Religion Is Creepy

I'm all for people worshiping as they please. I'm all for live and let live. I choose not to believe, and to expect my choice to be respected I should respect the choices of others. And I do. But religion is still creepy to me, and it makes my skin crawl.

This past weekend, a minister of a local church was killed while riding his bike on Bardstown Road in the Highlands of Louisville. I heard it on the radio while driving in to work on Monday, thought "that sucks," and went on with my day. Then Smacky calls me at work in a panic, apparently the minister was from the local hippy church she's been attending. Now, when I say "hippy" I mean "based on Christianity, but inclusive of all viewpoints, lifestyles, and people." Basically, it appears to be the locus of alternative spirituality in Louisville for those marginalized by other religions: homosexuals, free-thinkers, spiritualists, deists, et cetera.

To support my wife, I went with her to the memorial service that was held last night. It was a nice (and LONG) service, and the church was packed to the gills. Not only did I not burst into flames, I made it through the whole service without feeling the need to get up and walk out (since that would upset Smacky and all). However, it was nice to see the man was so well liked, and how the congregation had accepted him so fully in the handful of months he had been with them.

While their inclusive modern form of worship was certainly a little more tolerable than most services I've attended, it still gave me the creeps. Ultimately, it was still projection of order and understanding onto the chaotic and the unknowable, which is the very thing I cannot accept and what drove me away from religion so many years ago. Lots of people expressed shock and lack of understanding, at which point they usually followed that up with declarations of order and understanding...and my skin would begin to crawl.

The one person who spoke who creeped me out the least was a minister friend of the deceased, whose closing statement expressed doubt about the whole affair and how he could not see the good that would come of it. Somehow, I feel it was one of the most real statements made that night, excluding professions of love and admiration as it was clear these people truly cared for the deceased.

When my loved ones have died, I have been destroyed with grief. But the grief is about the loss of them from my life and the lives of those we loved in common. I do not grieve for their "soul" or that they should be alive or question the good or bad of it all. Life is a fragile, delicate, and amazing thing. Enjoy it while it happens, and when it ends, feel lucky you had a great run. Ultimately, I wish the deceased well in whatever, if any, existence is ahead of them, and then I move on to dealing with the gaping hole left in my life by their absence. I do not try to create order surrounding the happenstances of the situation. I do not expect a higher power to show itself and its workings to me. I accept the loss, deal with my grief, and go on with life.

To me, religion is -- particularly in times of grief -- a dangerous crutch, an ointment for a wound better left to heal on its own, a support structure that all too easily becomes an imposed hierarchy of how to think in everyday life. Yuck. Creepy stuff.