The two sections in this article “When I Met God” and “How I Discovered the Importance of Worship” are not to be taken as my attempt at conversion or as any type of Apologetics. In reality, “When I Met God” is probably {spoiler alert} the opposite of an apologetic because my reaction was certainly not favorable. The second section is, once again, not a proposal for everyone to go to church, but I hope you will take the time to discover how I am trying to redirect the concept of worship away from the practice of religion, per se, but still believe mankind could benefit from “worship”, or practicing behavioral patterns of gratefulness for our existence, both in eco-political sphere and the environmental, although I am speaking more in terms of the social environment man places himself in. As always, I welcome your reactions and comments.
When I Met God
I cannot recall ever attending church until I was five. At that time my parents split up for the first time, although I didn’t really understand that was the case. I knew my father had been teaching in a small town on the outskirts of Gary while my mother finished university in Muncie. And then she took me to live with her parents.
My mother had been cast out by her parents (I learned all this later) and she had been taken in my paternal grandparents. After I was born she was able to return to high school because my paternal grandparents lived in a different town from my maternal ones and she didn’t tell anyone she was married and had a child in her new town.(My father had been sent to Okinawa by the Air Force and would not return til my mother and I had moved to Muncie and she had begun college).
At any rate, by the time my memories begin in my third year, we were living in Muncie, and on Saturdays we would generally drive to Marion and visit the grandparents, but I’m not clear exactly when I met my maternal relatives. It was at right around that time that my paternal grandparents had moved into Marion as well and that is their home I first can remember them living in. So for the rest of my life, no matter where I was moved as my parents pursued a career with DODDS.
My father returned when I was four or early in my fifth year and he took some classes and earned an advanced degree (somehow in a manner I’m unsure of,he had returned from the war with a college diploma even though he’d entered the air force at sixteen, having dropped out of high school.) I suppose that spring my parents their college years in Muncie and I have never returned to the town of some of my first memories.
I am quite sure, however, that the person I would become were shaped by those first years in Muncie more than any other place. As a toddler wandering pretty freely about the neighborhoods in Muncie I experienced vicariously, when wandering into the segregated black sections of town, the racism that my friends in those black communities were experiencing. I was quite aware I was not black, and so I suppose when I saw them put down, and sometimes even more viciously it seemed to me, because I was with the black families, they were castigated more severely and suggestions seemed to be inferred that, I, a young white boy, was somehow superior to my companions.
Maybe it was my imagination, maybe they were always treated as viciously, even apart from my presence, but I developed a distinct impression that white “folks” were demeaning them even more than normal as a means of impressing upon me I was not one of them.
At any rate, those formative years in Muncie must have left a very deep impression because almost every daily event blazed into my memory, no matter how mundane, while thereafter there will be gaps, I remember most occurrences vaguely, and have fewer detailed memories that impressed themselves upon me in my third and fourth years.
I ended up emerging from those years with a strong sense of responsibility for others when I feel they are being put down. I developed a sense that people needed to be protected from such ill treatment and that it can be done only when we act as a whole against those who drive wedges between us. As a child I felt guilty for letting it happen, and as I would grow into a somewhat larger than normal presence I learned that size could often be intimating enough to prevent people castigating or attempting to harm others.
But when my size alone was not a hindrance I would never reflect about whether I should interfere when I saw someone putting down another, verbally or physically, and I suppose I developed a sense that it was the “authority” who was responsible for leading those against each other.
But as I was being transferred from my “home”, the only one I’d really known til that point, I was about to encounter The Authority I have spent the rest of my life trying to comprehend. I was about to meet GOD.
Although I did not know them very well, but had met them by this time, upon my parents’ graduation I was deposited with those maternal grandparents. Occasionally my father came to visit me from where he was teaching in Portage, outside of Gary. But for several months I had no contact with my mother.
To this day I have no idea of her whereabouts during those days, whether she had a teaching position, whether she had moved in with some man. I just don’t know. It’s an unknown script, and no one else seems to know either.
I began school and I have to admit I was totally disruptive to the school authorities. As I mentioned, my own memories are really vague. The only incident I recall is the finger painting incident where I refused to participate because finger painting didn’t teach me anything and was a really stupid thing to do. There must have been other incidents because when my parents were undergoing their background check to work for DODDS, the report noted a troublesome child who had difficulties with authority. (Indeed I did, and still do).
And as I think I have mentioned, that would follow with me as part of my record no matter where we would move to. When I was in my late thirties and I requested my FBI file through FOIA it was still there, though the rest of my life had not seemed to arouse much interest to the FBI.
