God is Santa

I effectively lost my religion in my teenage years. I was raised Catholic (though my mom was a non-practicing Protestant of some shade or another and now identifies herself as an atheist) and was dragged to Mass by my dad every Sunday of my young life until I was in college. My relationship with my dad was complicated, but for the purposes of this post, suffice to say that I loved him, but he was an an alcoholic and a Sunday-morning Catholic. In other words, aside from having a figurine of the Virgin Mary on a knick-knack shelf, Catholic faith and dogma didn't seem to play a big role in our everyday lives, but come hell or high water (even when Dad was mightily hungover), we had to be in a church pew every Sunday morning at 8:30.

There was no one moment when I realized I didn't believe in God; in fact, I have a hard time remembering any time when I did have a strong faith, except when I was five years old. The Christian God always seemed more like Zeus or Santa Claus to me, someone it was nice to think about and hear stories about, but those stories never seemed real. I think the yearning and searching for spiritual balm is real and justified, but belief in the specific stories that the major religions tell about their central iconic figures are not (justified, perhaps, in terms of the effectiveness of parables and allegories and the power of narrative, but not real).

Which finally brings me to the book I just finished, Losing My Religion by William Lobdell, a former religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times. It's an account of how Lobdell went from essentially having no religion, to being born again, to losing his faith, largely due to what he saw and heard on the church beat. The trigger for his loss was the Catholic child abuse scandal, not just how so many victims of abuse by priests have had their lives messed up, but by how the Church as an institution tried to hush the scandals up. Around the same time, he was also working on a story about how ex-Mormons are treated by their former friends and family members (total shunning). Finally, he admits to not understanding how, ultimately, most answers to questions about God's ways, especially when they seem cruel or capricious, come down to priests and ministers telling us, "It's God's plan, and it's a mystery."

To his credit, the book is not a screed about how horrible and dangerous religion is--though I must defend the more strident books of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens as necessary in a body of popular literature in which the taking-on and taking-down of religion has always been taboo. Lobdell seems more sad than angry, and he does not trash most people of religion, particularly laypeople believers.

What I liked best in the book was his comparison of God to Santa Claus, which made so much sense to me. In the back of my mind, I've always assumed that, as all children must eventually come to the realization that there is no such magical being as Santa Claus, most thinking, rational adults eventually come to the conclusion that there is no supernatural God, at least not in the monotheistic, anthropomorphic way that most organized religions teach. I admit there are times when it would be nice and incredibly comforting to believe in a parental God who helps and punishes and has a nice, cozy spot (or not) in the afterlife waiting for me, just as I'd like to believe in ESP and ghosts and Zeus and Apollo and Santa Claus. There are moments in my adult life when I've almost believed in elves or astral projection, and, yes, God, but I can't be a thinking person and give myself over completely to such wishful, supernatural thinking. Not to mention the destructive behaviors, personal and social, that religion has facilitated over the years... but that's another blog post.