An earlier comment conversation…

A while ago, I was having a comment conversation with i from squub.

We were chatting about religion and such. He had lots of good things to say: so much so, that I was really at a loss as to how to reply. I’m still feeling vaguely disjointed and at a loss about it.

I get this feeling sometimes, like the other night in particular, that I have difficulty formulating or crunching together coherent ideas built around logical arguments and evidence and etc. (Do I feel more comfortable over on the right side? You bet.) Perhaps it’s evidence of a lack of intellectual rigor, on my part or maybe I just have too many contradictory pieces and bits floating around in this noggin of mine. Whatever the reason (and maybe it’s a false conception of mine: maybe I have a decent idea formulation brain-widget?), it’s sometimes a difficult stumbling block to get around.

So I’ll try to take a stab at it anyway. i’s comments about religion struck a deep chord with me for several reasons, mostly having to do with my OWN ambiguity about religion:

1) My mother is and has always been deeply religious (catcholic then protestant then catcholic again). In a way that I don’t particularly understand. For example, the churches that I grew up in were speaking-in-tongues, prophesying, laying-on-of-hands style of churching, which I always, even as a child, felt vaguely uncomfortable around. Perhaps sadly for her, none of us, her children, are particularly religious in the same way.

2) I wouldn’t, now, consider myself deeply religious at all, though at one time I did (ah, those heady (pre) and adolescent days). Have I just mellowed out or is it something that I’ve “lost”? Regardless, I’ve never felt particularly comfortable around religious people. Why? Hard to say. But I’ve always enjoyed the company of the ir- and anti-religious…

3) In spite of my current ambivalence towards religion, I still have (and have always had) a deep (non-intellectual) yearning? desire? need? for some kind of deeper mystical or emotional or transcendant connection to something bigger than myself. This causes some conflict within my own self. And it’s not really something which is easy to talk to anyone about, because I tend to surround myself with people who don’t seem to have much interest in talking about it (see number 2).

4) Is religion good or bad? It’s almost a meaningless question, except that I think that the goodness or badness of any institution or individual can be measured and held to account. And yes, I do feel as though you, i, are closer to the reasonably religious than they are to the religious extremists. Their voices usually are not quite so loud and strident.

A case in point is this guy: the Real Live Preacher. He seems to write about the same kinds of things that you were writing about in my comments there, only from the “other side”…

That’s all for now.

3 thoughts on “An earlier comment conversation…”

  1. So much more thood for fought goin’ on here. I’ve got a lot to say about this; but that’s a constant. Hopefully I’m going to comment a little more tomorrow, and then later I’ve got something else I’m thinking about.

  2. Hey there. I’m still spinning some of this around in my head; it’s been back and forth between the back and front burners. I started a poem, which I pretty much am miserable at any time I’m actually consciously trying, (and probably some would say a worse failure at when I’m not trying,) and then I tried writing something and couldn’t figure anything out. So today I got back in a groove and I’m going to see where it gets me. I already wrote a buncha stuff on my site.

    But specifically what’s got me thinking here are your numbers 1 thru 3. First, the speaking-in-tongues thing: that stuff just fascinates me. Being from a decidedly NOT that way religious background, maybe there’s something “oh, what is going on there?” about it. But really it’s more than that… there’s a real power in letting the mouth physically do whatever it wants to do; I’ve occasionally broken into that sort of rant on my own. It feels like tourettes or something when I get like that, but it’s always ultimately under my control. So there’s some weirdness about me that’s really probably unrelated.

    More importantly, your statement about not feeling comfortable around religious people strikes a chord. Possibly I narrowed in on my own reason for it in what I wrote originally (wherever the hell that was… that earlier quote that this was a response to,) but I’m not sure that covers everything. I wonder if it’s being uncomfortable around people who really think everyone should believe what they believe? Or is there something more? For me sometimes I get uncomfortable because I don’t feel like having the spectre hanging there about me being an atheist — in professional situations, primarily. (I say atheist there intentionally — I never know when I’m up against a jesus-guy that really thinks there’s something criminal about not being that way, and so lumps everyone else into that atheist thing.)

    #3 – yes. Yes. a deep yearning for a deep transcendant connection. So what IS that? As a person who always first tries to think biologically about these things, I wonder if it isn’t a survival thing; if a person really couldn’t think that there might be something beyond what he or she could see… erm… I dunno. I’m getting to where I don’t know. I do want to mention though that just talking about that yearning for mysticism being biological frustrates the very drive. Because it defeats itself. If it’s biological, the biology is going to do whatever it can to keep it there. So. I know I’ve got a lot to say about this but it’s still swimming around.

    #4 is touched on in my current post.

    Okay!

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