A Rant About Faith

Today I spent part of the afternoon watching Richard Dawkins' documentaries about religion on You Tube. I had heard a snippet of the incendiarily titled "The Root Of All Evil?" on a podcast I like to listen to. If you are interested in an atheist's overview of the culture of faith, you should check it out. Seeing the Reverend Ted Haggard's arrogantly delivered argument was extraordinarily satisfying. (He is such. An asshole. And he made so much. Money....which he spent on male hookers and speed, which is appropriate behavior for an Evangelical who supposedly consults with the President once a week. As if we weren't in enough trouble.)
Most children are indoctrinated to become believers in whatever spiritual camp their parents were thrust into as children. I was lucky enough to avoid this sad situation, largely, I think, because my parents felt that matters of the spirit are best left to the individual. Or maybe my dad thought it was bullshit, that thing about tithing. He had a word or two to say about churches, and I reckoned that was why we never went to any. I did grow up in a really churchy midwestern place, though, and there were times I wanted the community that other kids seemed to have on account of where they went on Sundays. I did set foot in a church from time to time, with friends, and my mother was inclined to say only that I was free to find out about The Lord as I saw fit. The kids I played with--which were not the same as the kids I went to school with, due to districting and choices my parents made about sending me to a country school instead of a town school--were involved in some sort of orthodox protestant cult thing.
I learned about Heaven and Hell and The Devil by proxy. And what I learned about these things was this: I was a Nonbeliever, and I was Going To Hell. It didn't matter that I was five years old and had not yet engaged in premarital sex with another nonbeliever. What mattered was that I didn't go to the same place those kids went on Sundays. I was given a decent education, via the transmission of little children, about how I would suffer an eternity of torture in Hell, at the hands of the Devil, who--if you were not careful and dug too deep a hole in the ground, would come out! I was kinda scared about that.
I was not beaten by nuns or forced to wear a school uniform. I was not molested by the clergy, who subsequently would have their asses covered by the Church only for it to come out decades later in a hail of liberal mediaism and court settlements and very tall therapy bills.
Nope. I read Walter Farley books and sometimes I went down to the river and chucked rocks into it. I did not get started in life thinking there was something I didn't do, but something a fictional character in a book did, that made me inherently bad, and that I would spend my life repenting for this thing that no one really ever did but that I was born being wrong about. I knew that I was fucked up, but it wasn't because of Jesus and His Flock.
I didn't get the guilt, the sex is dirty thing or the sinning or the repenting. All I knew is I was a Nonbeliever, and after a fashion, that was good enough for me.
I did get, however, that faith was something I was supposed to be respectful about. The thing is, I'm mostly not respectful about people's faith. I think it's bullshit. If you've got your spirituality in a good place--great--I can respect that. I do not respect it when you use it as a weapon in personal matters. I don't respect it when you start wars with it--this unverifiable thing you have, this faith. I don't respect it when you use it to repudiate facts, like the fossil record. And I don't respect it when you look, with the thousand-yard-stare, at all the critical thinkers, and muse over all the smiting and killing in the bible like it is metaphorical. I do not respect you who practice your "faith" when it is convenient for you.
I'm a happy athiest. I do not need to adjust my moral compass every time I have sex with another nonbeliever. And unlike the Reverend Ted Haggard, I'm keeping my commitments to my partner, telling the truth to people who come to me to hear it, and I do not hide behind a ton of bullshit to try to explain to myself what I am. And unlike countless trusted Men of Cloth, I have yet to touch a child inappropriately, or to teach one to judge another for being somewhere else on Sunday morning.