This is a May '95 rant, the broken edges have worn a little, and I'm with people now who don't shake God like a voodoo doll over my head.
I don't want to think about God or "faith" any more. I don't even want to read anything about people who believe.
What about the truth of prophecy? Well, what about it? Take Jesus being born of a virgin, for instance: Isaiah said "maiden," "young woman," not "virgin." There was no need to drag Mary into it.
What about the fall of Babylon? All cities decay eventually.
Those are the only two examples I can think of; so much for knowledge buttressing faith.
What about the Flood of Noah's day? I don't have to cramp my intellect by believing in it any more.
What about creation vs. evolution? I DON'T CARE.
What about biblical ethics? I see nothing wrong with them, and I don't see that you have to be a Christian or a Jew to practice them. I don't believe in the misanthropy that underlies being "separate from the world." I think you can have "unspotted" conduct without crawling into a cave. When working at a charity or playing with the neighbor's children become a sin, I can't take it. Who started this whole idea of Jehovah's Witnesses not contributing to charity, anyway? I've actually heard it from a sister's own mouth.
What about losing all my friends? I haven't seen any of them in over a year. (Not entirely their fault; I did stop attending meetings -- just dropped out of sight.)
What about the love Christians have for each other and for their neighbors? A sham, most of it. Conservative Christians can be positively hateful to their fellow-man. Jehovah's Witnesses are at least less virulent (most of them), but their so-called love is hedged about with fear of man and a terror of non-conformity.
I would be more impressed with the relief work performed by Jehovah's Witnesses if it were extended to non-Witnesses as readily as it is to their own. It's one thing to send clothing and food and medicine to spiritual brethren in Bosnia; it's quite another to collect food for the welfare recipients in your own town week after week, or to teach a homeless kid how to hold a job.
I have to admit that between the hatefulness of many born-agains and the timidity of Jehovah's Witnesses, Christianity is spoiled for me.
So is humanism, for that matter -- humanists can be just as cruel as born-agains. I've seen them do it, in print.
I don't believe in God's forgiveness. Why should God forgive? Why should Perfection put up with imperfection, especially on such a large scale? I don't see that mercy is even relevant here. I guess I don't believe in having a relationship with God, either. You might as well have a relationship with the Milky Way galaxy, or absolute zero.
One of Robert Heinlein's characters once made some patronizing remarks about faith being all right for the sort of people who can get some comfort from it.
Well, I can't. For years I have not been able to draw any comfort from the things I knew to be true. At best, Christianity has been as comforting as the knowledge that granite is an igneous rock. At worst, it has been like knowing you have inoperable cancer: it's no use to hide from it, but you are nonetheless powerless to improve matters.
In the past, the Watchtower Society has advised us to "make the truth real" to ourselves by visualizing ourselves in the hoped-for earthly paradise, in God's new order. I've tried that, repeatedly. It felt like day-dreaming.
No, I am not going to wander off into Hinduism or Buddhism or Wiccanism. I have never been able to make much sense of religions outside the Christian tradition, and their garish deities are even harder to believe in than the God of the Bible is. And I especially dislike the Wiccans digging up antediluvian deities who died a dignified death centuries ago.
No, it's back to agnosticism for me. I hesitate to call it atheism, because I don't have enough hostility to really justify that term. I'm not going to make a religion out of my disbelief.
M.C.M.
May 1996: This page has an interesting argument against such religious separatism, from a conservative Christian viewpoint.