Brought to you by my finding a diatribe about God I wrote when I was 16
When I was a senior in high school, I skipped a lot of school. I was very sick that year and couldn’t handle being around people so I’d stay at home and obsessively read religious texts. I never truly believed in God but I wanted to try it out since so many people seemed to believe in *waves hands*. And so, I read the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran and I got really into mythologies, Greek and Roman and Hindu and Norse alike. I needed an explanation for how I was the way I was and I didn’t find it in religion (or in anything else for that matter) but I’m glad I tried. Like, don’t get me wrong, Leonard Cohen’s version of “Hallelujah” makes me cry just as much as any other red-blooded woman that doesn’t eat red meat, but I was born an atheist and I will die an atheist, at least when it comes to organized religion. That being said, I believe in faith, not so much in it being about a devotion to a God or religious entity but a devotion to humanity as a whole, and all that entails.
I’ve said this many times before, but I really don’t like rules. I’m not a rebel, I’m not even an iconoclast, but I disdain the idea of following rules I can’t justify. In other words, I see rules as guidelines, to be followed unless doing so is harmful to my own or others’ well-being because I’d much rather not face punishment for not doing so. But, the issue is that I’ve never really felt guilt for breaking the rules whether official or unwritten, even if I’ve hated the consequences of that supposed rebellion, and that’s taboo for young women (of color). I was 7 years old when I decided I was an atheist, and well, that sentiment has held. What can I say? I was a overtly precocious child who was obsessed with self-determination and defining my own version of morality. I didn’t ever require an omnipresent fear of God to be a good person like from birth, I knew it was wrong to lie, cheat, and steal without the threat of censure by some God I couldn’t see or even perceive.
Plus, I’m right-brained and mathematical to a fault. It’s been ingrained in me since birth that a single case does not prove a theorem but a single counterexample can disprove a theorem.
Example: Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and if there really was a God, that wouldn’t happen.
QED: God doesn’t exist.
Semi-relatedly, I saw a post on Tumblr.com that says, “Taylor Swift is just Phoebe Bridgers for girls whose CIA case officer has a more clearly defined system of rewards and punishments” and while I haven’t ever listened to a single Phoebe Bridgers song, I’m a huge Taylor Swift fan. Both me and Taylor Swift have spent way too much of our lives contemplating our morality and our existence as human women, and when we didn’t measure up to our own arbitrary standards, we’d punish ourselves by whatever means we saw fit. In other words, I don’t need a God to make me feel bad about my very existence and to hold me accountable for not being perfect in a completely undefined and most likely irrational way, I can do that for myself.
My favorite Taylor Swift album is Red (of course), and I’ve always loved the progression from “State of Grace” to “Holy Ground” to “All Too Well” to “Begin Again,” like I’ve seen that sequence described in the sense of God and religion but I regard it differently. Earthly slash romantic love has long been considered inherently blasphemous (especially when women and sex are involved) but I tend to take a “to love another person is to see the face of God” approach to it all. Red was originally released on October 22, 2012, back when I was still halfway innocent as I used to say, because nobody had actually hurt me in a way I couldn’t forgive at this point (besides myself of course).
Taylor Swift is re-releasing Red (Taylor’s version) this November and in her announcement, she wrote:
In the land of heartbreak, moments of strength, independence, and devil-may-care rebellion are intricately woven together with grief, paralyzing vulnerability and hopelessness. Imagining your future might always take you on a detour back to the past. And this is all to say, that the next album I’ll be releasing is my version of Red.
Musically and lyrically, Red resembled a heartbroken person. It was all over the place, a fractured mosaic of feelings that somehow all fit together in the end. Happy, free, confused, lonely, devastated, euphoric, wild, and tortured by memories past. Like trying on pieces of a new life, I went into the studio and experimented with different sounds and collaborators. And I’m not sure if it was pouring my thoughts into this album, hearing thousands of your voices sing the lyrics back to me in passionate solidarity, or if it was simply time, but something was healed along the way.
I used write extensively about a relationship I had with the first person to really hurt me because I fundamentally didn’t understand why we couldn’t just be happy together since I knew we loved each other. I’d never have admitted it at the time but I would go to the chapel at Cornell and pray to a God I definitely didn’t actually believe in to “fix it” because no matter what I tried, no matter how much we seemed to revolve around each other’s cyclical orbits, we couldn’t get our shit together. As I once wrote, the foundation of us was wrought with fault lines of fury and sadness and both of our self-loathing so there was never really any hope for the two of us from the very beginning, despite the existence of what I’d call the permanent echoing affiance of infinite second chances. That infinity runs out when one party forces herself ascends beyond the pain that brought you together and the other never will, you know? But I digress.
In any case, I see religion, organized religion, as fundamentally disparate from faith and goodness. I believe in the unconditional nature of love, romantic and familial and platonic, I believe in its eternal nature, but I also believe in intentionality. I believe in waking up one morning and deciding to be a better, kinder, smarter person and making that a reality. I don’t believe in predestination, in predetermination, in things being eternally out of my control. Maybe it’s my erstwhile arrogant control freak rearing her pretty head (I’d say ugly but I have good hair), but I low key think I’m more powerful than any God can ever be because I’m plagued with mortality and yet I’ve still triumphed over death. Like, I thwarted death multiple times before I could even legally drink, and while a lot of people become religious from extreme trauma, I became irreligious. God didn’t save me, I saved myself, and nobody, not even some unseen, inhumanly powerful entity, can take that away from me.