State of Protest

Being religious is like eating sand. It fills you up, tricks you into not being hungry, but has no nutritional value. When religious people argue that the lack of God or religion leaves an empty hole that cannot be filled by anything other than religion or spirituality, they’re mistaken or being misleading, perhaps because they’re so full of sand that they cannot make room for that very obvious thing that can, and does, fill that hole — good food. What your mind and body need is sustenance – real sustenance, which can take many different forms, but always has something in common — it passes the honesty test.

When you pass from belief to doubt, that critical stage necessary to eventually eschew religion entirely, you often maintain that craving for the easy fix of sand that will quickly fill you up and keep you distracted. The reason you have even an inkling of doubt is that the part of you that needs real sustenance knows that you’re deceiving it, and it wants real food. It wants truth and honesty, and your doubt is evidence that the sand you’ve been gulping down is only there to distract you from what you could be consuming. Once you pause a moment, to let some of the sand pass, and you take a bite of something curious and wondrous in and of itself, two things will happen. First, the part of you that you’ve been suppressing, that part that craves real sustenance, tells you that it wants more. Second, the habit you’ve formed, for probably years, maybe decades, sends override signals and demands sand intake – quickly, before you realize what’s happening.

If you choose, perhaps over time, perhaps cold turkey, to wean yourself from that sandy diet, and start filling yourself with alternatives, you’ll want more and more. But it doesn’t end there. Not even if you’ve purged yourself of sand. The habits you’ve built up over the years want an easy fix. Sand is easy to come by. It’s everywhere, and people love to feed it to each other, because it helps to justify and perpetuate their own habits. The arguments about that “hole” that needs filling, with God or religion or both, start to seem reasonable. You want to get that sand fix. You begin to second guess yourself, and start arguing with yourself that maybe it is a good idea to be on the “safe” side of Pascal’s wager. What have you got to lose? You lived all those years being religious, so it couldn’t hurt to go back. And it’s easy, so easy to do, and to be accepted into the fold, accepted back into the flock which you abandoned.

But you realize that the reason sand is so easy is because real sustenance is so challenging. Answers to everything aren’t laid out before you in connect-the-dots simplicity. You have to think about things other than what scripture says or how to interpret it. You often have to fill in the void with answers that you don’t like — it’s very likely that when you die, that’s the end of things. Can you accept that? Can you digest it? Can you consume and keep down all of the new things you’ll learn, and can you keep room in there for more?

What believers who argue that you have a hole that needs to be filled with God don’t realize is that it’s okay to have a hole that needs to be filled. But you’ve come this far, so, instead of taking the easy way out by succumbing to the habits that keep you controlled by those habits, fill that hole with the things that will make your mind and body feel good about yourself, the things that challenge you, the things that you find truthful of your own accord (not because someone else demands that you see them as the truth). That’s the honesty test. And that’s good food.

-Procrustes