That Which We Call A Rose By Any Other Name

To change a name, to morph shapes, letters; to twist semantics, to pry and bend and hammer at definitive syllables; to place vowels in their proper order - I have done these things to change one simple word marred by years of internal warfare and heartache, to weld the jagged edges and crescent moons into an opponent word so hideous in contrast, so heavy, even I, its Creator, could not have anticipated its influence. To call things by their right name. This connected the previously arbitrary blimps of hardly traceable disagreement between me and the religion I once claimed. Now I am one semi-circle, open to the ground beneath, curving inward and pouring downward on the right side until it drips into a single dot of embarrassing and self-proclaimed unbelief. In the bible-belt suburbia,  I have little time to toss my hands in the air in frustration before the protestant EMTs come rushing in to heal my scraped knee with morphine and a lobotomy. "I am a" meant nothing without "Christian" strapped to the end; when I walked away from "Christian," I walked away from the present, labeled it past, and carried the physiological shell of me into a Godless place I struggle to name "Reality," or "Hell." I am hesitant; changing a name changes everything.

Belief-O-Matic Quiz

1) Unitarian Universalism (100%)

2) Secular Humanism (97%)

3) Liberal Quakers (85%)

4) Neo-Pagan (74%)

5) Nontheist (73%)

6) Reform Judaism (67%)

7) Theravada Buddhism (67%)

8) Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestant (60%)

9) New Age (58%)

10) Bahai Faith (50%)

I'm a Single Cell on a Serpent's Tongue

When I came home, I stuffed it in my purse, to keep it hidden, to keep the cover close. I felt a little ashamed like I was 16 stealing my parents liquor again with the same regretful smug defiance. I know the words, "The God Delusion," would be a cherry on top of my negligent church attendance and my journey through the Qur'an, to them. I doubt they are willing to admit the assumed conclusion of this evidence, that I am no longer a Christian, but as their suspicion rises, I'm beginning to feel the sting of deception. 

I am in no way proud of my unbelief.

Im agnostic, btw.

WE

The rotting steal infrastructures, lines of rectangles and triangles screamed, crying at the passage of a quiet mass, solemn with 20/80 vision. We hear the dulled version through hours of foggy memory and swallows of cheap liquid poisons that burn our throat and churn our stomach. We move as a flock, as an entity shuffling our feet and tripping against the strings of nothing, as nothing smiles back. We are one, the unity of ten thousand tragedies, indifferent to us as they trudge along. We are dizzy from the madness that perpetuates with time and those quiet moments of solitude, though rare, often irreparable. We have one aim, one mind geared toward the three pleasures eminent enough to corrupt. We name them: God, love, and drugs. We name them magical realism, selfish satisfaction, and false sensation. We name them excuses not to think, immoral though admirable. One day we may name them petty, but not today.

The subway roars; our impatient anticipation transforms every clank and echoed footstep into a raging machine of transportation, eating the tracks as it comes our way - certain to remain its cycle long after we end ours. But our imagination fabricates sounds and it doesn't come for another five minute eternity. Flying underground we fail to determine the temperature of the current swooping us up with the weightlessness of feathers that form a wing. As we fall to our knees in suffocating laughter we feel the glare of solitary shadows, soldiers of the straight-edge, kings of condemnation. As if pressure diminishes in the pool of now vague sensation, our body melts into a misshapen cup, unable to hold substantial content without spilling all over your shirt. We are stains. We are the embarrassment of past mistakes still apparent to everyone, "Not so past," we laugh. We are a confused temporary agnostic, like everyone else. We are waiting for justification to believe in a God but we do not find it. We tried to fall in love but we stopped believing in it.

Today we admitted our disbelief to a surprisingly apathetic audience. We spoke with our trembling voice, the words advocates use to excite emotion, but we found them unconvincing. Our eyes filled with the tears we spent years building up, but the millstones pulled harder and the ocean was none-the-less drowning us. We almost lost our footing at the halting screech-stop of the iron beast, to the amusement of the annoyed wrinkled faces among us. To lose our faith, we feel aged; to lose our mind, we feel we never used it in the first place.

