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When I was 6, my paternal grandma (among other things: a Presbyterian Sunday school teacher) moved to Kansas from Michigan, and taught my brother and I our very first bedtime prayers. "Now I lay me down to sleep, pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I wake before the light, God shall see me through the night. God bless (insert list of people you want to bless here, especially including family members, guinea pigs, the family dog, mean school mates and hungry children in Africa - I think my record was 10 minutes, which she encouraged me to do - to open my circle as much as I could - and that tendency has stuck with me to do this day and is why this post is public. Thank you, Grandma :> )."
When I was 8, she died, and my dad decided to follow through on her dying wish that we start attending church. Mom, Dad, Chris and I piled in the Crown Victoria every Sunday and listened to the excellent sermons of Reverend Ramsey at the local Presbyterian Church. Eventually, my mom, who is very anti-organized religion, rebelled, and Chris and I were given the choice to keep going with Dad or to stay home with Mom. I didn't get much father-daughter time, and I really loved Reverend Ramsey's sermons, so I opted to keep going. My brother decided to stay home with my mom, which lead to things like coming home from church and finding that they'd bought our now nearly 20-year-old Quaker parakeet, Toby, at the flea market.
When I was 14, while my youth group peers were going through the Confirmation process, I studied towards my baptism. Both of my parents have anabaptist leanings - they believe that a baptism must be consciously understood and accepted and that infant baptism is meaningless - so Chris and I were not baptized at birth.
After my baptism, I got very serious about reading the Bible beginning to end, and started asking harder and harder questions and was eventually asked to not return to Sunday school (one of many reasons why Contact strikes a chord with me), as I was becoming disruptive in class. When I hit college, I loved and respected many people who followed the teachings of Jesus, but I wasn't so sure about this God being described in Joshua and nobody was answering my questions. Reverend Ramsey would've had some wisdom for me, I think, but their family had moved to Texas and now we had a different reverend who was a lot more easily flustered and also had several arguments with my mom when she tried to override my mom's authority in my life. My logical solution was a decline in my faith; I became agnostic.
When I was 20, I was friends with a man who took the initiate vows of the Benedictine brotherhood of the Catholic church. I was talking with him online one day about religion, and somehow the subject of the LDS Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons) came up. He said several things about Mormons that seemed to be both hostile and untrue, but I actually was too ignorant about the LDS Church to argue with him. My solution? This makes a lot of people smile when I tell them... I called up the LDS Church and requested that they send me some missionaries to explain their religion to me.
I met with two totally awesome female missionaries in the Kansas winter at the apartment I was sharing with a bemused and very tolerant Matt, and we drank hot chocolate together and studied from the Book of Mormon once a week for a month or two. I was very clear with them that my purpose was education and not conversion, but I take on a very When In Rome approach to everything I do, so I attended a few Sunday services at the college ward ... Anyway, my experience with the missionaries and the LDS Church deserves its own post. The point is, I was right in thinking my Catholic friend was unjustified in his accusations and prejudices, and I'd developed a basic vocabulary with which I could now go back and argue with him and (hopefully) open his heart somewhat.
This whole experience pointed out to me, though, how incredibly ignorant I was of the world's religions. So off I went to Borders to find a good encyclopedia of the world's religions. After sitting on the floor of Borders for over two hours, reading through my options, I was disgusted. In one book, the author suggested that Catholics worship idols because of their religious icons. In another, the entry for Witchcraft described it as an extinct religion, no longer practiced. What was repeatedly missing from these books was the voice of the believer.
So, I started a website on religious tolerance - one that would seek out believers to describe their own religions. At its peek, I was communicating with Catholics, Episcopals, Baptists (one of whom resigned because Atheism and Satanism were also being represented on the website), Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Pagans of their many feathers (Dianic Wiccans being the most eyebrow-raising and fascinating to me of this lot), Lutherans, a Demonolatry priestess, a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan (an atheist philosophy created by Anton LaVey), a Discordian (wins for most entertaining conversations), a Theistic Satanist, a Kaballah scholar, a Unitarian-Universalist, Buddhists from several schools, a Shinto, a Sikh, a Greek Orthodox (Doc Oz, who gave me an awesome and hilarious pamphlet about What To Expect if you've never been to an Orthodox Church before what with the prostrating and the kissing icons...) a Scientific Pantheist, a Secular Humanist, a Jain, a Quaker, a Mennonite, a Zoroastrian ... gah, I'm probably forgetting some people, though I can still actually name many of these people 11 years later.
