Merit-bound Alley

I’m continuing my work on the site itself with a new tab under the header that holds all of my Why Atheism posts. If you missed them, check them out!

Did my journey really end with a belief in nothing? Of course not! I can no more stop pondering morality and ethics in life than I can stop being a father. I wouldn’t even want to. The end of the search for a belief system was nothing more than the end of a chapter, and a successful one, at that. In fact, shortly after my epiphany about god, I found something that exactly matched what I do believe.

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I know it’s taken a while to get this out here, but it’s not because of the careful consideration I’ve had to put into this part of the story. No, this one will be notable for it’s brevity.

I was distracted this week by the illness of my cat, Rook, who after 13 years of friendship had to be euthanized on Thursday. Rook was a great cat, and I miss him terribly.

With that out of the way, it’s time to take a look at my last bout of religion in general and Christianity in particular.

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I know it’s unusual to have the appendix out before the end of the story, but I need to respond to some things that kavips stated in his always excellent Outside the Perimeter:

But while my topic is on religion, Joe M. takes us down an interesting road, on one at least I have never been. We are on his odyssey to discover his search for the absence of religion, having spiraled down through Catholicism, to Wicca-ism, and now through the mid-years. Somehow thorough the shallowness of his experiences I can sense why he feels he must pursue that quest…….were my life experiences the same as his, I wonder if logic would have taken me on a similar journey. But my experiences were quite different, and propelled me in a different direction. So to find out what was missed…we await the fourth Canto.

First, my search was anything but a search for the absense of religion. It was an evolving search to find a religion that suited me, and a connection to god. Second, I need to take umbrage with the phrases “spiraled down” and “shallowness of his experiences”. “Spiralled down” invokes the idea that this was a downhill journey to a bad place. This is not the case at all. While the journey did have its ups and downs, the end result was nothing short of complete contentment with a greater understanding of who I am. To me, that is nothing near a downward spiral.

As to the “shallowness of my experiences”, this was not a feeling that I meant to impart in the slightest. Every one of them is absolutely cherished as an experience that helped me learn about what I really believe, and at times, strengthened those beliefs. Just because I didn’t accept each religion as a truth does not mean the experience itslef was shallow. It just means that the religion was unfulfilling despite the fact that it had taught me much. I apologize to anyone who got the feeling that any of these experiences were shallow, as that would be due to my ineptitude as a writer.

At any rate, I hope that clears some things up. Thanks for the nod, kavips!

So, it’s been a few fever-filled days, and I’ve had time to think about what I call in my head the “Median Years” of my search for god. I also thought about green cats and giant tigerlillies, but that was probably due to the fever.

I have to sort the next part of this into years rather than a specific religion because I did a lot of bouncing around. Learning about something so different than the experience of Catholicism awakened a thirst in me to learn about more religions, and in most of them, I found something that was worth learning. Let’s list them out, shall we?

• Taoism
• Buddhism
• General Christianity
• Hinduism
• Jainism
• Zoroastrianism
• Bah’ai
• Secular Humanism (this is an important one)
• more Wicca

I’ll warn you now, this one is long. Sorry.

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As I said in Part I, for my confirmation, I worked at a metaphysical bookstore in my home town. Let me set the stage for you, as I have many fond memories of the store and it’s owner.

Ram III Metaphysical Books was a small storefront on Main Street in Medford, NJ. This small section of Main Street was a small-town attempt to be another New Hope, PA but without the head shops, and minus about 300 stores and two miles of street. I remember my first visit to the store, when I wandered in looking for books on ghosts and UFOs. Shut up, I was young. The shop was facing the south, and the feeling of warmth that washed over me as I entered stayed with me throughout the rest of my visits, as does the memory of bright bands of white and rainbow light cast on the walls by the numerous crystals that hung in the bay window. With the warmth, there was a mix of every scent of incense that the store sold, which had seeped out of the little plastic bags and presented the shopper with an odd harmony that was never reproducable at home no matter how many bags of the shit you bought and burned.

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I was raised Catholic.

So many secularists begin their story of how they came to have no belief in god(s), that it’s become one of my favorite cliches. First Holy Communion, Confirmation, Advent, Lent, giant horrifying statues of the crucified Jesus, the whole bit. That was my life for at least an hour every Sunday for about 14 years. 728 hours is a real long time to deal with boredom. Wait, I forgot about CCD, which was another hour once a week from age six (I think) and we have a grand total of 1114 hours or ~48 days wasted.

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