Our Land: We Are All Living in Relationship With Mystery

Hi, Friends! I’m so pleased to feature the amazing words of my most namaste-excellent, brilliant friend, Sarah from Left Brain Buddha. Sarah and I found one another through mutual friends and immediately clicked. Her wisdom, outlook and life views are amazing and insightful. Visiting her site always makes me think, and I leave feeling peaceful and determined to live my life with more gratitude. After reading her great Our Land contribution, go check out some of her other work. I’m sure you’ll adore her as much as I do.

Our Land: We Are All Living in Relationship With Mystery

Our Land is about accepting each other’s differences and living with empathy and wonder. How am I different? My difference makes me part of an often vilified group in our culture. In fact, a 2012 poll indicated that Americans would be more willing to elect a gay or lesbian president, or a Muslim president, than a “this” president.

I’m talking about atheists.

Indeed, some progress has been made in how atheists are perceived in the US ~ the poll found that 54% of Americans would vote for a “well qualified” atheist candidate, up from just 18% in 1958, when Gallup first asked the question.

More and more Americans today are part of the religious “nones” ~ people who claim no religious affiliation, which would include both atheists and agnostics. In the most recent Pew Forum survey, almost 20 percent of Americans, and about a third of Americans ages 18-32, identified as being “unaffiliated” {meaning they don’t identify as Christian, Muslim, etc.}But for many years, I didn’t want people to find out I was an atheist. In fact, when I was in my early twenties, it somehow came out in a conversation with my roommate and her mother that I had never been baptized. A look of shock came over her mother’s face, and she quickly tried to recover, “Well, um … that’s okay!” But the revelation had clearly made her uncomfortable. Chris Stedman, author of Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious, writes about how he had to come out of two closets in early adulthood ~ first, to tell people he was gay, and second, to tell people he was an atheist.

When I was a kid, I came home from school crying one day because someone on the bus had told me that I would be going to hell because I had never been baptized. I remember a “friend” in seventh grade telling me the same thing in the middle of art class. Other junior high friends staged “interventions,” where they cried and told me that Jesus loved me so much and they just could not understand why I would turn away from the God who had given me so many gifts.

By the time I was in high school, I had developed a pretty negative attitude toward religion. When people found out I was an atheist, they asked how I could live without having morals, as if morality and ethics were impossible without belief in God. I started to assume all religious people were judgy, and believed in a judgy God who loved them but hated me. They may have tolerated me, but how could I be friends with them if they really thought I was going to hell?

{And, as an aside, I am in agreement with Glennon Doyle Melton, who writes in Carry On, Warrior that we need to strive for more than toleration of others. We tolerate long lines at Target. We need to respect and honor and engage with human beings.}

In college, my negative attitude toward religion became downright hostile. I thought religious people were delusional and irrational, and that their participation in organized religion merely perpetuated intolerance and bigotry. I was Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins before I had even heard of the “New Atheism” of the early 21^st century. I wasn’t just an atheist, I was an anti-theist.

I realized I had become just as intolerant of the religious as many of the religious had been of me. In Faitheist, Stedman describes how he came to a similar understanding of his hostile anti-theism ~ he was painting the religious with as broad a brush as the religious had painted atheists. He writes, “It was clear that I needed to change my attitude toward religious people; it was holding me back in my relationships, in my work, and in my personal development.” I was the same way. If I found out someone was deeply religious, I assumed we wouldn’t be able to be friends.

As I have embarked upon my own spiritual journey over the last decade, I had to confront my assumptions about religion, and about the religious. Many religious people do not, in fact, think me misguided and delusional for my beliefs. They don’t think I’m going to hell. Even Pope Francis stated in September this year that atheists would go to heaven if they had lived according to their conscience.

I have also come to realize that many religious people do not, in fact, believe God to be a judgy guy with a white beard. There are as many conceptions of God as there are people who believe in Her. Stedman encountered religious scholars who told him when they said “God,” they meant love, or justice. Well, I believe in those things too, I just call them love and justice. We can’t confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself; we’re all living in relationship with mystery.

Even as recently as this year, when I started my blog {called Left Brain Buddha, where I write about mindfulness and Buddhism} I was surprised when I would get followers who included that they were Christian in their Twitter bios. Didn’t they read my blog name? Don’t they know I’m not Christian? Why would they read my writing? But I’ve learned that just because someone loves Jesus, it doesn’t mean they hate me.

Today I have many readers from many religious backgrounds. We don’t just tolerate each other, we engage with and learn from each other. I have come to honor and appreciate their worldviews. And this is exactly what true interfaith dialogue should be ~ not just people of different religions, but the unaffiliated and the agnostic and the spiritual-but-not-religious and the deeply religious sharing their wisdom and insight in order to create understanding and empathy.

I will admit, there are times I still struggle to understand the religious. In my time attending a Unitarian Universalist Church, I loved the saying “The only thing we are intolerant of is intolerance.” So I can’t say that I will honor a vision of a God or a Mystery or a Flying Spaghetti Monster who loves you but hates gay people, or denies science, but I do think there is value in our dialogue. Even if all we can do is agree to disagree, we can at least do it without being disagreeable. Whether we are Christian, Jewish, Atheist, Agnostic, or Pastafarian, we can all strive to live with compassion and love and kindness.

Through this type of dialogue, we might realize that Americans’ definitions of “God” are quite diverse. In the 2008 Pew Forum survey of religious affiliation in the United States, 70% of the religiously unaffiliated, and 21% of atheists, said they believed “in God or a universal spirit.” Over nine in ten Americans professed such a belief (71% were absolutely certain of their belief), but only 60% said they believe in a personal god. And many people who identified with a particular religious affiliation proclaimed no belief in God at all, including 17% of Jews

These numbers reveal that being “religious” or being an “atheist” can mean many different things. It’s no more acceptable for me to assume what “God” means to you than it is for you to assume what my beliefs are because I call myself an atheist.

Talking about atheism can be a challenge, not just due to cultural stigmas, but because it is by definition a proclamation of what we don’t believe, not what we DO believe. When I do have deep conversations about spirituality and mystery and “the meaning of life” with those closest to me, I sometimes find there is not a lot of difference between me and my theist friends.

We still must avoid the trap of saying, “All religions are basically the same,” for there are important differences among the world’s wisdom traditions. But we can likely discover that we all desire to live our lives with compassion, wonder, and empathy. That sounds a lot like Our Land.

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See? I told you that Sarah is amazing. Here’s a bit more about her:

Sarah Rudell Beach is a teacher, wife, and a mother to two energetic little ones. At Left Brain Buddha, she explores ideas and practices for mindfulness, and shares the challenges and riches in her journey to live and parent mindfully in a left-brain, analytical life. She encourages you to discover the amazing transformations that can occur when we not only indulge, but learn to tame, our monkey minds.