This morning while I was folding laundry I found myself humming an old hymn, We Gather Together.  When my brain is on auto I find it will usually start singing hymns – old church music.  I love church music but the old ones, the old kind, the church music of my youth. 

There is a bit of church music that plays in my head, the Doxology, at odd times, day or night, and honestly sometimes I sing myself to sleep with it. The doxology is usually sung after the offering.  Why this piece of music is my constant companion I have no idea. 

Now you would think, with all this church music playing in my head, that perhaps I was a god-fearing, church-going Christian of some ilk or the other. You would be wrong. 

But that said – from the age of 12 until 18 I lived in church; it was my life. I was a devoted and passionate Protestant; a member of the the Congregational Church. And I had plans to become a minister. (Oh yes, way back then girls could aspire to be ordained ministers in the Congregational Church. The Congregational Church in the United States ordained their first female minister in 1853.) 

As I grew older and wiser and more educated I fell away from Christianity and organized religions altogether.  They make no sense. Then again, Faith, with a capital ‘F’,  makes no sense, that is it’s very definition – belief without proof. 

I am long past the point where I need to give a name to what I believe. I have no need to personify or anthropomorphize what I believe. I have no need to discuss or explain what I believe. Because I feel it in my bones and my gut. And it is not a god, or goddess and trying to talk about my beliefs using common terms muddles everything because we humans have this need to name everything and then ascribe a common definition and that just doesn’t work in this situation. 

I realize the efficacy of common terms and definitions, regardless of the language we all pretty much understand the concept of ‘chair’.  But the concept of a belief – a quote/unquote religious belief? Yeah, not so much understanding. If someone asks me if I believe in god, I say “Whose?” because that word doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. 

It’s a muddle. Certainly there are many things in all religions that make no rational sense but when you are talking about a supernatural being, how much is really going to make sense? 

Do I believe in a supernatural being? No. I can’t wrap my head around there being a male, patriarchal god, who had a son via a human female and that this son is the same “person” as the father yet – here’s the part that has always confused me, this son, who is also the father, is the one who everyone prays to and the one who will ‘save’ us all.  And what exactly are we all being saved from? I’ve just never understood the son part. 

And if god and son are one and the same then just pray to the god – and let us not even bring up the holy spirit because no one knows who or what the hell that is.  The Christian religion makes my head explode. I have no doubt that if I delved deeply into other religions there would be more head explosions because they are all myths. Stories of the supernatural to explain what human beings had no answer for. 

Human beings have made huge advances in 4 million years – we now know the whys and wherefores of most natural phenomena. Yet we still hold on to the myths ancient humans created to explain them. 

Do I have a point here? No – I’m just saying what I want to say because if I said this in polite company a lot of people would get their shorts in a knot. 

I’m not here writing for you, I’m here writing for me.