The Dreaded Post About Religion

My husband and I watched Bill Maher’s scathing documentary, Religulous, for the first time last night and I have to say, it made me happy not to be religious. No duh, of course it did; Maher found and interviewed every religious wacko he could find, so there was no chance of religious fanaticism coming across as anything but ridiculous. Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Mormons alike were skewered.

There is no one more cynical and mean-spirited than Bill Maher, and this movie was by no means a fair and balanced investigation of organized religion. Nevertheless, I can relate to a lot of what he said in Religulous. I'm a realist (even as a child, I was less prone to flights of fancy than most kids) and therefore I've always found Biblical "stories" (The Creation, The Resurrection, etc.) hard to swallow. I can remember many an Easter, sitting in Sunday School (which my dad forced us to attend only sporadically), listening to the teacher explain the resurrection story, and trying really hard to believe that Jesus actually came back to life on the third day. Even as a kid I knew that dead is dead and there's no coming back.

Even though I had issues with some of the Bible's contents, that didn't mean I didn't pray to God just like the other kids. Every night before bed, I’d pray for my family and friends, as well as for whichever animal or people were in the news at that time (starving Ethiopians, clubbed baby fur seals, etc.). My final prayer would be, “And please, God, don’t let there be a nuclear war.” Hey, it was the Seventies, after all.

Occasionally I would communicate with God at other times, but it would almost always be when I either wanted something or was in trouble and as a result, it ended up being stressful for me, not reassuring. I figured that since God sees and knows everything, he most certainly would have realized that I only called on him in times of trouble. I was a poor-weather friend to God: when everything was going great, I forgot all about him. This made me nervous that perhaps God didn't hold me in very high regard, and therefore I was never confident that my prayers would be answered. I started to get resentful of the whole God thing.

Despite my misgivings, I generally believed in God while growing up. It seemed like the thing do to, and since I was always pretty much a rule-follower, I just went along.

But then I became a teenager and, as teens will do, started questioning everything I believed in. God and religion came under fire, and I stopped praying. I didn't exactly stop believing, but God pretty much disappeared from my life. Eh...I had other things on my mind, you know?

Then came college, and agnosticism set in. Being religious in college was almost as bad as having an STD: it made you a social pariah. You were basically considered an idiot of you were religious. I'm sure there were God-loving and God-fearing people around, but I certainly didn't know them.

And that brings me to the present. I have two young children with malleable little brains: what to do, what to do? We live in a very Catholic town, so when it comes to religion I've decided to keep my mouth shut and leave their religious upbringing to my Catholic-raised husband. He takes them to church (while Mommy goes to the gym) and leads them in their bedtime prayers. I figure my role will come later on, when they are teenagers and begin to question and doubt. I'll tell them it's okay to be unsure, that they need to make their own decisions, and that they are wonderful people no matter what they choose to believe.

What else can I do, right? After all, I can't make myself believe in something I don't. And when it comes right down to it, I'll admit it: I'm sort of with Bill Maher on this one.