I went to Sunday School, in a Reform Jewish congregation, but always thought there was something missing in my Jewish identity. My family did not practice the traditional rituals ie Friday Night Prayers nor dietary prohibitions against mixing meat and milk. I was a teenager before I even knew about the Holocaust. I went to a French film, with a friend of mine who’d grown up in Israel, that had footage of the concentration camps, and said to him, “What is this?” My family had never discussed it. When I asked about it later, they just shrugged. It was not a part of their reality. My father’s family had migrated to the US before WWII, from Poland through Great Britain and South Africa, then to Canada and then into the US. And my mother’s grandfather on her father’s side had come as a teenager from Russia or Ukraine to avoid the 25 year army draft imposed on Jewish men, and prospered in the midwest… belonging to both a Conservative and a Reform temple. My mother says she remembers that they joined the Reform temple because it had a nicer cemetery. It sounded funny at first, but now I understand that old fashioned cemeteries have depressions in the ground and become overgrown, so a new cemetery can look “nicer” by comparison.

Anyway, I also now understand that migration is an engine of change… the surnames in my family are inconsistent. The very act of landing in America speaking a different language meant that some guy with a pen and a clipboard gave you a name you didn’t have when you left the old country.

In any event, as I was learning about my family background, as a Jew, in my confirmation class, the instructor taught comparative religion. I think it was supposed to show us that Judaism was the best of all possible religions, but I was a child of the sixties, and so-called Eastern Religion was soon on the horizon. I remembered the visit to the Buddhist temple when my friends were experimenting with Zen and hearing about the Beatles and their visits with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi… all the practices that constituted variations on spirituality.

Frankly, my generation was all about exploration into what boiled down to superstition. Astrology, ESP, gods, angels, UFOs, aliens, astral projection, time travel; it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the stories of the bible and religion were no less fantastic than the ones in Sci Fi. They were just somehow branded into a formal and “accepted” respectable format.

I still have not fully figured out why some people buy it… and others don’t; why some people insist that they have a direct and palpable connection to the Spirit in the Sky, and I think there is nothing there but sky.

When I finally had time to go to college and take some anthropology classes and a couple of semesters of sociology and critical thinking, then called Argumentation…. it was refreshing to find out that it wasn’t just me who thought the world was all screwed up. The tension relaxed a notch or two when I discovered that there are political and sociological reasons that religions have power; that the hierarchies lie to their congregations, and that they rely on people’s fears and insecurity to control them. Those things have nothing to do with a supernatural being that answers prayers and runs things.

Finally, one day, my dear ex mother-in-law and I were getting ready to take a swim. I had been married to my ex-husband for only six years, but I’d remained friends with his mother, a very nice Jewish lady, for over 30 years after we were divorced. We used to go to get Jewish deli together, and she made the best chopped liver I ever ate. One day I decided to tell her how I feel. I said, “You know, I don’t believe in God.” She looked over her shoulder, and all around… we were alone in her apartment, but she whispered, “… neither do I.” And it started an important dialog. I think there are a lot of Jewmanists.

Probably it takes great courage to admit this in the face of the Holocaust… I don’t know what it means to be anything else other than a Jewish atheist. One of my best girlfriends is an atheist who grew up going to Christian school, and can quote chapter and verse of New Testament, but doesn’t believe; I’ll have to ask her more about it. But for me, it’s just the truth. I like being Jewish, but I don’t need, want or have to have a supernatural being who answers prayers and runs things.

This is just an abbreviated version of my “coming out” story… there is so much more because it is unfolding every day. I am happy to be able to be human unencumbered by superstitions, unfrightened by fear of stepping on a crack, or not waving my hands the right way. I don’t want to feel superior to people who have not made the decision to come out yet… maybe they are about to emerge from their cocoon soon. I was delighted to find out that my grandson’s confirmation class was very non-spiritual

