During the Fringe Festival someone handed me a card, a rather attractive young man, actually. I didn't think much of it. He said, "check this out." And since it's common practice at the Fringe to promote your show by passing around fliers I barely glanced at it, until later when I was going through the bits of paper that I had acquired that night.
Here's what it says:
What if today was your last day? Where would you go? What if there is a heaven and a hell? What if we all had to stand before GOD after our death. Where will you spend eternity? What if HE was to judge us by the Ten Commandments, would you be innocent or guilty? Stealing anything or telling just one lie breaks the 8th and 9th commandments: looking with lust breaks the 7th commandment. The Bible says that all liars shall have their part in the Lake of Fire (Rev. 21:8) and that no thief, fornicator or adulterer will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6:9-10). The price for our sins must be paid; death is the wages of our sins (Rom. 6:23). We are guilty and the place we will go is Hell for eternity. What if the guilty verdict was changed to not guilty? What if someone paid for our sins and we were forgiven? What would you be willing to do for that person? That person, JESUS CHRIST, did that for you and me. All we have to do is repent (turn from our sins and turn to GOD) and trust in HIM alone to save us. What if you prayed right now and asked GOD to forgive the sins you have committed and thanked JESUS for dying on the cross in your place? What if you followed JESUS CHRIST at any cost and obeyed HIS Scriptures that you would read everyday? Are you going to REPENT today? Please visit: www.NeedGod.com
Hmmmmm. Food for thought. The answer for me is simple. I would rather spend eternity burning in Hell than at the feet of a mean and vengeful God. Three years ago as I suffered through the throughs of yet another bout of post partum depression, while my brain fought against itself between logic and the synapses of awful thoughts that continued to fire despite all my will against them, I came to accept that for me there is no God. Not one or another, not Allah, or Buddha, or Jehovah, or Krishna, just none. Follow that with a short tour of a third world country, mostly Roman Catholic. People who are told that it doesn't matter that their lives are shitty, they will be honoured in Heaven. I couldn't follow it. It made no sense to me except as a way for the church and grossly corrupt government to control the masses.
It took me many months to work through those feelings. After all, I'd be raised in a Christian home. A moderate, liberal Christian home but Christian nonetheless. I took it for granted that there must be a God. So much can be explained with God and I believed the stories I had been told about the baby Jesus, about the baby Moses, and even about Noah and his Ark. Never mind that I was disturbed by the stories. Stories of babes born in barns, separated from their mothers to avoid certain death and mass murder of every living thing except the pairs necessary to repopulate(I took great hope in the rainbow which I was told God gave us as a promise that He would never again react so severely as he did in Noah's time). At fifteen, I was so desperate to be sure of access to Heaven that I repeated my own promises to God and was immersion baptised. My husband and I were married the same United Church as my parents by a very liberal minister who made us feel comfortable about our discomfort with God. Our oldest children were baptised by an elderly minister who was sick with cancer and not afraid of death, and our third baby by a minister that played goal on my dad's hockey team. Both also making us comfortable in the face of our natural discomfort.
Now the discomfort is gone. I feel good about embracing my atheism. And raising my children to be free thinkers not lambs following to slaughter. We have found our own moral compass which exists simply because we are capable of feeling empathy, and not because a threat hangs over us to behave. I am not afraid of death except to leave my family without me. I am not afraid of the "no longer", because I am comfortable with it in the same way as "never was". I see death as the escape from life, from pain, from our bodies failing us. And I see how each of us continues in small parts in the people that we touch, affect and love.
For awhile I missed prayer. Its simplicity. The release of the thoughts, ideas and fears that were floating around in my head. So I took up more Yoga and began practicing meditation more seriously. I learned to sit still and let it go. I learned to appreciate the small details: the joy of breakfast in the morning, the smell of dew, a warm hug from a sleepy child, moments with friends which we have only for those moments, a glass of wine. It changed my thinking and it made me happier, most of the time.
And for awhile I worried about not baptising my youngest babe. For awhile. I worried that she would feel left out. That she would feel that the decision not to baptise her was made out of our time being consumed by her brother and sisters. And I worried about not giving her the community which I felt came with the church. But what I soon realized is that the community I imagined comes from other places too. Its in our neighbours, in our family and most certainly in our friends. We don't need a church to belong somewhere.
And so here we are, happily and thoughtfully without God.
A couple more things. If you haven't checked out "The Meming of Life", please do so here http://parentingbeyondbelief.com. And as a disclaimer, I never did visit the website that the card directed me to.
