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Well, I don't know if I consider myself "pagan", though I suppose it may be a technically accurate label. I was raised in a born-again household, with church Sunday morning and Sunday and Wednesday evenings. My parents were divorced when I was very young, so I straddled the Christian and secular worlds between living with my born-again dad (and eventually he married my born-again step-mom) and my non-practicing Seventh-Day Adventist mom. With my dad, I played drums in the church worship services on Sunday mornings, prayed in tongues, was prophesied over, and was only allowed to listen to Christian music. With my mom, I listened to Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond and Billy Joel, and could listen to what I pleased and watch what I wanted on TV, too.
I guess I equivocated throughout my youth, alternately embracing Christianity because I was part of a community where that was the one true way, and embracing secular popular culture and mores when I was away from that community. I went away to high school, a boarding school in northern Michigan--away from my Texas dad and Virginia mom. There I met Christians, Muslims, Jews, Pakistanis, Chinese, Germans, Africans, hippies, gays, transvestites.... I started to determine that life was less about absolute truths than beliefs relative to your upbringing and experience.
A couple of years later, on a foreign exchange year in Germany (the area formerly East Germany), I felt my eyes open to another culture. One devoted to life and love and friendship, and mostly unconcerned with one's particular religion. I realized how similar we all are in heritage and in purpose, and I believe it is particularly inconsiderate and arrogant for any faith to promulgate--on fear of eternal damnation--its tenets on non-believers. Believers should band together and support each other in their pursuit of righteousness; no question about that, and of course they should be free to do so. But the respect and freedom accorded to religion must by necessity and fairness be mirrored onto unbelievers.
The more I see my Christian family value faith over reason, myth over science and bigotry over tolerance, the more confident I become about my own soul and the more despondent over theirs. Of course I respect their religious privelege, and I can't help but respect my dad's unshakeable faith; he is an intelligent and decent man and I love him dearly. And I have at times seen the world through his eyes; it is paradoxically comfortable there. I find it however more challenging living in what I believe to be the world of reality, where the answers to life's persistent questions are explained by experience and science rather than parable and myth. Where I know that the outcome of each decision I make is a consequence I must wholly accept rather than a cosmic lesson I'm yet to understand.
I honestly don't know if there's a god. But the longer I live the more I doubt it. And the more I learn, the more I see how alike we are, and how improbable that just one faction of us has found or been gifted the one true way. It just seems too easy, but more importantly my experiences tell me otherwise.
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be the change you want
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