Eventually, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance's parallel efforts exceeded mine and I passed on what unique work I'd done to them and let go of the project.
It was, however, an extraordinary personal experience.
These are the most important things I learned during that time:
1. All prejudices I had that made me feel fear were consistently proven wrong by speaking with a believer of that religion.
2. Always ask someone what they believe. I first learned this from NeoPagans and later discovered it to be true of all believers! Even if they're in a reasonably orthodox religion, there is still personal flexibility and interpretation.
2b. If someone is born into their religion, tread carefully with #2, and if possible, see if you can find a convert. Some religions have rites of passage (CCD, Bar/t Mitzvah, missionary work, etc.) that require their believers to learn more about the faith, but unfortunately, many don't and a lot of people born into their religion actually aren't sure what they believe. All of the most stressful moments I experienced on this project were because of the frustration and anger people feel when they are asked to describe the tenets of their faith, and cannot.
3. If someone likes you and is sound in their faith, many people will whole-heartedly believe you will eventually join them in their faith. Don't take offense at this. It is an expression of love.
4. No matter how hard I try to be unbiased, I think that four out of the Jains' Five Principles of Living are utterly cool and awe-inspiring. I also retain exactly one extremely strong bias against a particular religion I won't name here. There were just too many anecdotes I heard firsthand of religious leaders condoning husbands beating their wives when those wives sought help for themselves and their children. For all I know, if I sat with enough domestic abuse survivors, the list would grow to include more modern religions. I just happened to meet two from this particular group, one of whom only had partial control of her face after reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation. I just can't respect that. The only thing I'm willing to do, begrudgingly, is stand up for their first amendment rights. Part of being tolerant is tolerating people who are intolerant, or things that are, ultimately, intolerable to us - it is the difficult nature of tolerance (and my most unpopular assertion about tolerance!), and here I've failed somewhat. But this gets into my personal moral barometer and that, too, is another post.
5. SE NON VERO, E BEN TROVATO. If it is not true, it is well-intended.
This last has been the guiding principle of my long-standing crusade to tolerate and respect all of the diverse beliefs of my friends, families, of strangers, and people I really really really don't like. One of the first problems I encountered in studying this many belief systems at once was how many of them said, "This is the [only] truth." This lovely Latin quote, which I found in a book I read about the Freemasons, gave me an extraordinary tool for addressing the pluralism of world religion, and I find that most believers can hear that about other religions in a positive, kind way.
When I was 8, she died, and my dad decided to follow through on her dying wish that we start attending church. Mom, Dad, Chris and I piled in the Crown Victoria every Sunday and listened to the excellent sermons of Reverend Ramsey at the local Presbyterian Church. Eventually, my mom, who is very anti-organized religion, rebelled, and Chris and I were given the choice to keep going with Dad or to stay home with Mom. I didn't get much father-daughter time, and I really loved Reverend Ramsey's sermons, so I opted to keep going. My brother decided to stay home with my mom, which lead to things like coming home from church and finding that they'd bought our now nearly 20-year-old Quaker parakeet, Toby, at the flea market.
When I was 14, while my youth group peers were going through the Confirmation process, I studied towards my baptism. Both of my parents have anabaptist leanings - they believe that a baptism must be consciously understood and accepted and that infant baptism is meaningless - so Chris and I were not baptized at birth.
After my baptism, I got very serious about reading the Bible beginning to end, and started asking harder and harder questions and was eventually asked to not return to Sunday school (one of many reasons why Contact strikes a chord with me), as I was becoming disruptive in class. When I hit college, I loved and respected many people who followed the teachings of Jesus, but I wasn't so sure about this God being described in Joshua and nobody was answering my questions. Reverend Ramsey would've had some wisdom for me, I think, but their family had moved to Texas and now we had a different reverend who was a lot more easily flustered and also had several arguments with my mom when she tried to override my mom's authority in my life. My logical solution was a decline in my faith; I became agnostic.
When I was 20, I was friends with a man who took the initiate vows of the Benedictine brotherhood of the Catholic church. I was talking with him online one day about religion, and somehow the subject of the LDS Church (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Mormons) came up. He said several things about Mormons that seemed to be both hostile and untrue, but I actually was too ignorant about the LDS Church to argue with him. My solution? This makes a lot of people smile when I tell them... I called up the LDS Church and requested that they send me some missionaries to explain their religion to me.