God. Sex. Drugs

In APenglish5 today we were discussing what is called a "level three question" which is basically an open ended question on philosophy that is derived from literary themes and situations. The question was (without references before)... What is faith?

My initial thought, my Freudian slip if you will, was "blind-belief." My conscious quickly took over however to tell me that it was a, "strong belief." Perhaps we should listen to our intuition more. The church teaches that faith should be without doubt but that doubt fortifies faith. My secret: I've never been without doubt. (And I don't think I ever want to be.)

My belief in God has slipped to the point that if you could see it as a line on a graph, I have recently slipped below the zero mark and lay somewhere close to the top, but just below. I feel I should almost say I have disbelief with doubts saying, "maybe God is real and maybe he does care", (the reverse of the last 6 years).

And tonight Ben, a Watershed employee I work with, came in to talk as he usually does. He told me all my music was about sex. I laughed and told him I went in weekly patterns of listening to music either about sex, drugs, or God. He told me this made since because they were the three most incredible feelings capable of humanity.

Suddenly, they all seemed on the same plane to me. That they are all just fixes for the emotionally strung-out and... weak hearted. I thought briefly then of the Buddhist ideology, of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, Deism, ext and I wondered... is religion a hoax? Is this a drug we've come to accept? Is this an orgasm of entire fantasy? Is it a socially acceptable cop out into a utopia we are unable to achieve on earth?

It seems logic is above this. If I can rationalize my way out I wont be waiting around for the next fix - for Sunday night, for a high or a shot, for sexual attention. While one day I persue one, the next day I persue another waiting until God, drugs, or sex satisfies. In a small way they all do, but in the biggest way, they dont.

Good feelings currupt us - they are a lust we all search after. Does it matter which medium we satsify this hunger in? Is it really healthy to have faith? I am full of questions and scared of their answers. For the past six years religion has defined me, and suddenly, I don't know if God is real.

I want to believe, I really do

I haven't fully understood this, and unnervingly never forgotten it. I feel like I could say that about a lot, lately. Ive been very introspective, Ive been interrogating my past. Tonight at church I was overwhelmingly flooded with a memory that didn't really make sense until now. I was in the seventh grade, undoubtably optimistic, unrealistic, and uncommonly happy. I went to a rally on the state house steps with my church, when Daniel was the youth pastor, I remember his missing fingers in this picture. I couldn't tell you now what the speaker said, I'm not sure it mattered, but I remember the worship. I dont remember the songs. I remember my knees pressed against the pavement, I remember my forehead on the ground. I remember me crying and crying and crying, and I remember what I was saying.

I prayed, "Please dont ever leave me. Dont ever leave. Dont ever leave me. Please. Please Jesus dont ever leave me. Dont leave me like everyone else. Dont ever leave."

I was twelve. Who knows where that sense of abandonment came from. I remember how hard i was crying, and how I didnt understand. Half way through I felt like a fake, I didnt have anyone leave me. Why was I crying about being alone? I didnt know why I was so upset, I thought maybe I was bringing this on, that none of it was real. It felt real though; I felt God. And now it feels like I was crying for what I had no idea was going to happen. I just kept on and on, "dont ever leave, dont ever leave me."

Looking back on it now, maybe he never has.

I see God in a lot of petty things; on most days I dont need convincing that he exist. What I wonder is if he cares, what I wonder is if hes active. Ive known the answers all along I just didnt want to accept them, I didnt want to accept that there is no single person to blame for all of this. I really wanted God to storm down from the clouds and stop these things that hurt; and he never does; and he never will. I do struggle with that, and I will, but I really want be with him again. Im ready to bury the image I had of God; Im ready to start over.