Students’ Views

All data ripped from NY Times article.

*More than 1/4 of American have left their childhood faith *If changes among Protestant affiliations are included, 44% of people in the U.S. have switched religious affiliations *The Catholic Church has experienced the greatest net loss of members, yet the percentage of Catholic Americans remains constant due to the effect of large numbers of Catholic immigrants *In the 1980s, 5-8% of the population did not affiliate with a particular religion *Unaffiliated people today are largely under 50 and male *20% of men are unaffiliated, compared to 13% of women *A total of 16.1% of Americans are unaffiliated with a particular faith *Most of these unaffiliated do not think of themselves as atheist or agnostic, but describe their religion as “nothing in particular.”

It’s a long story really. I couldn’t really say what finally made me decide to leave the Catholic faith, and christianity, in fact- all religion- forever. I think two things hit me and slowly began to eat away at me. The first was my fellow Catholics. There are a variety of jokes circulating these days which make use of the fact that there is a great lethargy among Catholics. In short, there are many, many (a majority I would almost say) holiday Catholics, who only come to church during special holidays like Ash Wednesday and Easter and Xmas. They never really think about God much, and belong to a great majority of humanity who don’t think of themselves as “good” or “bad,” knowing they are not worth the former according to religious standards and no one likes to think of themselves as the latter, and thus they simply think of themselves as “okay” or “good enough.” God’s a good ol’ chap, he’ll let me in the pearly gates, I really am sorry for all the things that I do and don’t do again and again day in and day out. What’s not to like about me? It’s not like I’ve ever killed anyone.

The second thing, the thing which I think contributed the most to my realizing what I eventually came to realize, was other religions. If you ask a Catholic priest they’ll dance around the issue, but basically if someone doesn’t believe in Christ they’re damned to hell when they die. So what about those people who are raised believing in other religions? Poor pious, good-hearted souls get burned for eternity, that’s what.

But it was the meditation upon the fact that there are REAL people out there who REALLY and TRULY believe in Islam or Hinduism or Nirvana. They really believe, just as much as Catholics (pious ones) believe in Catholicism. That meditation led to a realization- when coupled with the lethargy of Catholics who ‘went through the motions’ and avoided asking themselves tough questions, this meditation led me to conclude that there is no such thing as religion. There is only culture. I was socialized into Catholic culture.

And now I am relieved to realize that there are 16.1% of Americans in my place. I’m not alone.

I’m not agnostic. I don’t weakly cling to those things such as eternal life and a good old chap in the sky looking out for me and discard everything else (except on Easter), all just to make me feel good. I’m not atheist. I don’t spend all my time actively NOT believing in God. No one thinks about the blankie they grew out of when they were toddlers every day.

I can’t explain the relief and comfort I feel now that I know I’m not alone. But this rising number of people in a ‘non-particular’ place makes a lot of sense when we take a closer look at it. I’ve been beginning to understand it a lot more after learning a lot about humanity in a bunch of other classes (the benefit of a liberal arts education).

How do I begin to explain the information above and my place in it?

There are a people in Africa who don’t have a native word for ‘community.’ This is strange in and of itself, but that’s not nearly as unfathomable as the fact that these people don’t conceive of themselves as selves. Their entire identity (if it’s even that) is based on their connections to other people. For example, these people think of themselves as mothers, cousins, friends, and even more complex things than that. I am the acquaintance of Charlie who owes him $5. That’s a REAL and almost tangible relationship with someone in this culture. That’s part of their identity. But as far as stepping BACK from all of these relations and saying “okay, I am me. I am Marcos. I am an individual“- nope, doesn’t happen. They only think of themselves as beings in relation to others. In fact, if you don’t have any relationships with anyone, if you were a hermit in the forest, you would in effect not exist. Now that’s something to wrap your mind around.

Why is it so hard for us Westerners to understand this concept? Easy. Capitalism. Capitalism needs for those living in a capitalistic society to think of themselves as individuals. That’s what every exchange is based off of. That’s what private property is justified by (btw, many cultures don’t have a concept of private property either). In fact, the emphasis on the individual is even more important than that. It’s completely integral to the system. Supply vs Demand. The demand of consumers. All of this led to the philosophy which we have all heard of at some point, that each of those within a group acting alone and for the betterment of themselves leads to the betterment of the group. This kind of mentality is a presupposition in economics. Every consumer thinks this way. Everyone in the stock market acts this way.  This is where the Western ideal of the ‘individual’, with ‘unalienable rights’ and ‘individual liberties’ was born. Our entire society is built on this.

So what? What’s wrong with that? Oh, well, now you’re talking right and wrong, concepts I think are useless to debate and are better left to essentialists. The fact of the matter is that when we combine this concept of the individual with the rising ‘global connection’ of people through technology, it presents a problem we all realize but don’t recognize for what it truly is.

The average American is ALONE. Completely and utterly. They are alone with their individuality, their will. They are alone in their actions. They are alone in a crowd, among friends. How many of us have TRUE friends anymore? People we can ‘be ourselves’ around, don’t have to watch what we say about anything, or change the way we act, talk, walk, think, react. How many relationships in our lives are controlled by ‘politeness’ and ‘decorum’ and ‘respect’ (unearned, given with the benefit of the doubt)? How many people (I include myself here) are in the ‘no particular place’ of having ‘many acquaintances but little if any friends?’ Or, for those who don’t realize that they belong to this group, how many have ‘friends’ but no real ‘best friends?’ Even further! How many ‘best friends’ are leftovers from childhood (I include high school and college) who don’t really qualify as such anymore, who you don’t really speak to or interact with on a daily basis? EVEN FURTHER! How many people claim to be Bffs but then get into petty fights and break it all off, while we know that any relationship with sustenance could’ve survived whatever the fight was?

