Today I got blood work done at CHOMP, the local hospital (isn’t 21st medicine amazing?). Before I could get any tests run, I had to be entered into the system. After disclosing my name, address, social security number, insurance information, relationship status, religion, and receiving a full cavity search (jk), I was allowed to go get stabbed and pee in a cup.
I felt like I’d been the victim of identity theft by the time we were through – all they needed was one of my eyeballs and they could have cleared all seven levels of security to my super secret vault. It definitely drove home how much personal data gets jacked every time an employee gets an unencrypted laptop stolen. Hopefully my total lack of assets will deter would-be impostors.
But when she handed me the final printout to confirm all my details, under Religion she had listed Other when I had clearly stated Atheist. Apparently that gets and Other categorization in our healthcare database! Fine, maybe atheism itself isn’t a religion unto itself in the Judeo-Christian sense, but Secular Humanism contains all the moral codes of traditional belief structures, just fewer Crusades and Jihads. I can’t think of a war that was started by people who don’t believe in a God.
Don’t get me started on who is more Christian than whom, my militantly atheist mother is as morally righteous as any weekday churchgoer. And probably less judgy, considering that atheists are the single most despised and targeted group in modern day American society. Is it because our belief in humanity doesn’t require a higher power? It’s just intriguing to learn that the recognized marginal groups in America – immigrants, gays, minorities, the poor – don’t receive as much collective ire as those who don’t require a paternalistic figure to guide their life choices. I respect people who choose religion as much as they respect my choice to exist outside of its confines. I choose not to lie, cheat or steal, out of a moral code that was gifted to me through parents and society – not because some omniscient deity is observing me on Heaven’s Closed Circuit TV station.
How egocentric and patently absurd is it to assume that some almighty being is deeply invested in my every hangnail, while simultaneously ignoring the suffering of millions of humans and billions of animals on a daily basis? To be fair, the earth only revolves around the sun because I wasn’t born when Galileo was using his telescope, but everyone has flaws. I just have a hard time buying into fairy tales, ever since the tooth fairy was late on her first payment, and the Easter bunny’s chocolate gave me the runs. So it’s sweet that we try to give the next generation more hope than the last, but when it’s warped by anti-science and mortality-goggles (when you’re too self-centered to see the reality of your own insignificance), it seems disingenuous at best.
Thomas Jefferson was rewriting the Bible – literally cutting and pasting it – into a version that lacked all reference to divinity on the part of Christ. Jesus was just a cool dude, trying to get people to chillax. I love that idea. Because as Kilgore Trout wrote in Slaughterhouse Five, Jesus was really a “bum who has no connections.” We do not live in Victorian England, people are not predestined to live out their lives in a caste system that lacks merit or reason. It is the West’s opportunity to free ourselves from the tyranny of religion and embrace the humanity that exists within us all – and the oneness that exists inside all creatures.
We are from the same Creator – the Universe – and the carbon in our bodies was once a part of stars. Why not treat each other with the same respect while here in this transient moment of being alive? We’re nothing but our unique perspectives, experiencing the universe momentarily through imperfect sacks of bones, brains and blood. Otherwise, we might as well be inanimate objects. So when I get told that Atheism is an Other, I ask, is Loving Life not a belief system?
