My Religion is Shrug Emoji

Before I begin, a quick update to this blog schedule: posts will now be Monday, Wednesday and Friday. But since I was sick yesterday, this post is getting written today, and a Wednesday post is highly optimistic.

Getting sick leads me to introspection instead of… anger or new ideas. It’s also Shrove Tuesday. So this is mostly just a personal account of my own religious and philosophical thinking through childhood and adolescence. I find this aspect of my life particularly interesting because it only occurred to me around this time last year, when I realized I’m not sure if I want to be ambivalent any longer. I almost want a box in which to put myself. I’m not someone who decries labels as reductionist or conformist; wanting to know your experience is shared is only human.

Anyway, I was a half-Jewish kid, brought up in an atheist family who mingled with families of all religion. From an early age this gave me a sense that one could draw upon religion for ceremony and community, rather than any belief in (or worship of) a greater consciousness. The idea of worship was what perturbed me the most, as a kid in a Christian primary school. To me, a loving God wouldn’t allow bad things to happen, no matter how transgressive its subjects. And given the number of religions out there, claiming to preach the truth, there was every possibility you could pray for help but be kneeling down for the wrong God. It was easier to just cut them out altogether.

This also led to seven or eight-year-old me penning tracts that demonized the church, with an ludicrously oversimplified view of the implications of Christianity. It makes me laugh that there are nineteen-year-old neckbeards with fedoras whose stance against religion is about as accurate as my own, when I was eight.

My parents suggested I might be too affected by the company I kept — we were visiting a vocally atheist family on a regular basis, and I was taken by their ideas, primarily because they were so fresh compared to the kid-friendly Biblical stories told every school assembly. And from then on, despite my parents wanting to create a safe environment where their kid could develop an ideology that fit them, religion became a taboo topic in our house. I forgot about my religious opinions because I so desperately didn’t want to worry them.

Incidentally, it was also around this time that I found out about religious cults. It was from an almanac lying around my grandma’s house that I learnt about the Jonestown massacre, which gave me nightmares for a good week, and from the Simpsons (and, when I was a little older, a Louis Theroux documentary) that I learnt about Scientology and its ilk. While it seemed easy at first for an eight-year-old kid to compare aspects of harmful cults with aspects of legitimate religion, especially when learning about things like the Crusades for the first time, it soon became obvious that I could channel my negative energies about organized religion into cases where it had actually been used for harm, and that’s about where my stance stayed for a few years.

I was twelve when I was taken out of school to be home-educated, and the number of highly Christian families surprised me. I live in the UK, and I thought maybe that stereotype was only a concern in the US. The good thing is it stopped me from being a judgemental asshole, given that most if not all of these families were socially left-wing, for all they still didn’t much like it when I used the Lord’s name in vain, and continually tried to convince me to come to a sermon — which never happened. (Though I did hang out at a few church meets, because who can say no to free cake?)

So like any reasonable development as an adolescent, I learnt not to judge people, and to respect what made people uncomfortable. But still, religion seemed kind of a bad thing to talk about if you didn’t want a debate, and that’s where it stayed. When I began my journey on The Internet, far too young for joining the circles I did, I got cussed out for labelling myself agnostic when my views were closer to the experience of being atheist. But no one knew the kind of internal struggle that came with the latter label. That is, my family dismissing a child’s rudimentary understanding of religion as brainwashing from the more radically atheistic households in their social circles, as opposed to a thought pattern they had allowed to cultivate themselves.

That’s about where things stayed for a while. Then in early 2015 I looked into Laveyan Satanism on a whim. Now, I said this was gonna be a discussion about religion and philosophy, and here’s where the philosophy comes in. A lot of the ideas made sense to me, but it was impossible to marry that to my politics. You could have an angsty, emotionally immature teenager like myself practice it and they’ll come out a more self-confident person. But what about bankers and politicians, who claim to be Christian but actually engage in LaVey’s tenets the whole time? How can we excuse what such an ideology does to someone already in power? Add that to all the uncomfortable echoes of Objectivism, plus the business-like structure in which the Church of Satan is run, and it just leaves you with a nasty taste in your mouth. I’d make a bad apple joke here, but I’m not that terrible.

But here I am a year on, and using Lucifer as some kind of symbol still appeals to me. As a person who likes a bit of edge, whose life was forever ruined by the devil-worshipping heavy metal music (and the devil-worshipping and uncomfortably kinky industrial music, for that matter), isn’t that natural? Especially in today’s internet culture, continually joking about sinning and going to hell, kind of a defence mechanism for LGBT kids like myself whose existence is constantly invalidated by fundamentalist preachers. I’d probably mention Paradise Lost here, since Miltonian Satanism is apparently a thing, but it seems ignorant to discuss a text I haven’t actually read. (Like most people who studied Frankenstein, I read a bunch of critical opinions about the poem for my literature A-level, none of which actually made it into the exam hall.) As much as there’s apparently a sect of people who missed the memo and think Brave New World is an ideal model for society.

I need a philosophy that carries the idea of being able to understand the worst of us, while never allowing that to excuse their actions. I need something where people are allowed to do things for themselves, and where they don’t have to forgive everyone. Where the marginalized can still be angry with their oppressors. Where you’re not given leave to be a judgemental dick because you’ve successfully ‘cast off’ religion, even though you’re literally just using a different coping mechanism. And when you reach the heart of it, that’s what I goddamn need. A coping mechanism.

Still, until I’m in a position to read up on different philosophies and educate myself better, I guess that coping mechanism will still be ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.