The Curse of the Holy Blood

I've been nudged by Ordinary Girl and The Chaplain reminding me that I've been neglecting the Atheiosphere. A couple months ago, I was in Belgium visiting my husband's family on vacation. Eight years ago, my husband proposed to me on a beautiful bridge in Brugge (Flemish spelling) in front of the beguinage. Motivated by the recent viewing of a movie called In Bruges (French spelling), we went back to Brugge. Brugge is home to a holy relic, a bottle made from crystal containing the coagulated blood of Jesus Christ and brought to Brugge during the crusades. I had my chance to go up and honor the blood. No fee was demanded, though a donation of 2 Euros was suggested. My husband, brother and father-in-laws did go up and show their respect. My husband claimed that he only did it because, though he doesn't really believe, his Dad didn't want to do it alone. I called him a hypocrite and stayed smugly behind.

Two weeks later, on April 27, I was laid-off work along with 30 other people.

I must have been punished for my unbelief and blasphemy. Though what the other 29 people did to deserve it I don't know. Jesus does do collateral damage I guess. Woah... I suffered two long weeks of unemployment before finding a job that pays more than I was making and pocketing the other 4 weeks pay from my severance package. Yay I did suffer… I'm now horribly busy doing a job full-time that focuses on the one small aspect of my former job that I considered play; developing in SharePoint. Because of that business I've been unable to spend as much time in the Atheiosphere with the rest of you heretics. Learn from me, ye heretics! If you're ever in Brugge, be sure to stop at the Chapel of the Holy Blood and disrespect the relic. Afterwards, relax with a Belgian beer in comfort as you await the wrath that is sure to come for you.

Looking for That A-Ha Moment

The Chaplain over at An Apostate’s Chapel wrote an excellent blessay (to steal the phrase from Stephen Fry) over her Stages of Grief over the loss of her faith. The Exterminator then commented

I’m always struck with the fact that there must have been an aha! moment, an unexpected insight, a sudden flash, that undermines their entire worldview

I was going to just comment, but decided I had enough content to fill my own blessay about a-ha moments. And, for me, I don’t think there was just one. Each was a nudge in a direction that led the next nudge to have greater weight. I’m sure I don’t remember them all, maybe not even the most significant ones, but there are three that do stand out:

1) An NPR interview with an amateur EVP “ghost hunter” who when asked if he was afraid, when hunting graveyards at night for voices, of what he would find replied, “I’m more afraid of what I’m not finding.” He was apparently a very honest, ethical ghost hunter who was disturbed not to be finding any voices from the other side.

2) My husband, who has a phobia about shaking hands with strangers, wouldn’t go to church with me because of this (or so he claims). I wanted to have a more “spiritual marriage” and, because I felt he wasn’t enough of a believer, went looking for things that would convince him to become one. This led to some very stimulating discussions that didn’t have the effect either of us were looking for.

3) A Discovery Channel (or similar) program regarding Jesus or the History of the Bible made on off-hand comment that there was controversy over the historicity of Jesus. It wasn’t the main topic of the show, it was one comment, an aside, one sentence – but to me it stood out like neon. I could say that it was the sudden flash The Exterminator was talking about, but if it hadn’t been for the earlier nudges, I probably wouldn’t have even noticed it.

I looked through my journal. 2005 seemed to be the year that I tried harder to be more religious but I notice certain things now that may have been nudging me towards atheism. 2006 was the final slide.

George W. Bush and the “Moral Majority”. Looking through my journal I have many, many rants about him and them and Christianity and how their Jesus isn’t my Jesus.

January 2005 – took Introduction to Contemplative Prayer, my attempt to increase my relationship with god. I didn’t work very hard at it, but was non-the-less disappointed at my lack of having an immediate Teresa of Avila experience.

The Fresco by Sheri Tepper, in which an Alien species’ moral-ethical religion is centered upon a sacred fresco that is covered in soot (so no-one can actually see the fresco, but they have stories of what it depicts). Tradition dictates the events and symbols that lie hidden beneath the grime, and it is taboo to ever clean the Fresco (Publishers Weekly). And then someone accidentally does clean part of it and finds it to be contradictory to the traditional teaching.

Read Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey. An alternate world where the French, a country known as Terre D'Ange, are descended from divine beings, beings that loosely mirror Jesus and his apostles. The main character is a masochistic courtesan, which in this alternate world is a sacred calling, and a spy.

June 2005 – Attended one meeting with a Charismatic Catholic prayer group. I tried very hard not to get the heebie-geebies from them and left feeling that I couldn’t delude myself enough to get whatever they were getting.

