Am I Religious?

April 13, 2023

When I was growing up, I was definitely not religious. I didn’t know anything about religion. My parents didn’t have any particular beliefs they wanted to impart on me, so my main attitude was one of total ignorance. I didn’t know the stories of the Bible. I didn’t know who Jesus or Mohammad were or why their followers disagreed with each other. I didn’t know the difference between a Hindu, a Buddhist, and a Sikh. The Tao of Pooh, which I found one afternoon on the bookshelf of our spare room, was about as close as I got to anything East of the Tigris.

The prevailing attitude online during this pre-Youtube era of internet video, was that religion was stupid, and in particular, Christianity was stupid. This was likely the result of many using the internet as a means to escape from a family or community in which their lack of faith left them isolated, whipping each other’s atheism into a sort of frenzy. I didn’t have any context for Christianity; as far as I knew, I had never met a Christian. Of course, I had actually met many, even at that age, but I had never known that that was what they were. It just never came up.

My first knowledge of religion was presented through this medium of sneering disdain and logical refutation. I had never thought that there might be a God, so the fact that there didn’t seem to be one did not surprise me at all. Instead, I was surprised mostly by the fact that anyone could have come up with such an idea. Where did they get it from? Did they just make it up?

I continued in this sort of state for a long time. Whenever any religious note was struck in a novel I was reading, I simply ignored it. When a philosopher began to pontificate upon the nature of God, I just wondered why they felt the need. It was all so alien to me. I just couldn’t understand. I was completely closed off from that sort of world.

At a certain point, I started to wonder if this constituted a lack. So many people across so much time had felt the need to engage with religion, in one way or another. It seemed mysterious that I just didn’t. I didn’t feel capable of any sort of faith or religious feeling. I was bought into Hume’s form of unfettered skepticism: I couldn’t even tell if I was real, let alone God.

I started reading the Bible in 2019. The book was of interest to me for historical and literary reasons. I felt like I was missing out on far too much context when it came to the books I was reading. They were always referencing characters or stories that I did not know the first thing about. (Funnily enough, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling was my first introduction to the story of Abraham and Isaac. It struck me as patently absurd — which is in fact exactly how it struck Kierkegaard, albeit in a completely different way.) The final straw was when I started attempting the New York Times Crossword on a daily basis, and was faced regularly with clues asking for names from Genesis.

At no point while reading the Bible did much of it speak to me. I was so detached that I could barely even understand the non-religious forms of pathos within the stories. It all felt so distant and strange. I couldn’t follow the motivations, and nothing anyone did made much sense. It didn’t help that I chose the King James Bible, and therefore was constantly faced with archaic syntax and confusing allusions to dragons.

Through sheer force of will, I made it through the large majority of the book, at least the narrative sections. By the end of Revelations, I was about as confused as a man had ever been. I felt that I had learned a lot, on a purely informational level, but that I was no nearer to understanding religion or faith than ever before.

However, something had changed. It took a long time for me to realize this. From that point on, when people talked about Christianity, I understood what they were talking about. I mean, on a literal word-by-word level, I knew the characters and concepts they were referencing. My brain no longer just shut off at the merest mention of religion, but instead tried to follow along. When faced with biblical allusions in fiction or philosophy, I could nod my head along. I knew the stories.

I had clambered over the barrier, and could now take part in the conversation. Christianity was no longer a confused, undifferentiated cloud of words and concepts, but a collection of real, tangible things. I could follow the specific arguments and the extrapolations. I could emotionally connect with these ideas about God, fear, love and Jesus.

Jesus particularly stuck in my head. I kept thinking about him. I re-read the Gospels. Everything he said seemed to make a lot of sense. All the episodes: the meeting at the river, the walk in the forest, the betrayal and the crucifixion — they struck me, as literature. That “as literature,” is important. I don’t say that to denigrate their impact but instead to emphasize it. To me, literature is everything. Literature is how I understand the human spirit. When I stopped looking at the Bible as “a bunch of stories that some other people believe,” but instead as “a bunch of stories,” I was finally able to understand. They weren’t for someone else anymore. I realized that they could be for me.

Over the last few years, I have devoted much time to thinking about these stories, and the myriad interpretations and exegeses that they have spawned. I have come to understand the grandeur of it all, as well as the personal note it can strike in a person. I am able now to recognize that it is the ambiguity of the stories that make them powerful; that the concept at the core of it all is not-knowing. The question of religion is how we deal with that which we don’t know, and that which we can’t know.

I always thought of religion growing up as a haughty form of pride — that people with faith considered themselves above others because they had knowledge that we didn’t. It’s impossible to deny that this pride exists, and that this tendency is present within all religions. But what I never suspected was the reverse side of this coin: the humility that comes with accepting that there exists something so far above you that you can’t possibly know it, and that any small knowledge of it you can attain is, in its own way, a blessing.

All this being said, if you were to ask me right now whether or not I believe in God, I frankly wouldn’t know what to say. I can no longer say with certainty that I don’t. I can no longer consider it far-fetched to live with the idea that Jesus’ death was a form of redemption for humankind. Do I believe in it? As in, do I believe that if I was given infinite knowledge, I would be able to confirm that all these claims are true? No, I am not certain of that. However, I believe in its power; I believe in what it says about us, and I believe in the emotions that it fills me with.

Around the same period of time, I read the Dao De Jing, the primary text of Daoism. This collection of poetry, even more cryptic and mysterious than any of Jesus’ parables, speaks of Dao as a sort of unknowable and all-pervasive energy or field that we somehow need to attune ourselves to, despite not knowing what it is. In fact, accepting that we don’t know anything about it, or at least can’t say anything about it directly, even to ourselves within our own thoughts, is key to this attunement. The wise sage who attains this understanding is a mess of contradictions, merging the concepts of sage and fool.

The merging of contradictions, in fact, seems to be a central concept here, which immediately sends a person raised within a rationalist logical framework into a tailspin. One must reconcile the irreconcilable, and not in the absurdist or nihilistic way that simply negates it all way, but in a way that attempts to posit some form of positive truth.

It’s all a lot to ask. I won’t say that the work I’ve done attempting to reckon with all this has been particularly fruitful in terms of anything one might call “results.” However, I keep coming back to this book, along with the Chuang Tzu, and each time I return I feel that I gain something. In my eyes, that’s at least partially religious in its own right.

These books ground me, orient me in a certain place, and help me understand what I am and what I’m doing. They don’t fill me with epistemological certainty, and I’d be hard pressed to tell you why these books, rather than any other religious books, feel the most truthful to me. I can’t tell you why, the third time around, the story of Job finally struck me with a bizarre mixture of fear and comfort that I’ve never experienced before.

Am I religious? If this is a question of faith, then the answer would have to be no. Faith is an emotion that has never come to me, even in my times of greatest need. The only faith I have is a certainty that there is something more: that we are not mere monkeys on a rock; that the laws of physics only answer what and how and not why — and that there have been people in the history of our world who have approached that something more and heard it as a whisper, have seen it as a ghost, and have attempted, in the languages that we have — sorry excuses for communication that they are — to tell us about it.