November update: God LLC's faith intact

Another Thanksgiving has passed, providing another opportunity to converse with relatives on the topic of faith and spirituality—a sort of faith-o-metric probing I due each year, with no such plans or intentions.

But alas, coming from a big family such as mine means being one among a plurality of beliefs and opinions and making an effort to understand one another. I feel fortunate to be a twig on such a diverse family tree, especially one that gets along so famously, and teaches me so much. I'm reminded often of my minority status as an atheist.

Still, the topic of spirituality continues to occupy me, in fact it enacts the most high-functioning part of my brain, that tier reserved for an uncharacteristic seriousness, or what might get called "discourse."

What is that special thing that happens when large groups of people get together with a unified purpose? That sense of oneness?

What is that feeling of elation you get when a scenic vista is reached amidst a day-long hike?

What happens in the brains of Pentecostal churchgoers during a cathartic outpouring of song and dance?

What I've realized is that I have my own way of describing these experiences. And it's important to recognize that I do so by way of a mix-and-mash of inherited vocabularies (things I've read/been taught, conversations I've had, life experiences that have shaped me). This is true for everyone; we are shaped and limited by our use of language, and I'm lately coming to terms with the rarity of my current vocabulary, that what I take for granted as prevalent, or common wisdom in describing 'spiritual' matters, is in fact newfangled, an emerging but underutilized dialect.

Evolving alongside this dialect is a new one for the faithful as well. A morphing set of ever-nebulous descriptions that shun the specific in favor of unity and tolerance. A Shack-esque permutation. In one sense, this is a good thing, as it means less blatant unthinking, less partitioning off of the mind to allow a refuge for pure unreason—but I wonder if the religious will wake one day soon and realize that really there is nothing concrete left to stand on; that what they really wish to hold onto, aside from the promise of a neatly grounded morality, is this notion of the 'spiritual,' and the comforts of ceremony. Both are notions which, I feel, can be redescribed; in psychological terms; in scientific terms; and through poetry.

As for the alleged supernature professed by most of the world's religions, with their stories of miraculous interventions and divine oversight, I continue to see these matters through a pane so pure, so clear—as clear and as pure as the most crystalline holy water, distilled from the tears of all of heaven's most chaste angels—that these accounts are merely hearsay, the memetic flotsam of our more primitive, fearful and ignorant ancestors, and it troubles me, when others can't see what appears so obvious; that the Jesus story, and all those of the world's religions are purely terrestrial, not divinely inspired, entirely without supernature—at least none that we can sensibly comment on.