July 2005 – My uncle found Our Lady of Souplantation



He tried to get it on the news and create our own hysteria, but I guess there was too much real news going on that week. It’s the Souplantation on Mission Gorge Road in San Diego if you wish to make a pilgrimage.

March 2006 – Went to a neighbor’s baby shower. Most of the people there were from her Lutheran Church. They handed out blank bookmarks and while the girl was opening her presents, we were supposed to come up with words of wisdom for the new parents and put them on the bookmark. The only thing I could come up with is my favorite "quote", and completely inappropriate for the situation…so I wrote it down.

Don’t mess with Dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with catsup.

April 2006 – is when I first start to really question god existence in a journal entry. There’s nothing in the entry that specifies exactly what brought this about though.

From here I think it takes another year for me to transition completely from belief to un-belief to fully embracing my Atheism. There was no ONE moment though. No one died. I didn't experience any significant loss or illness. I didn't want to start attending orgys or cheating on my husband. My impression has been that slowly over time, little by little, I lost the ability or desire to continue deluding myself with an answer that didn't satisfy the question.

God commands you to read this

Ok, if God had ever given me an ecstatic cellular orgasm I wouldn't be an atheist today.

Cosmic Forgetfulness

New Scientist talks about cosmic forgetfulness and the reincarnation of the universe.

The model showed that most, but not all, of the information about what came before the big bang gets irretrievably lost through the big bang transition. And in a perpetual cycle of big bangs and crunches, this information loss means no two universes are ever the same. Bojowald calls this "cosmic forgetfulness".

Universe mostly forgets its past during cosmic rebirth

Carl Sagan and Voyager 1 showed us that our planet is no more than "a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam". Now we can see that the Universe itself could be possibly be something that is endlessly destroyed and recreated without ever being the same.

Wow. How can a little deity ever compete with that?

No longer looking forward to an afterlife, I’ve often contemplated the finality of death and oblivion, while retaining some hope that something of me continues on. I don’t remember anything before my birth, but then I don’t remember many moments of my life. Which leads me to the philosophical question “What makes me, ME?” This body of cells is completely different that the one that existed years ago. My thoughts, my feelings, my perceptions, my humor, and my passions are all different from age to age. A brain injury could remove all my personality leaving me an entirely different person or not a person at all.

Sometimes, I morn the loss of my little brother. My brother is still alive. He’s now 26 years old. But he’s not that little boy that I loved and doted on when I was 15 and he was 3. To me, they’re not the same person at all, and I miss him. Then again I’m not the same person I was at 15 either.

Religion would say that we have souls, but science hasn’t found them yet. Even if I did have something that could be called a soul, that wouldn’t mean current self, my current personality, would continue to exist. If it did, it would mean I didn’t grow any more and without growth you can’t have life can you?

I guess I’m just going to have to wait for my death to find out.

Another Atheist Blog

I used to beg God to exist. Now I’m glad he doesn’t.

I’m an Atheist and this is going to be an Atheist blog. There are an ever growing number of Atheist blogs on the internet. Most, I’m sure, have been and will continue to be better than anything that occurs here. I’m just adding my voice to the multitude in hopes that we’ll eventually drown out the superstitious nonsense that currently grips the world today.

God’s not an easy thing to give up. Who doesn’t want an all-knowing all-powerful being looking out for you? In the playground of life, who doesn’t want to say, “My big brother is bigger than you and he can kick your ass.” Then again, I don’t have a big brother, and what I’ve heard from friends who do have a big brother is that when he’s not sticking up for you at the playground, he’s tormenting you at home by pushing your face in the dirt and stealing the heads from your Barbies.

God, of course, would never do such things, right? An all-knowing all-powerful being is all about love, right? All those people who do horrible things in the name of their God have things completely screwed up and obviously don’t know what their religion is REALLY supposed to be about.

Except, they do. They’ve actually read and contemplated the words in their Holy Texts. It’s the rest of us who’ve gotten it wrong. We’ve cherry picked the ideas from the texts that give us warm fuzzies and ignored the rest, if we’ve bothered to read them at all.

Those of you long time Atheists will know all this and know it’s been said better by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. Should there actually be someone reading this that doesn’t, I humbly point you in their direction. Get thee to a bookstore and buy The God Delusion and The End of Faith!

I was raised Catholic, but not until after my parents divorced when I was seven. I don’t know remember anything religious happenings in my life from before they divorced. My father is an Atheist and my grandmother on my mother’s side was possibly an Atheist as well. Maybe it was because we went to stay with Catholic friends that my mother started practicing. I do remember her telling me that she wanted to raise me with religion so I’d never feel alone in the world. She didn’t say it was because it was true.