While I remember none of my classmates names, or even what they might have looked like, I don’t remember being unpopular. I do know as soon as school was over I would change clothes and go to visit at my classmates homes. I have a recollection that at the last recess period they would come and ask me to visit and argue about whose house I should go play at. They would argue and then decide whose turn it was to have me come spend the afternoon with.
At supper time the children’s parents would tell me it was time to go home and eat my own supper. I don’t remember ever being invited to stay for dinner, and I’m quite sure I never mentioned that there would be no supper because both grandparents worked swing shift and my meal would not come til breakfast. But I do not believe I wanted in hunger. I believe there was probably leftovers, and fending for myself had always been my existence.
But on Sundays,my grandmother would take me to Sunday school which was fun, and then we would go into the church proper,sing a few hymns and then the preacher would begin his sermon. I suppose he was old-fashioned even in that day. He was a fiery hell-and damnation preacher who screamed at full volume at the congregants that one sin—just one violation of God’s law condemned one to eternal damnation in fire where worms crawl into you and eat your heart and eyes while the devil would be setting on his golden throne throwing bolts of fire at you for all eternity. If you didn't want to suffer that fate–REPENT NOW AND NEVER SIN AGAIN or that would be your fate.
I don’t remember him mentioning God too much, or Jesus, because I never remember knowing you repented to anymore, but he sure seemed enamored with his Devil of fire and striking fear of the Devil’s wrath into the listener. And frankly I didn’t want to be burned up and I imagined in my mind that the preacher had bolts of fire and a can of worms at his behest. So I would slide off the pew when he became to yell, and crawl beneath it huddling as much as possible into a ball, and tucking my head into my abdomen and wrapping my arms over over my head, and bringing my legs up over my head.
After church my grandmother’s sister, and her one younger brother would come over for Sunday brunch, which was always a really huge meal. There were no kids. The sisters families were grown, and the brother was a late in life birth who hadn’t started his family yet.
While they were preparing the meal, I would run out into the backyard all the way to the alley next to the trash cans. And I would begin my own sermons and yell at the garbage that in those days was just dumped into metal containers without lids and when they all filled, they would be emptied onto the burn pit in the backyard and burned.
“There you are Devil God! You’re going to be burned, you’re no going to burn me! I’m going to burn you all up and I’m never going to let you burn anyone! How about that Devil God! How about that?!” or whatever vengeful thoughts came into my childish head.
I suppose I was nine when I read the entire Revised edition, and then the KJV. For many years the only translations I knew of. I suppose that first year I read each version through twice. Thereafter I tried to read the entirety of both every month. I began seeking commentaries, and I began seeking out the history behind the books.
I don’t believe I began trying to delve into other religions until I was perhaps fourteen, but I had already began to read anthropological writings of Frazier, Boaz, Benedict, and Malinowski before then. And cowboy and indian movies made me root for the “indian”, hoping everytime the ending would be different, but I had to wait for Little Big Man twenty years later. So I began trying to find ‘good stories’ of what became my own enamored affair with Natives. They were not easy to find in the 50’s and I suppose Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha was the first, but that tale led me to seeking information on their culture to a greater extent, although I didn’t find a lot until i was in my teens at the dawn of the 60’s.
I began to believe that religion and the state were interconnected means of controlling people and conforming them into what “authorities” wanted them to become.
Well I have a bias—I’ve laid it out here—Today I came across a substack note addressed to me. It said, “There are other interpretations.”
Indeed there are! And because there are, that is what has led me to believe as I do.
And How I Discovered The Importance of Worship
And that is why I studied religion. Religion is the way mankind is controlled and loses his freedom and governments as well as churches can use the authority of right to unleash the demons that drive us beneath the pew.
And of course the religious faithful following Trump have felt themselves being driven beneath the pew in a society that they feel has enchained them in a devilish government that has tormented them out of their fare (not “fair”) share of liberties.
I don’t share those views any longer because I know the demonic forces power is the power to bring people to fear and fear can be easily molded into a righteousness that can save one from the wrath. Perhaps if I hadn’t missed that part of the sermon, perhaps I would be with them now, casting out the deep state through obedience to Donald Trump. Perhaps my belief in God could have enticed me to hate everyone. But I missed the salvation part hiding under the pew and decided I could get my own salvation by burning the god away from people instead of allowing him to burn people.
Who knows?, but I somehow became totally consumed by God upon our first acquaintances and I needed to exorcise him from tearing people apart in hatreds. And maybe I saw that God as the perpetrator of the oppressive abuse my friends in Muncie had been subjected to. That emerged from the fear of the fiery bolts that punished all imperfection, the imperfection of the black man really being the white man’s knowledge of his own imperfections that he tried to lay at the black man’s door as Adam had tried to throw his guilt on the woman and fool God into punishing her more severely than he God punished him.
