lickhaven

There’s been speculation springing from studies of separated twins that there may, in effect, be “spiritual genes.” That’s putting it in a deliberately simplistic way, but the general idea is that some of us are wired for religious, or at least spiritual, throughput, others, not.

I entered Catholic school in fourth grade, not previously having been exposed to god (or if so, the exposure’s lost in time’s mists). The nuns’ continuing message of justified punishment, however, quickly turned my ever-quivering kid weakness to jelly, with their vision of perdition waiting to mug me around every corner. Without conscious transition, I accepted god, devil, ritual, sin and eternal retribution.

Yet once in college, I just as quickly lost all active traces of religion. And they have never come back, never hovered in the background; over the years, the distance between myself and – not just belief, but the possibility of belief – has become an unbridgeable chasm. 

After returning from my abortive post-grad stint at Stanford, I plowed through occultist materials and Eastern religious tomes under the maddening hiss of defective fluorescent lights in the Van Pelt Library at UPenn, until one day I realized I was reading down the center of every page because the same ten code phrases, repeated, rearranged but unvarying, had piled up like driftwood on my mental shores. There might be a stout trunk of truth in there, but the branches of differentiation had withered and died.

These declining days I’m probably the most materialistic person I know. It’s easy to dismiss my current dearth of spirituality as a rejection of what went before; it feels more like easing into my natural state. 

For the last few decades England’s been going through a remarkable academic debate about whether there is or isn’t a god. It takes on a rather nasty tone at times, and god knows (or doesn’t), the militant atheists are as rampantly pigheaded and doctrinaire as the righteously religious.

The pro-gods point to scriptural truth, gauzy internal knowledge and the “intelligent” complexities of creation for their justification. The anti-gods haul up the established laws of physics which, they say, will fully explain those complexities without the need for external intelligence (which, by Occam’s close shave, makes god unnecessary).

Of course, a hundred pages of “convincing” proof on either side will convince no one not otherwise ready to be convinced. For each of us, in a general sense, the Great Ruler is either faith or logic. 

Those spiritualizing genes (if they exist): Do they make us slaves to our predispositions? Or, more realistically, do they gently nudge us with their chromosomal arrangement? Either way, looking at my family, we seem to be missing a spiritual underlayment.

My mother was a (first Presbyterian, later Episcopalian) church secretary, and heavily into the social side of the neighborhood Episcopal hangout. Yet I can’t recall an instance of her extolling god or making a religious statement.

My father was Catholic and went to Mass every Sunday – because my mother badgered him into going. Why should she do this? As a power maneuver? Dad, likewise, said nothing about belief (then again, Dad seldom said much). Because of a “football injury” he’d received in high school (which failed to manifest itself during the remainder of the week), he found it too painful to kneel. He would hunch slightly forward off the edge of the pew during the those parts of the Mass when our church’s unpadded wooden benches impressed their grain into my knees.

Brother Vic? Not a word. I was closer to Rod, who claimed to be agnostic on a technicality: As a strict logician he could not say definitely there could be no afterlife or beatific vision, “but I’d be very surprised.” (I loved Rod’s wonderfully understated sense of humor.)

For those of you suffused with belief, I don’t know how to elucidate its lack. It’s generally impossible to describe a negative – though I don’t myself view this lack as a negative. It’s more that I can’t see anything out there to believe in. It’s hard enough to believe in the daily vagaries of the “real” world without drifting into veneration of the amorphous woo-woo. 

But is my disbelief determined, or have I chosen not to believe? Either way, innate compulsion or choice, I’m not accepting of the idea of god, whether as totem, anthropomorphic super-daddy, or fluid, unifying reflection of nature. I don’t view the totality of existence as inextricably linked. (I mean, should I intuitively imbibe the acceptance of a rock or be attuned to my cat’s deliberations?) And how does adding a god to the universal mix make it any more palatable, exciting, rewarding or comprehensible?

Good gravy, folks – the Big Bang! How much more visceral hoopla can you want? And couldn’t you, I or any concerned four-year-old design a more fair, decent and kindly universe?

There used to be (may still be) sanctimonious hogwash about deathbed reconversions – especially of Catholics – once they’ve recognized their “error.” Within our relatively long-lived family, at age 81 I’m about nine-tenths of the way to the Great Beyond (barring the iconic anvil dropping on my head), but I sense no intimations of religious immortality – God and the tooth fairy weigh about the same for me.

As for cozying up to a deity who would kick me down the heavenly staircase for faithfully following my own sense of the truth (which includes the lack of his existence) – would I want to spend eternity with a guy like that?

I “found” science after college and have cuddled alongside it since – petted it, gently nipped its ears, kitchy-cooed its silky fur. The religious might be justified in calling such adulation a “belief,” but I don’t think it’s the same kind of belief. I don’t believe in an afterlife (or a forelife, for those reincarnatedly inclined). I’m intrigued and delighted by the simple proposition: “I was not, I am, I will not be.”

I can’t offer the slightest hint as to why the universe exists – why there’s “something,” rather than “nothing” – but I do “believe” that physical law will prove fully adequate to explain the form and movement of the “something” that we experience.

The mind-rendering transformations of religious leaders – Saul to Paul, Mohammed to Prophet – came about during those converts’ middle age, a time of major shifts in brain chemistry. At one time I looked forward to something similar for myself – not because I gave a bean-eater’s toot about transcendence, but because knowing All The Answers would make it easier to steamroll ahead and the hell with everybody else. 

But though, as “The X-Files” rather lamely put it, “The truth is out there,” we, for better or worse, are stuck here. I find it more interesting to try to figure out existence on my own than to work with somebody else’s instruction booklet, no matter how attractively packaged with a gift certificate to the afterlife.

I’m not fond of the idea of dying, but I kind of look forward to rotting.