On the morning walk with my dog we passed a yard that had, for some reason, put a stake at the edge of their driveway and covered it with one of those “hen and bitties” pots turned upside down (those are ceramic flower pots made for a type of plant that spawns new little family members all around and has holes on the side like little apartment openings to accommodate them). The effect of the upside-down pot with two holes higher and one lower was like a Jack O’ Lantern head on the ground. Just as I thought to myself that it looked like a weird head just sitting there by the street, my doggie companion got the same idea. She stopped short of the thing then circled around sticking her nose out to sniff and trying to see all around the oddity without getting too close. No way was she going to touch that thing!
It looked like a person-head, in an odd sort of way, so it HAD TO BE; but it didn’t pass the smell test no matter how hard she sniffed, better to be cautious and skirt the issue.
That’s a good illustration of my past relationship with religion. None of it ever completely passed the smell test for me, but by the way people acted it looked like it HAD TO BE true, didn’t it? I had a lot of trouble accepting a lot of stuff, like when I found out as a kid that all my friends were going to hell. WTF? That didn’t make any sense! And later when I got dragged to a Bible Study in a vulnerable time in my life and heard some poor girl, who seemed to have it all together compared to me, talk about how she and her boyfriend had to come to the conclusion that they had to give up the idea of getting married or being together because he was divorced, and the split up. OMG! I was lucky I didn’t wreck on the way home I was so mad. Why loving this living, breathing human being nothing compared to following some wretched rules? How can spiritual be so heartless and evil? But no one seemed to question, no one spoke up about real people in the here and now hurting because of Bible quoting, and preacher voice, and bad hair galore. It just WAS, and I kept feeling like I’d better decide to believe someday before I died or I’d burn forever if that hateful crap was true. I kept being told to respect it, that no one would be “good” without it, and I wondered if it wasn’t just the reverse?
I hit a wall a decade ago and started reading. Not the Bible, I still can’t read that, way too much baggage, but scholarly books about the origins of Christianity (since that’s the one I’d personally been plagued with). I learned that ancient people wrote things for purposes of aggrandizing their nations and rulers, and metaphorically to make points, and also passing down stories that predated them while changing the names of the main characters to fit the past they built, this was the story of the Old Testament. I also learned that the New Testament was written long after Christ, and not by his disciples. There were even elements of more ancient stories mixed into his to give continuity, or even tell the kind of tale that was expected for someone considered great. Nothing is carved in stone by a Universal power, and that spelled RELIEF.
That freed me from “belief”, but not from curiosity. I have lots of theories about “spirit”, “connectedness”, “essence”; but I reserve the right to change those as I see fit. Belief is such a loaded word that it seems like society only officially offers particular flavors of it or none at all. To believe (or the opposite) I have to be pretty damn sure, and honestly, I doubt that many people are if they think about it.
Consequently, there are a lot of things I think, and think about, that could be cataloged as “spiritual”. I think a lot about reincarnation, other dimensions, human souls, and animal souls. I like thinking about those things now and am free to do just that. I’m glad Atheists are free to think about how nothing either spiritual or religious can be real in their opinion. Free to think is the big deal with me.
If something doesn’t interest me, offer answers that resonate, offer love and acceptance, or doesn’t pass the smell test I’m gone!
I bet my dear doggie love would reconsider her avoidance if a piece of chicken was on the top of that pot, it’d pass a whole new smell test then!
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