Leave Faith Behind For ExCommunications
Title: Leave Faith Behind: You Already Have What You Need To Live Without It
by Vincent Downing
This essay is part of a greater idea that I’m trying to emphasize in my Recovering From Religion conversations. It was for me essential to my process of maintaining my emotional/intellectual independence while still living among religious folks. Then for my deconstruction. Then for my healing and finally integration. It’s this. Christianity is a set of incentives that erode our own internal resources. And minimizes our access to them. In return, the only “resource” we are provided with is faith. Faith to me is something much more toxic even than a faulty epistemology. Its a gateway drug to an addiction to being right.
What if leaving religion didn’t just mean growth pains? What if it also meant withdrawal symptoms?
In the interests of full disclosure I have told myself many lies. And I suffer from my share of addictions. Just not the faith one.
I define faith as follows:
Faith will keep you addicted to being right. Faith is prostituting your reason in the service of comfort. Faith is pretending to know when you don’t. Faith is saying, over and over, that sanity is believing things you have shitty evidence for. Faith is ignoring the evidence of your senses and reason and even your intuitions so you can cleave to dogmas. Faith is the gateway drug to tyranny, and ignorance. Faith is first footstep on a path to the narcissism that lets you think that you and your tribe are right about everything. Faith is the caul of solipsism. A true solipsism that elevates your unconscious mind to the Power that Created the Universe. Faith is a lie.
In place of faith, I “fall back” on the following:
FREEDOM What you’re feeling is a fear of freedom. But you are now afraid of a real thing: the world in its vastness. Faith offers you fear of a false thing: straying from the edicts of supernatural beings.
HUMOR Ever notice what humorless shits their Gods are? Hint: So are tyrants on earth. Humor is weapons grade perspective. Laughter is a salve you feel, body and mind. Laughter is wings and wind and delight in the sky you fly in. When you rock with laughter you are shaking free of the muck. The truth may or may not set you free. But laughing at it will.
CONFIDENCE Once you use reason combined with intuition you can have answers you are confident in. This is in addition to knowing what you’re afraid of is at least real. Hence your fears could be of use to you for something other than belonging to a particular tribe.
WONDER The religious worldview is bound in the human frame of reference. Science allows you to glimpse sub atomic particles and the peregrinations of galaxies. The only wonder I’ve ever felt in the presence of the plod of dogma was a wonder that these poor people could survive on the stuff.
HUMILITY You are a beautiful beast on a speck of dust free to love and learn. You are part of an ecosystem of dazzling complexity and beauty.
REASON: Reason gives you answers you can’t be certain of by using means that you can be.
COURAGE: To leave behind the addiction to being right; the comfort of friend and family. To risk job and security. None of this happens without huge reserves of courage. And perseverance — which is just courage over time.
CLARITY: The less time you spend gazing rapt into the mirror of tribalism the more of yourself and the world you will actually know. I try to leave the Truth to those who need it and confine myself to looking at myself and the world with unbiased eyes and using whichever of my faculties I’ve got a reasonable grasp of at that point in my life to arrive at some provisional perspectives. Clarity to me is an alchemical elixir composed of intuition, observation, and if and only if I’m driven to it, calculation.
LOVE: When I’m free to love lust and laugh the glow of it fills me, and in the company of those who love me freely and authentically my brain and body are filled with a joy in something real.
