“Spiritual” Response to Shane’s Request for Religious Affiliation

Hi Paul,
I'm curious to know what religion, if any, you belong to.
Submitted by Shane


Reply to Shane
Your interest in what religion I belong to or if I belong to any at all took me completely by surprise, Shane. You realize, of course, that I cannot tell you. All my reasons for not telling you are pretty much of the same importance, so I will give them at random.

My religious affiliation or my lack thereof would change the way you perceive my relationship with God. I am deeply religious, but by the standards of any religion, I am an atheist. I do not believe in God. I do not believe God exists. I am thoroughly convinced that science has trumped religion, but I have a relationship with God no matter how self-serving that scientifically apparent delusion may be. For me the relationship is real. Under such a circumstance, no atheist organization (religion if its members seek to persuade others to abandon their theist beliefs and replace them with a more rational dogma) would accept me as one of their own.

I do not believe in God, because belief is an admission of doubt. Doubt suggests I must prove something to someone. I have a relationship. It is personal. It is something I can share, but only by talking about myself or making up stories to stimulate a mythological response can I make others aware of that relationship. It is based totally on faith. You will have to accept or reject your own relationship and set your own parameters for what you will believe and what you will not believe. I cannot do that for you nor would I want to. There are those that will attempt to set those parameters for you if you wish them to do so.

I believe that God is beyond existence, that He created existence. Trying to make God part of existence is an attempt to diminish Him, an attempt to make Him manageable, to domesticate Him, to make Him less awesome.

Labeling is useful. It is a way to simplify a person or a concept. However, labeling myself marks my message, if it is seen as such, and changes its meaning and its intent. I move from sharing to snaring, evangelizing, selling a product. My message, if I have one, is that everyone chooses their own path through life whether they admit or not, but not everyone is truthful about the path they have chosen, often not even with themselves. My intent is to encourage others to share the true direction of their lives. These are difficult times. We are badly in need of a religious renaissance (I consider Atheism a religion). By religious renaissance I mean a lot of people sharing, comparing, arguing and justifying their spiritual convictions, not as members of a group so much as individuals.

Labeling myself would embarrass the group that shares my journey, but not my path. It should be obvious to you if you have read my articles that I stray from the beaten paths. I share my relationship with God with the individuals in my affiliation, but I do not try to convert them. How could I? It’s a relationship. Publicly identifying myself as a member of any particular group exposes that group as accepting my theology (world view) by allowing me to continue in their fellowship. It also contaminates my theology (world view) with the dogma of those with whom I commune.

I am also concerned that someone might read my response and say, “I am so disappointed. I thought he was one of us.”

Coincidentally, a friend having just read ‘Spiritual’ said to me just the other day, “I did not understand a word in your article. It is way beyond me.” I have noticed that people grouped together for an extended period of time begin to use words unfamiliar to those outside the group. They seem completely unaware of these changes and use the words freely with outsiders. If there are only a few such words, no one really notices, but over a really long period of time a minilanguage, understood only by members of the group, develops. Those who approach others outside the group find it more and more difficult to effectively communicate. The general public hears only gibberish.

Evangelicals of all religious groups (including atheist religious groups), especially the enthusiastic and deeply committed groups, have a real problem with this. Though their thoughts and insights are deep and worthy of consideration, their language makes them appear foolish and inconsequential often forcing them to adopt in their persuasive techniques the very human propensities they originally sought to overcome.
I suspect that whatever may have sparked your interest in my religious affiliation or lack thereof and the inability of my friend to even begin to understand what I was trying to say was either a movement in my thinking toward a kind of gibberish or toward pedantry (the affliction of one who writes or talks too much).