So, last night I realised I haven’t thought seriously about spirituality in a while. I am the kind of person who likes to occasionally re-examine the ways I think about things and analyse why I think in that way. Naturally I then spent seven hours thinking about religion and my personal relationship with it.

I don’t think I’ll ever believe in a god. I like having solid evidence. I was brought up without a god, and taught that believing in a god was just blindly following indoctrination. It didn’t help that a lot of people I knew were just blindly following indoctrination. I knew a girl in real life who believed in God so deeply she’d do anything her Church told her without question or analysis, even if it went against her god’s apparent compassion. She outwardly refused to develop a sense of morality other than what was already provided. According to her, God demanded unquestioning and unthinking obedience. (Coincidentally, so did her very religious parents.) I found, and still find, the idea of this repellent. It must be an incredibly insecure god who can’t even handle his followers taking a moment to really consider their beliefs and why they hold them.

In a way though I can believe gods exist, in the same way France exists. There’s no platonic ideal of France. Soil from one side of the Pyrenees border is no more inherently French than soil from the other. France is a social construct. But France exists in people who believe they are subjects of France, and in treaties and constitutions, and borders that enforce the construct onto the real world. To me, gods are manifested in how humans make them manifest. Recently, I’ve been studying the scraps left of Mycenaean religion, 3200 years ago. It doesn’t matter that those gods probably didn’t exist as supernatural entities, or that anyone who believed in them as such died millenia ago. They still left an impact on the world through their believers. So they existed.

I knew a girl on the internet once, about five or six years ago, who was an atheist. Then about a year later, she found what she called G-d, in how beautiful she thought the sound of Hebrew was, and in the echoes of history that resonated in her bones, and in the love, joy and comfort she found in Judaism. I watched her post through the year-long process of conversion. She disagreed with the holy books sometimes. She talked a lot about arguing with G-d, and about analysing the scripture, debating and disputing how much the imperfect hand of ancient man distorted the words of a perfect and all-loving G-d (actually, I’m not sure how much she believed in a supernatural entity called G-d, or how much G-d was a manifestation of compassion in the world). To her, it wasn’t that these things weren’t sacred enough to go unquestioned - they were too sacred to not be questioned. And so she questioned, and she found that this G-d was always her answer.

I read something once about how unconditional love is overrated. A puppy will love its owner unconditionally because the puppy is biologically predisposed to love whoever it sees as its caregiver. It will keep loving even if it is kicked and starved and thrown out, because it has no other choice. Conditional love requires the person loving to have standards, and to have made the choice to love, and to have the ability to question their own choices. I hadn’t connected this to religion before, but it makes sense to connect it, I think. A god who wants conditional love seems better to me than a god who wants unconditional love. If I believed in a god it would be a god like this.

I didn’t realise until reflecting on it now, but I have unconsciously tried to carry the idea of ‘too sacred to not be questioned’ with me, and I guess that’s why I just spent so long questioning myself. I don’t think I’ve come up with any new answers, just put into words the answers I’ve always had, and so I feel like I understand myself and my own relationship with spirituality and morality better than I did yesterday.

I am putting this down in words partly to articulate and better understand my own beliefs, but I’m also going to post this just in case it encourages someone else to question themselves a bit, whether on their religious beliefs, political beliefs, or really anything subjective. It is partly due to people who simply believe and do not actually think that I gained a dislike for religion - it is partly due to seeing people (like Seraph!) put thought into religion that made me regain respect for it.