To do that I had to embrace the idea of my own imperfections and chastize my inclinations for perfection.
My mission was to never be god, and my vision became clouded against anything that was declared to be right.
It became much easier to see wrongness than rightness, and wrongness always seemed to emerge out of winged proclamations of what people needed to be or do in order to become good. Fight the heavenly battle against what is not good and cast it into the flames. Obey and hate the evil stranger or become the stranger yourself and be consumed in the destruction.
There might be something to be said for worship and rituals that bring people into harmony when those rituals enhance the importance of each. But religions that are used to demonize non-compliance are indeed the opiate that allows societies to garden hatred, if Marx was correct on nothing else.
We converted the black slave to christianity and in doing so sanctioned our demonization of the christian black person being still unable to go to heaven because he was marked by Cain (or frequently Ham).
Were there any truth to Adam-Eve-Cain and his mark, it might have been the mark was the mark of whiteness rather than the mark of blackness.
But it all depends if one believes faith leads one to share or take. It all depends if faith is out of desire to unify or divide.
As much kindness has been done in the name of religion as evil. It is probably quite un’fair’ to suggest otherwise. The current Pope in the Catholic church seems to believe more in togetherness than separation. He doesn’t seem to use his position to require anyone to hate. Certainly in recent memory there was Mother Theresa. As a youth, there was a great movement in Catholicism called the Social Gospel Movement and when I studied at CIDOC in Cuernavaca for a few months, I met many revolutionary priests in that movement. But they were all preceded by others…by protestants who aided in the Underground Railroad; by others who led the charge for social reform in Britain and the US.
While Elijah Mohammed had many faults, he offered, at least to black men, pride and self-respect. Even though much of the “spiritualized” Hinduism that gave rise to an interest of the American youth in the sixties was a hybrid of sanitized Upanishadic Hinduism overlaid with tantric practices of the Vajrayana Buddhist beliefs, some did find through more compassionate inclinations towards their fellows.
And yet many fell into cultic overbearance and succumbed to the tambourine beats of the Jesus People (exemplified in Godspell, the Unification church of Sun Myung Moon, or Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple.
So I cannot despise belief or faith in any religion as universally Wrong. But it at the same time the worst wrongs come frequently under the guise of being GOOD by demanding righteousness against even ONE sin, be it the sin of being of a different race, a different sex, a different faith, or even a different political party.
So by studying religion I learned how little I was right about worship and belief. Both are central in my life and in my perspective on humankind.
But it is because worship and belief can be shaped around granting individuals or denying them of those same attributes that religions are unnecessary, and as Tillich suggested God is unimportant in how we believe.
But some do act benignly and with compassion out of belief that the command of the gods to be good does not include fearing others but embracing others.
So while I may deny any cosmological necessity for a god of any sort, there may be a need in many for an ontological purpose for believing that can grant a purpose to behaving with respect towards others.
I guess my study of religions has led me to recognize that I have no fight with any demonic god, only with the purveyors of a demonic god out to punish the stranger who is not a follower of a particular god. God and Religion do not cause evil, but purveyed by the wrong messengers can create a lot of evil in the name of what is right,
But neither does belief create a Mother Theresa who surely believed in her cause beyond the confines of her belief in the church she thought required her to “make beautiful things for god”, but was god necessary? Do beautiful things, as she termed it, only come from her interpretation?
Obviously for her it did. For Tillich it was the faith of the individuals in other individuals that throwing god into the mix could detract from one being able to achieve that faith.
Belief in god can lead us into susceptibleness to servitude and following the leader in his blind quest to use others.
The God who is the hero, the God who is powerful enough to defeat his enemies. The Superman or the Superhero can fulfill the longings of those who feel the society has abandoned them, and their only recourse is to find their own salvation as a deliverance. To be led by the Gods who favored The Greeks in their efforts against the Trojans. The Valhallan mighty who led the Norsemen beyond their own lands.
Of course for many Trump is the hero from their movies they attend, the deliverer who will save them from the evil liberals who have oppressed them. Does he did to be “good”? Does he need to “follow” the teachings of Jesus? Well whose teachings of Jesus? Every follower of Jesus has not been Mother Theresa. There are also the teachings of Urban II who called for the first Crusade and had the Waldensians tortured out of their Mother Theresa type fellowships of God. Urban II’s beautiful things was only what increased his own power and urged upon his listeners salvation through casting others into hell who didn’t follow him to create a Christly paradise by authorizing the hatred of any-believer in Christ or not–who did accept the authority of Urban II. There was little good in the Christ of Urban, his was the Christ of deliverance through the sword of Joshua. His was the power of the Christ who used his power to wither the entire fig tree whose fruit was not ripe on the day the Christ wanted to eat the fruit. His was the Christ that threw demons into a herd of pigs that stamped over a hill to their death. His Christ was the Superhero who had the power of deliverance not the more well known meek man Jesus followed because he urged his followers to abandon their wealth and power and superiority and seek the harmony within humankind.