I met with two totally awesome female missionaries in the Kansas winter at the apartment I was sharing with a bemused and very tolerant Matt, and we drank hot chocolate together and studied from the Book of Mormon once a week for a month or two. I was very clear with them that my purpose was education and not conversion, but I take on a very When In Rome approach to everything I do, so I attended a few Sunday services at the college ward ... Anyway, my experience with the missionaries and the LDS Church deserves its own post. The point is, I was right in thinking my Catholic friend was unjustified in his accusations and prejudices, and I'd developed a basic vocabulary with which I could now go back and argue with him and (hopefully) open his heart somewhat.
This whole experience pointed out to me, though, how incredibly ignorant I was of the world's religions. So off I went to Borders to find a good encyclopedia of the world's religions. After sitting on the floor of Borders for over two hours, reading through my options, I was disgusted. In one book, the author suggested that Catholics worship idols because of their religious icons. In another, the entry for Witchcraft described it as an extinct religion, no longer practiced. What was repeatedly missing from these books was the voice of the believer.
So, I started a website on religious tolerance - one that would seek out believers to describe their own religions. At its peek, I was communicating with Catholics, Episcopals, Baptists (one of whom resigned because Atheism and Satanism were also being represented on the website), Mormons, Orthodox Jews, Pagans of their many feathers (Dianic Wiccans being the most eyebrow-raising and fascinating to me of this lot), Lutherans, a Demonolatry priestess, a card-carrying member of the Church of Satan (an atheist philosophy created by Anton LaVey), a Discordian (wins for most entertaining conversations), a Theistic Satanist, a Kaballah scholar, a Unitarian-Universalist, Buddhists from several schools, a Shinto, a Sikh, a Greek Orthodox (Doc Oz, who gave me an awesome and hilarious pamphlet about What To Expect if you've never been to an Orthodox Church before what with the prostrating and the kissing icons...) a Scientific Pantheist, a Secular Humanist, a Jain, a Quaker, a Mennonite, a Zoroastrian ... gah, I'm probably forgetting some people, though I can still actually name many of these people 11 years later.
Eventually, the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance's parallel efforts exceeded mine and I passed on what unique work I'd done to them and let go of the project.
It was, however, an extraordinary personal experience.
These are the most important things I learned during that time:
1. All prejudices I had that made me feel fear were consistently proven wrong by speaking with a believer of that religion.
2. Always ask someone what they believe. I first learned this from NeoPagans and later discovered it to be true of all believers! Even if they're in a reasonably orthodox religion, there is still personal flexibility and interpretation.
2b. If someone is born into their religion, tread carefully with #2, and if possible, see if you can find a convert. Some religions have rites of passage (CCD, Bar/t Mitzvah, missionary work, etc.) that require their believers to learn more about the faith, but unfortunately, many don't and a lot of people born into their religion actually aren't sure what they believe. All of the most stressful moments I experienced on this project were because of the frustration and anger people feel when they are asked to describe the tenets of their faith, and cannot.
3. If someone likes you and is sound in their faith, many people will whole-heartedly believe you will eventually join them in their faith. Don't take offense at this. It is an expression of love.
4. No matter how hard I try to be unbiased, I think that four out of the Jains' Five Principles of Living are utterly cool and awe-inspiring. I also retain exactly one extremely strong bias against a particular religion I won't name here. There were just too many anecdotes I heard firsthand of religious leaders condoning husbands beating their wives when those wives sought help for themselves and their children. For all I know, if I sat with enough domestic abuse survivors, the list would grow to include more modern religions. I just happened to meet two from this particular group, one of whom only had partial control of her face after reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation. I just can't respect that. The only thing I'm willing to do, begrudgingly, is stand up for their first amendment rights. Part of being tolerant is tolerating people who are intolerant, or things that are, ultimately, intolerable to us - it is the difficult nature of tolerance (and my most unpopular assertion about tolerance!), and here I've failed somewhat. But this gets into my personal moral barometer and that, too, is another post.
5. SE NON VERO, E BEN TROVATO. If it is not true, it is well-intended.
This last has been the guiding principle of my long-standing crusade to tolerate and respect all of the diverse beliefs of my friends, families, of strangers, and people I really really really don't like. One of the first problems I encountered in studying this many belief systems at once was how many of them said, "This is the [only] truth." This lovely Latin quote, which I found in a book I read about the Freemasons, gave me an extraordinary tool for addressing the pluralism of world religion, and I find that most believers can hear that about other religions in a positive, kind way.
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