Okay, this, under most circumstances for me, would be a very hard thing to clarify. However, I am on the edge of drunk, on Bacardi 151, so I’m more at liberty to slew out my opinions of the moment, on my journey from general religion to general atheism (for the most part) or where I stand now. I’ll start out with my childhood. My dad was a Jesus freak, for the most part, or as far as I can remember. I remember him having us watch the sermons on TV when we woke up late at his apartment when I was visiting him. He was also, and I assume the overlapped, deep into drugs. Which was apparent in his death by heroine overdose. But I remember once, long ago, when I was probably five or six, my father and my older brother discussing revelations in the bible, and the end of the world as we know it, and how horrified I was, in my own quiet world (I’ve always been shy) sitting on the couch listening them talk about “doomsday”. I also associate this with, at this time, my first contemplation of oblivion, or imagining what it would be like to not exist at all, or to have never been born ,and the weird empty pulling that is associated with such a consideration. Then, another event involving my father, when we were at a pool in a hotel with a Chinese restaurant, probably 4 years later. There was a big golden Buddha outside the restaurant. I rubbed the Buddha’s stomach, I believe, and right after, my father told me an old superstition, that if you rub the Buddha’s stomach it’s bad luck, but if you rub his head, it’s good luck. (it could have been the other way around, I haven’t heard of this superstition since, and I don’t remember exactly what I rubbed) but either way I rubbed his head or stomach and thought that was bad luck. I thought of this while swimming, and until bedtime. I remember at bedtime I would pray, and this was my only connection with a god that I for the most part, disconnected with our Lutheran faith and the boringness of church. I would pray to pure light and not even a humanly figure (which later became the basis for my “religion” while I had one, but after Christianity.) Yet, this particular night, I prayed to this essence of pure forgiveness, goodness, etc. A pure philosophical ideal: that I could be not be punished for rubbing the Buddha in the wrong way. I was praying to a christian god, to forgive me for enacting a superstition upon a Buddhist “god”. I find this ironic and hilarious in retrospect. Anyway. While drifting through the Lutheran church. Which, to me, is the democrat to republican, in Lutheran to catholic, and I later chose a third and more informed option on both right-left choices. (maybe logic) Yet, the entire time I felt something was off. The church did give me insight. Often in my later years, into things about philosophy and poetic concepts, yet never did I fully take them seriously, as they did themselves. I got confirmed, told them my idea of god (without selling out my beliefs) and was still confirmed into the church. (which is a process of carrying candles for the pastor and taking bible classes) I did all this at the will of my mother. Yet, when they asked me what seemed to be the final question about god, I told them as I actually did believe at that time, that god was a standard of good, and Jesus was a representation of that. The only place I stretched my beliefs with this question was in telling them that I thought Jesus was a representation of that whole good, when in fact, I was already considering the fact that he was just a smart prophet of the time, if he existed at all, and that there were many others since him more enlightened that A Christ or a Buddha. Since confirmation, I never went to church. it was a funny thing. I basically stopped right after that. I only go when my grandma comes to visit. Yet, since then, I have once been what is called a Deist. Which is a general philosophical notion that there is a higher power, expressed through nature, and that it’s not a personal god, or necessarily represented in any specific person. Yet, it is evident to me that some people are “smarter” or just generally more with their own act than others, and that these people are becoming more and more, and that awareness is spreading, not in a religious way, but in the way that possibly Jesus, as a character was, and that people will awake to freedom, and discard establishment and government. This is just a hope of mine. After Deism, I became intensely intrigued by Buddhism, Zen Buddhism in general, (not the folklore over the man Gautama Siddhartha the Buddha, but general Zen Buddhism, for peace of the mind) Anyway, this realization came almost side by side with psychedelic drugs and my journey into trying to discover the beyond, or what we can glimpse of that beyond us, while alive. This gave me a more democratic god view, which I haven’t totally discarded today. I considered the works of Huxley and Allen Watts, as what if everything is truly god, and that we all suffer the same way. Which still much intrigues me today, as do all religions, if thought about in combination or studied, but as they apply to politics and real life, they become dangerous, so I guess at this point, when I realized the combination of stupid religions and dangerous politics, have realized that we cannot afford group religions, because it becomes, like race, a way to separate people, and that all we can assume is that everything is god and that we must leave the balance to the nature of things, that which can never be understood or explained, so I remain agnostic, but with a strong inkling that the afterlife does not exist, which makes me feel more atheist, yet I’ve heard that even some Buddhist religions are considered atheistic, and I still sway toward eastern religion, it seems more fascinating, maybe because it is further from me. I even consider Christianity in a general sense, I do not like to take down the bible itself, however outdated, like other atheists. because, it all is metaphor, for what really is and can never be spoken, and from what really is and is here in front of us. It is all archetypes and myths of the great One man, the self, in search of whatever he must find in his pointless life, for the game of it. I think, if life is meaningless, you can have more fun with it. Society’s problem is making it serious, you do not NEED to achieve anything in life, but simply to live in peace. I leave you intoxicated, hoping to forget this section of my overall accumulated belief, but that it is genuine, and that I do believe it all amounts to nothing, but that is the beauty. A poet, a philosopher, an artist, yet not doing this for a god other than which I know is a metaphor for the ironic struggle, that is I.