[Ghoulish Delight]

I keep trying to come up with posts without coming across as the angry atheist. It's hard.

I'm not angry at any individual for having their faith, though I will forever be baffled as to how adults can't recognize all of these competing ideas of God as nothing more than man's imperfect attempts to synthesize our shared gut desire for order and morality into fables and tales that make it easier to impart the lessons. Why people can't accept that it's myth, not literal, and instead spend time making up new rules to justify the increasing improbability of this unknowable being, is beyond me. So much energy spent in service of an analogy that could be better spent taking care of reality.

But for the most part I don't really care what other people believe. But as I get closer to having a kid, I'm growing more and more frustrated as the difficulty of being an atheist becomes clearer to me. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I guess that my parents (my mom at least) would have more easily accepted me coming out as gay then if I told her I'm raising my child without the Jewish faith. And what's crazy about that is that my parents are NOT religious people, per se. They are the epitome of cultural Jews. They're in it for the traditions, not the theism. They made a strong effort to teach me that all these things I was learning about god were allegory, that the REAL reason to be good wasn't because of fear of God but because making bad choices had real consequences, for myself and others.

Yet I know that even THEY would have difficulty letting go of that.

And I struggle mightily with how to handle it with my own child(ren). I still value much of what the structure of the religious tradition did for me. It's a ready-built community that makes the early imprinting of morality and responsibility very straight forward. Duh, that's why organized religion has been such a successful meme, it's good at what it does. And certainly my parents managed to balance their disagreement with the dogma with their desire for that structure and connection to family, immediate and extended. And I definitely don't want to disconnect my child from his family by not having him share the cultural foundations that tie us together.

But then I picture us, after a Seder, standing and looking at an open door with a full cup of wine on the table calling, in some relatively aggressive language, for Elijah to return and for God to strike down the nations of our enemies and I cringe. I picture a 13yo giving a bar mitzvah speech, talking about how he'll dedicate his life to god's teaching, and I feel a rush of dishonest shame.

I want the cultural continuity without the theistic dogmatism. But even my search for like-minded secular Jews has only turned up depressingly touchy-feely agnostics that just do a find and replace of the word "God" with "binding spirit energy that unites us all" or other such nonsense in the holy texts.

I know I'm asking for the impossible. That I can't just hope that secular communities with the strength of a community with thousands of years of consistency are just going to appear in the face of overwhelming societal pressure against it, even though I believe their impossibility to be simply a matter of circumstance, not nature. And I know that in the end I will in all llikelihood do what my parents did and do my best to take the positive community aspects while de-emphasizing the rampant smiting and rigid dogmatism.

Wow, that was a long way of saying a whole lot of nothing. I've lost my original point. I guess mostly I just want to parrot what Flippy's been getting it, that no matter how you drill down and come up with ways to allow for your particular view of a supreme being to operate and account for the apparent contradictions that arise, they all being with one very big, unavoidable "if". And "if" that is by its very nature impervious to logic.

And as a final note - does anyone mind if I pop this out into its own thread? It's far too civil and intellectual to be part of this one.