Already in the scriptures of the Christian canon, we see the division, the meek Jesus, the Superhero Christ. There’s is nothing “unChristian” to follow “bad” Trump who might use his power to place his followers in what they hope will increase their own authority. There is nothing “unChristian” to propel one’s followers through hate. Look at Urban II. Although he was in no way singular, but perhaps enough to show that Donald Trump is as Christian a redeemer as another. The religion of redemption, be it Christian or otherwise, is the religion of the Superman who can lead the downtrodden across the threshold if one only despises thine enemies enough.
It comes down to believing in the equality of humanity or falling into a struggle against humanity by the leader who in actually sees himself as the anointed over humanity.
So I have turned my battle away from fighting demons or refusing to prostrate myself to gods. It comes down after all to man and the type of gods man has created.
The gods of the tribal Iroquois, the Sioux, the Sans, and the Papuans who view an equal godliness in each aspect of creation and in each individual person or the god created by the man who would be your savior. The major religions of the world include both gods and are two-headed in their interpretations,
And that is why I do not see the necessity for gods or religions, but do see a necessity for respecting the sanctity of existence and the sanctity of the necessary equality of individuals being respected as none greater than the other.
But worship is central in bringing people together. We all continue. We worship using the same pre-religious methods of worship, even if we may abandon the symbolism. We worship through music, through dance, through storytelling that brings people together. Never have I have experienced more abandonment of prejudice that at a concert where everyone abandons themselves to the joys of those around you and become effected by the unity of the crowd.
But there are music and dances and stories that provide an alternative worship, There is the music that the clan marches to under hooded robes to proclaim their redemption against there neighbor.
I don’t really know if I believe in atheism, or that all “atheists” have no beliefs in the ontological realm of the “beyond” . The god is unimportant in theism and so it is not the god who needs to be abandoned.
It really boils down to do worship the importance of what we have, the cosmos, the earth, the species upon it, including man, as brethren in the harmony of survival, or do we worship the authority of the heroic savior who can create the harmony.
My suggestion is that we already have a universe created in such a manner that illustrates no need for the hero, only the worshipful understanding that we are in balance when we recognize the importance of the ant to the survival of the man.
The perversion enters with the psychotic mind of the God-Man through whom our deliverance and salvation may only come through.
But if we are “saved” merely because we are, we needn’t a savior because that savior needs someone to save and that savior distorts the balance and prevents us from recognizing it is he, the savior, or the opposing savior, that creates the imbalance from which springs the “Good” savior and the “Evil” opposing demon who creates the disharmony.
No, I think not. It is the savior who must have a demon to save us from. It is the idea of good from which the idea of wrong springs into existence. This concept refutes that existence has neither good nor evil, but is good for all men when its balanced is maintained with what does exist.
The eco-political structure that creates imbalances, or encourages, or supports them, is part and parcel of the religious ideology of good and evil, demon and god. They exist together; or neither exists. So maybe my five-year old childish desire to burn the demon-god, while fanciful of my limitations of maturely recognizing exactly what I wished to burn from existence.
Nevertheless I have not succumbed to not seeing that it is the demon-god who must be burned away from our consciousness.
The demon-god distorts the parity that existence has given us and has placed us into a battle to somehow be saved from that imparity placed upon us. But our salvation will come, from my studies, not by what I tell you, I can lead no one to salvation, nor can anyone. We will only find our salvation when we are able to recognize we don’t need to be saved from anything and that our existence is united everything that exists.
Then we will walk tall and be not oppressed.
All we need to be saved from is those who would save us.
In deep deference to my favorite author (whom was a blatant racist, but brilliant writer) Samuel Clemens (also known as Mark Twain), I submit to you what I consider one of his finest, and mostly unknown, works. I read it first as a 16-year-old college freshman and was mesmerized by it. I continue to be and your article reminded me of it, albeit tangentially.
I will spare you my potentially extensive nerding out on the matter. But I will say that it is a living document despite obscurity as a novella and posthumousity. I reread it very ten years or so. Each time I read it, at a different stage of life, its meaning changes, yet remains the same. A bit like your bible, I suppose.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3186/3186-h/3186-h.htm