god complex

When I was in high school, I was saving myself for marriage. I believed that God had made a man specifically for me, my destined soul mate, who would fit together with me like a puzzle piece. I only use the puzzle piece analogy because that's how I described it back then -- me and my future husband, like two puzzle pieces in an oddly graphic sexual, yet somehow spiritual, innuendo.

That plan got scrapped a few years later, and thank God for that. If I'd stuck with the first puzzle piece I tried it would've been like when you work a whole puzzle and you only have one piece left and you try and try and TRY to get it to fit into the opening but it really doesn't go there so you just jam it in with your fist anyway and congratulate yourself on a job well done. Needless to say, had I stayed true to "saving myself," whatever that means, this would be the blog of a bitter, unsexed divorcee instead of a young, decently content single gal.

Anywho. This idea of a divine soul mate, of saving my purity as a gift for my husband on our wedding night, it all came from the Christian beliefs I held at the time. In fact, for much of that time, I didn't just consider myself a Christian. I was also a SOUTHERN BAPTIST. (Cue organ music.) My parents were never religious people, nor were we a church-going family. I often joke that I rebelled as a teenager against my liberal, non-believing parents by being conservative and Baptist. Not entirely untrue.

For a good few years, I went to church almost every Sunday, participated in church activities, even went on a church camp trip to Gatlinburg like every good Tennessee Christian will do at some point during their adolescence. I was in the Bible club at school, I went to Tuesday morning prayer meetings. I loved the Lord.

But being a Christian, for me, also came with its share of unwanted baggage. It made me so terrified that my family was going to burn in hell for eternity while I flew around on my angel wings in heaven that I would pray for their souls until I was physically ill with worry. It gave me so much guilt that the first time I ever masturbated I spent the next three or four hours hunched over my Bible, praying for forgiveness, CONVINCED that I was going directly to the seventh circle for putting a hand to my own piche. It gave me the tools to enable a debilitating eating disorder, with the belief that God wanted me to be healthy and the Bible verses to prove I needed to eat even less and exercise even more.

Some time during my freshman year of college -- I often blame learning about the history of global religions in World Civ -- I became an Agnostic. I'm still not too wild about giving it a title, but Agnosticism encompasses my major beliefs: I don't know. I'll never know. (And in my personal definition, I don't care.) So last night, when I sat down to watch Bill Maher's 2008 documentary Religulous, I was already pretty much in Bill's corner. His message was one of doubt. How can anyone be so certain?

By the end of the film, though, I don't think he and I were completely on the same page. Sadly, religion has caused all sorts of awful things to happen in the world throughout history, and it still does. Sadly, I think most of the hate that exists among people globally is a direct result of religious beliefs. But I also see that it does good. I remember the way I felt when I was at church as a young person and it's a feeling that's unmatched by other experiences in my life. I'm not saying I was happier, or better off, but it made me feel good. Welcome. Cared for, loved, like something special and greater than me was planned for my life. Now, I find I'm able to feel most all of those things, most all of the time, from within myself. But if something makes people feel those feelings -- and also teaches them to be a good, moral person at the same time -- it can't be all bad.

But if there was one piece of information I gained from Bill's little documentary that disturbed me more than any of the Holy Wars, the discrepancies in scripture, it was that the number of non-believers in the United States registers at an astonishing 16 PERCENT of the population. 16 percent? SIXTEEN. PERCENT. And if we assume that half of those are men and half women, then we can assume that only EIGHT PERCENT of the population of the United States is made up of men who do not follow any religious dogma.

That means for every 13 men I meet, only ONE will share my Agnostic philosophies. And probably about fifty percent of THOSE guys are in New York, and God knows (or does he?) that I'm not sticking around here to find one. No, instead I'm going back to the south, where I'll find the other 92 percent, who love the Lord, or Allah or some crazy alien who implanted demons into their business before the beginning of time. LOVELY.

When I look back on the ghosts of boyfriends past, only one truly aligned with my lack of concern for organized religion. The rest had their attachments, either passionately or to something from their childhood. What is an agnostic girl to do? I think once I move back down south I'm going to start an agnostic match.com. Or an agnostic singles mixer? Either way, I think on a given night out I'll need to plan to chat with at least 13 guys. Just to improve my odds.


cheers,
elizabeth