Faitheism?

As a child, I spent a lot of summers visiting my grandparents in Nova Scotia.

This was my favourite thing to do; I loved everything about Nova Scotia and my grandparents.  I even enjoyed going to church with them on Sundays.  I liked the Sunday School and the hymns and the after church lunch of cold cut sandwiches and homemade cookies.  Because I liked all of these things, I didn’t mind it when my grandmother made me a born-again Christian.

I even kept up with the Christianity through most of my high school years.  One of my closest friends from high school(with whom I am currently having a text message conversation on whether or not to have a True Blood night tomorrow night) introduced me to a couple of Christian youth groups, and through them we made close friends with a few other boys and girls.

Yep, while most of you were experimenting with drugs and sex, I was merely experimenting with spirituality and the possibility of a higher power.

And sex.  I mean really, if you think my hormones are bad now, just imagine the teenage version of me, surrounded by dozens of handsome, virtuous, young men.  Everyone experiments with sex.  Sex=Love/Love=God/God=Orgasms.  If I were Catholic, I could be nominated for the role of Sex Pope with that formula.

Anyway, as I aged, my thoughts and feelings about God took a turn for the worse.  I started to question my beliefs, and, after a few upsetting incidents with the church, decided to break up with religion.

I spent my early twenties in an atheistic rage, spurning any and all encounters with organized religion.  Spewing contempt for the poor ignorant lambs who believed in a higher power; feeling that religion was an evil tool, more adept at causing violence and destruction than love and creation.

I was like Richard Dawkins, but less handsome.

Throughout this time in my life, my mind would sometimes wander back to my grandparents and their beliefs.  They didn’t support the blowing up of abortion clinics.  They didn’t think that all brown people would go to hell.  They wouldn’t cast aside their son or daughter, simply due to that person’s sexual orientation.

My grandparents were (and still are) good people who worked hard and tried to make the world a better place.  Their lives were made better by believing in a higher power.

I still don’t believe in an afterlife, I don’t believe in a devil, and I certainly don’t believe that there is a holy man in the sky watching and judging every little thing I do while letting starving orphans in Africa die of AIDS.

I don’t know.  I just hope that there’s something larger than what I can see.