I now think it’s unfortunate that neither my father nor my grandmother, for whatever reason, chose to oppose this new religious direction. Perhaps it was the strength of my mother’s will or perhaps they thought, “it couldn’t hurt.” Perhaps they’d never heard of Catholic Guilt.

The Catholic Church teaches that divorce is wrong. When I asked my divorced mother about it, I was informed that her marriage to my father didn’t count because they weren’t married in the Catholic Church. I remember thinking at the time that logic was sort of bending the rules and also wondering if that made me a bastard. (The Bastard was a TV Miniseries at the time and it was very titillating to learn there were bad words that suddenly weren’t bad words if you meant them in a different way.) She had another brief, non-counting marriage, before having the real one with a third man.

Years and years of CCD (what they called Catechism before that and call something else now) and I never made it to confirmation. Like all teenagers, by High School I believed I knew better than adults and told my mom I didn’t believe in God or that Jesus was his son. This pissed off my mother, but then I was only just getting started with finding things with which to piss her off. I believed religion was a crutch and religious people were nutcases. My teenage self would be horrified at some of my later religious phases.

A year or so after High School, and much family drama, I found myself without friends or family and in the Army. My solitude, my need, and a book I found in the library called Drawing Down the Moon led me into Wicca. It, and the Mists of Avalon, had me convinced that all the time I’d been praying to the Virgin Mary who I really should be worshiping was the Goddess.

You know how hard that is to admit? It’s like getting caught singing into the hairbrush in front of the mirror.

Wicca was cool and I could see all kinds of parallels between the rituals from the Catholic Church and the rituals practiced in spells. And Magik is really all about focusing your positive energy to influence the world around you. Not much different than the woo from “The Secret” or “What the Bleep”. It did make me feel incredibly cool and gothic and special. And I totally missed the point that I was estranged from my mother and was now replacing her with a Goddess?

Then I fell in love with a Baptist who feared that I and my heathen ways were going to Hell because I hadn’t accepted Jesus as my personal Savior. Man we do stupid things for love don’t we? First I went along with it because I wanted him and wanted him to marry me, and then I got sucked into it completely. I helped in my own brainwashing. I went to Bible study. I listened to Christian radio. I was led to be “Born Again” and was baptized with a full dunking in a Baptist Church because my Catholic baptism as a child “didn’t count.” My Baptist in-laws were so happy. Wow, I finally had parents who were proud of me.

And when my marriage was failing and my husband was wetting the bed because he was too drunk to wake up in the night, I bought the Praying Wife and stuck with it. Eventually the day finally came six years later that I couldn’t stick with it anymore.

And without him I didn’t go to Baptist Church anymore. I started going to Catholic Church again because I missed the ritual and non-Catholic Churches don’t feel like “real” churches. Where’s the stained glass? Where’s the incense? Where are the pews and the statues? But it was lacking in the “motivational speaking” I’d come to depend on from the Baptist side. So I retained my brain washing and listened to Christian Radio and read the Left Behind Series. I almost dumped my said-he-was-Catholic-but-didn’t-really-believe-in-it-but-believed-in-something boyfriend because, according to my Left Behind saturated mind, he was damned and going to Hell.

The rapture is imminent you know. It has been since the beginning of Christianity.

This time when love won out over everything else it luckily turned out to be the right decision.

I started to think that if only I could get back to what the Catholic Church was before it was corrupted by mankind. Back when priests could still get married and sex wasn’t a bad thing. I tried to learn more because I desperately wanted a Teresa of Avila experience. I wanted to know religious ecstasy. I thought if I could just learn more I’d be able to reach certainty and not feel like I was deluding myself.

I was watching one of the many documentaries they have on the History or Discovery Channel about the history of the Bible or the Christians, I don’t remember the specific program, but it mentioned very casually, as an aside, that there was doubt as to whether Jesus ever existed.

What… wait a minute…WHAT? I thought that the existence of Jesus wasn’t in doubt. That couldn’t be true. There had to at least have been a guy that at one time was a leader and maybe later on his message was distorted. There had to have been someone who was the Martin Luther King of his day right?

And much like described in the movie The God Who Wasn’t There, the more I looked for a historical Jesus, the more, or rather less, I found of him. This was the beginning of the domino chain that led to my Atheism.

I have friends who are praying for me, hoping that someday I’ll come back into the light. I know that they mean it out of love and concern for me. Out of love and concern for them, I hope that one day they will find their way out of the superstitious dark ages and into the light of science and wonder. My world has gotten bigger and more wonderful since the bindings of dogma have been removed.

It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. - W.K. Clifford