A zombie to religion

Where I grew up, God never had much of a stake. It seemed like people didn’t need him, and things worked out all right. There were plenty of jobs and green grass, town-hall meetings and no major problems to speak of. There were houses of worship, but they were more about ritual than praise. You wore a tie on Sundays to appease your parents and sat there idly while sermons bounced off your face.
That was just the nature of faith. You made a weekly pilgrimage to tribute the broad, amorphous notion of God, but it was almost like God wasn’t involved. Really, it was like going to God’s weekly funeral, nominally about him but not directly related to anyone’s well-being.
I thought the reasoned, dispassionate way I went to services applied to everyone, but that was before I came to IU. It was that first semester, as the summer waned, that I was greeted loudly by the “Bloomington market for souls.”
At first I thought of the whole situation as novel, saving pamphlets about hell to show my friends.
“Look how serious it is,” I’d explain, “how over the top some people are going.”
But after I’d collected the third piece of literature to specifically refer to “sodomy,” I
became disinterested.
I’d already been told I was going to hell by a 13-year-old in a cowboy hat because I didn’t want his church’s business card, and I’d been told by a preacher that the devil and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures were in cahoots.
If I ever tried to explain to my friends at universities where the official doctrine was atheism (University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, anywhere with an engineering program), I’d just end up frustrated at my inability to convey the horror. I’d always believed in God, I’d done so with a strong sense of morality and I prayed under extreme duress. Still, I never expected God to listen to me or my sophomoric prayers, mostly because trying to get girls to date me seemed like a selfish allocation of His time. Also, it didn’t work.
The impact on people roughly like me pushed them one of two ways. They would either pick up a copy of “The Fountainhead” and become smug Ayn Rand-ians for whom eternal bliss existed in the form of being a dick about everything or join some Pentecostal church and wind up seeing Satan everywhere.
I tried both. I took a philosophy class and dabbled in theology, tried picking it apart but was roundly defeated, and tried going to Campus Crusade for Christ, but couldn’t stomach people’s references to Jesus like he was their friend from out of town. I even tried being a Unitarian, but decided against a clergy who wears rainbow scarves.
But all those failures to find out what I really believed, if nothing else, got me thinking about the issue. And for someone who began his religious life as part of the zombie slog to interfaith services, that’s good enough for now.