We are eroding the labels which once meant something. Our ability to create meaningful relationships with others is decomposing, and the contributors to this process are many. I could write a book about it. I bet there already is one, never read by those who could benefit the most from it. However, I will speak about the contributor related the the rising disbelief in religion.

I think it is very clear that the origins of this phenomena begin in The Enlightenment. Everything in philosophy, from beauty to morality (Read some Kant) began to require something very peculiar to people up to that point. If you wanted to be good, you were forever in conflict with yourself, you had to suppress your ‘animal’ urges and use your ‘reason’ to do things. In essence, by becoming a slave to reason you were in fact freeing yourself from the useless, despicable animal inside you. Remember that! It really seemed as if there was something ‘not you’ inside you, urging you to do things ‘you’ didn’t really want to do. This lead to the ability to actually have a ‘fight with yourself’.

This ’stepping back’ from the corporeal world and ‘transcendence’ into a beautiful, pure, untainted world of reason was the first step. This was the first step in stepping away from ourselves. It was a necessary step, but this step cost us peace within ourselves. Not until that point did we truly understand what it meant to have eaten that pretty little apple.

It’s called detachment for a reason. When presented with a nude picture in an art gallery, someone begins to draw your attention to the strokes of the brush, the use of colors, the objects surrounding the woman (always a woman). That beautiful ray of light coming through the window representing- blah blah blah- point being, something fundamentally erotic is at once sexual and yet we have the excuse of looking at it in a scholarly, detached way. This is the situation of many relationships. We ‘like’ our acquaintances, but there is a politeness which is infused in the ways we interact, we are ‘proper’, in essence, we control the way we really want to act and behave and change ourselves into a pre-molded self, defined precisely by the utter respect for another person’s ’self’. Useful, yes. But not to the point where we can do away with real connections. I hate when I do the below, and yet I keep on doing it:

“hey, Marcos, how are you?”

“Good, how about you?”

We never stop walking past each other. The last question is not answered most of the time. A perfect example of reinforcing the kinds of relationships which do nothing to provide the sense of not being alone.

Now, after this other digression, how do I connect it to religion? Not yet, it adds up, believe me, this stuff is complex. One human is complex, for crying out loud, when you talk about society, well it’s bound to have digressions.

The discovery of the atom was the next big hit. I’m not sure which came first, the atom or enlightenment, either way, one was the first and the other the second big stepping stone. I mean ‘discovery’ not in the sense that it didn’t exist before we discovered it, but that’s what I mean. The atom was not part of our fundamental view of the world, our subjective worlds, until it was discovered. Who would you be if you didn’t believe in the atom? I guarantee you your faith would be a lot easier if you didn’t believe in it.

The atom reinforced (or started) the fundamental separation of the world we knew to be true from the world we actually experienced.

Have you ever seen an atom with your naked eye? No, and yet it is a fundamental unit in the subjective world of a Westerner. Religion should’ve died then, says Nietzsche (”god is dead”), but he realized himself that that would not happen for a long time, if ever.

We are divorced from the world we experience. We are divorced from true relations to people, because we form relationships cast in the molds which do not allow for subjectivity, among other things. Now comes religion. The lethargy among many Catholics comes from the fact that we are raised to believe in something, and yet raised to believe in something fundamentally opposed to it. God vs Atom. We pretend like we believe God invented the atom. All that does is separate us further from understanding God, leaving us to fend for ourselves in trying to understand the subjective world we live in when we are bombarded with separation and the existence of a world that is not accounted for by our own subjectivity. The ‘water-down Catholics’ (not my phrase btw) don’t want to ask themselves the tough questions of why they don’t really believe what their faith calls them to believe in (belief being synonymous with action is one of them, therefore not acting according to those beliefs means you don’t believe in them). They don’t want to try to reconcile these two seeming truths.

My journey away from religion was only possible because I craved the answer to that very question. And in exploring it I wavered from piousness to watered-down faith again and again before I realized what I now believe to be the truth. The human condition throughout history has been the contention between the world of the senses and the ‘world of the mind’. Now it has been elevated to a whole other level. Both religion and enlightenment ask us to think of something other than the world we experience. As a result we are losing the skills to maintain (an illusion I must ultimately say, but one I dearly wish to have) true connections with people. I will say that though I don’t believe true connections are possible, I strongly believe that meaningful ones are, and that I have been using ‘true’ instead of what I really meant as ‘meaningful.’ How can you have meaning without truth? That is the human condition…..

My brother is a gamer. He spends all his time playing FFXI online. He has lots of friends online. Only in this day and age can we attempt to erase our loneliness by sitting in a room by ourselves. It works while we’re engaging in these forms of ineffective interactions, but the best test to whether or not you are alone in this world, is whether or not you feel lonely when you are alone. Meaningful connections last long after those involved are gone. And the lack of those kinds of relationships and connections is fundamentally why there are so many people who are ‘watered-down’ whatevers. At least I have God, right?

But there is hope yet. A whole generation is growing up and realizing that there is something missing in this picture. And I hope we can all find out, now that we are in the most painful ‘nowhere in particular’ place, where to go from here to find and create meaning again. It’s going to be hard, we have to resolve and find a way to live with a fundamental conflict in the cosmos. But if evolution has anything good to offer it’s the hope that our adaptability can overcome this obstacle too.