say he knew how to do it. What then? We’re told that Jesus “ascended into heaven” to sit at God’s right hand. In other words, Christians believe that you can never find the body of Jesus because there’s no body to find. He ascended bodily into heaven. Timing must have been crucial, then. After all, over a century of aviation has failed to reveal a heaven in the clouds of Earth. No 747’s wing has ever clipped a harp and sent it crashing toward the mob below. So heaven must be somewhere else, somewhere not of this world.
But if that’s the case, then Jesus had to ascend to heaven at a specific time—and only that time. Since Earth rotates, Jesus would fly off in the wrong direction if he were delayed, for instance, by the skeptical questions and prodding fingers of the apostle Thomas. And his inconvenience wouldn’t end there, since he would need to achieve a velocity sufficient to escape Earth’s gravitational pull (almost seven miles per second) and endure untold hours of flight in the airless cold of space.
Some may claim that heaven is such a special place that physical laws don’t apply there. Why, then, was it important for Jesus to go there physically? And if he is there physically, how does he interact with the disembodied spirits blessed with heavenly admission prior to their resurrection on Judgment Day?
These almost silly reductions of Christian claims should not be seen as mere food for the disputatious. Rather, the ridiculousness of even some ideas credulously accepted by so many should impel the faithful to take the time to consider the rest of the story they’ve swallowed without chewing.
Whatever works of charity and goodwill can be credited to religion, there are at least as many (and I believe far more) acts of almost inhuman cruelty perpetrated in its name. The faithful need to recognize that their faith is not an ideological buffet from which they can pick only the palatable scraps. It is a complete package, a complete system of thought and law. Yes, “love thy neighbor” is a wonderful thought. Ordering the execution of human beings for their sexual preference is not. But each idea is given equal weight in the scriptures that many millions consider to be the infallible word of God.
My message to the faithful is this: Know your faith. Read your scriptures. Learn every detail of what it is you’ve up to now casually said you believe. Do not perpetuate the cultural crutch that has kept religion churning on for centuries. It is no more logical to continue identifying with and unquestioningly accepting an outmoded religious ideology than it is to expect to sail off the edge of the earth.
The sense of uncertainty in the absence of religion may be discomfiting for some. But they will soon realize that it is far better to have the liberty to ask questions when no longer stuck with the unsatisfactory answers of centuries past.
i. According to a 2005 Associated Press-Ipsos poll of 1,000 people from each of ten countries, only two percent of Americans said they do not believe in God.
ii. Islam has a similar creed of belief, known as the shahada. It is far shorter than the Apostles’ Creed, but its purpose is the same.
iii. It is important to point out two quick things here. First, there are some differences of opinion about the line referring to the descent of Jesus into hell; some translations simply refer to his descent among the dead. Second, the use of the word catholic in lowercase makes use of its adjectival form meaning “universal.”
