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Losing my religion
Jan. 10th, 2005 08:39 amDriving in to work I heard this segment on NPR about how the tsunami poses a challenge to people of faith. Starting off, it's by my least favorite NPR reporter, Barbara Bradley Hagerty. She's shockingly biased and allows it to slop over into her reporting, besmirching what's otherwise a fantastic news organization. Here's a more complete examination of her faults and compromises. Whenever one of my more liberal friends complain about a skewed or slanted story on NPR, tracking back I've found it is often one of her lovely little "journalistic" exercises. And of course it goes without saying that they can't ever fire her, the religious reich would have a full on coronal mass ejection at NPR getting rid of their most prominent born again reporter.
This insipid piece was the prototypical survey of the major religions responses to the question of how an omnipotent god that loves mankind (as they purport) could allow tragedies of this scale to happen. Listening to these verbal tapdances, and more particularly noting my response, it emphasized a change that's been happing in me. I'm losing my faith. Never had much to begin with, but going on the traditional definition of "belief in something without any evidence in support" it's gone. The last thing I used to have some faith in was reincarnation and the existence of the soul but over the last decade those beliefs eroded to the point I considered them just sad attempts to avoid the ugly reality of death.
More than that, I am losing my spirituality. It seems to be all mummery and mumbo-jumbo. Child games to keep the boogey man away and make your excruciatingly normal hum-drum existence seem special or meaningful. The only god I can come close to believing in (other than the one that stares out of the mirror at me) is some sort of gestalt emergent property of the entierity of human consciousness. And even that I have serious doubts about.
This insipid piece was the prototypical survey of the major religions responses to the question of how an omnipotent god that loves mankind (as they purport) could allow tragedies of this scale to happen. Listening to these verbal tapdances, and more particularly noting my response, it emphasized a change that's been happing in me. I'm losing my faith. Never had much to begin with, but going on the traditional definition of "belief in something without any evidence in support" it's gone. The last thing I used to have some faith in was reincarnation and the existence of the soul but over the last decade those beliefs eroded to the point I considered them just sad attempts to avoid the ugly reality of death.
More than that, I am losing my spirituality. It seems to be all mummery and mumbo-jumbo. Child games to keep the boogey man away and make your excruciatingly normal hum-drum existence seem special or meaningful. The only god I can come close to believing in (other than the one that stares out of the mirror at me) is some sort of gestalt emergent property of the entierity of human consciousness. And even that I have serious doubts about.
