This one popped up in my feeds and I immediately recognized this phenomenon, having played a part in my own life. Thinking about it now, it’s not like my teenage years were really that challenging, but things were confusing enough to my adolescent mind that I played the “religion” card at fifteen and deferred really dealing with said confusion for more than a few years. Some critics might postulate that I never quite dealt with it. Fair enough, but isn’t that the nature of life: to learn from ones experiences and prune the unhealthy branches. 

Just as the presenter, Jonny Thomson, said, this isn’t a blanket criticism of religion, but it’s an acknowledgment that the answer to life’s challenges isn’t always going to be “religion.” For me, it gave me a framework to begin to understand life. But eventually I recognized the limitations and contradictions in that framework. 

I’m reminded of an episode StarTrek: The Next Generation, The Devil’s Due (Season 4, Episode 13, sorry, major nerd moment here…), where the crew is dealing with an entity who is claiming ownership of a planet because of an ancient agreement that the citizens of the planet had made in their history when they faced a crisis. There’s a trial to determine the legitimacy of the agreement and whether this entity is the ancient one with whom the agreement was made. It turns out that after the agreement was made the world’s governments worked together to find solutions to their pollution problem and problems feeding their people. After hundreds of years the planet became prosperous and stable, but not because of the intervention of this entity, but because the “agreement” helped them organize themselves and find solutions for their very real problems. As with all great sci-fi, this is a pretty obvious analogy on the benefits that a society can achieve when it unites behind a plan. It does help if the plan actually works.1

What I needed to hear as a confused 15-year-old was that God loved me just the way I was. That got me through those years. That helped me organize my life, trying to figure out what’s what, make many mistakes and hopefully learn. One of the things that I eventually learned was that my “framework,” that framework stopped “working.” It was a bit more complicated and long and drawn out than that, but that is the gist of it. 

I was raised in a religious home, Roman Catholic in the 1060s & 70s, and as the world was changing and I was changing (growing up) I accepted an invitation from some friends at a home Bible study to pray over me. I don’t remember if they said so that I could “receive Jesus” or maybe “receive the Holy Spirit,” but something happened that changed my life. Kind’a like the folks in the Star Trek episode, a lot of the “change” came from certain things that I was doing, like reading my bible voraciously and looking at the world through the words that I was reading and the other believers I was spending time with. I was still a confused, horny teenager, but I became more driven to become a better person, a better Christian than my drive to experience sex. That didn’t go away, it was just delayed or, as the video said, bypassed for a time. Crazy as it might seem to most people, religion helped get me through my teenage years, but I would eventually have to figure out what it all meant to me and what kind of person I wanted to be or become. 

So, I don’t judge someone for whom their faith works for them. I know of a few friends whom I knew as Christians over those many decades for whom the framework seems to work and I’m happy for them. I just know for myself, that I am a square peg that didn’t really fit in their round hole and I’m okay with that. It’s the desire to be ones best self that I think is important and the ability to foster and see that in others that I’m attracted to. Folks that “got it all figured out” and know what you need to do… well, if I don’t know what I need to do, having worked at this for going on six-decades, I don’t see how your cool-aid is going to make things any better. Eventually we all have to contend with ourselves and accept our gifts and flaws and do what we can to be better. That is life. And what is true for the individual, is true for the community and society. We are flawed and imperfect, but we can be better and it all depends on us and not some external “force.” Enjoy and Happy Monday. JBB

Sources:

Tags: anthropology of religion, in bad faith, meditations on, mini philosophy, video Mondays

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FOOTNOTES:
  1. Here’s a link to a reaction video on the episode that summarizes it with clips and commentary: https://youtu.be/pm_0Fy_W2-w?si=Dc0PDhGs66a93pfH I was thinking of embedding the video in this post, but decided that if you’re really interested, you can click the link above yourself. Enjoy.[↩]