Curious About Belief, Just Not Enough to Sign Up
My first memory of a religious nature was attending a Bible class at the age of around six or seven. This seemed normal at that time, but fortunately it didn’t last long as my parents didn’t attend church and soon tired of dropping me off and picking me up again on a Sunday morning when other more exciting activities beckoned, like digging for toheroa on Muriwai Beach.
At Presbyterian elementary and high schools, we had to sing hymns and listen to Bible readings at morning assemblies. The only hymn I could really relate to was “For those in peril on the sea,” given the fact that my grandfather’s family were all master mariners and most of my hobbies were water-related. I have so far survived all of my many ocean, lake and river pursuits, so perhaps a Presbyterian deity, if one exists, was listening.
When I left high school, the principal, who was a Presbyterian minister, gave me some career advice. He suggested I either become a teacher or enter the church. I had been forced to enter several churches while at school, but becoming a minister seemed a bit over the top when I considered my ambivalent attitude towards the Christian conditioning I had been subjected to. In those days there was a definite division between Presbyterians (church of Scotland), Anglicans (church of England), and Catholics (church of Rome), not only in Ireland but right here in Aotearoa.
Many young people were encouraged not to become romantically involved with or marry members of the other denomination. Some converted to avoid this taboo. It all seems quite ridiculous now, but at the time it was taken quite seriously.
My grandmother told me never to date a Catholic, but that’s another story.
Although many Christians live lives of love and caring for others as Jesus preached, history paints another story, a bleak picture of mass killing and oppression carried out in the name of Christianity. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the European Wars of Religion, the Conquest of the Americas were all carried out in the name of religion. Christian countries were involved in the Atlantic slave trade, and many extremist groups like the Klu Klux Klan in America and the murderous Lord’s Resistance Army in Central Africa identify as Christian organisations. Even today’s illegal war in Iran was started and is being financed by a so-called Christian country and a Jewish one. And the scriptures say, “Thou shalt not kill”, and “Love your neighbour and your enemies.” I have to ask myself why I would be a part of such religions.
In Sri Lanka, I met a group who called themselves The Children of God, and who were originally founded by a guy called Moses David who had what I considered to be some pretty wacky ideas and doctrines. He allegedly instructed female members to use their bodies and sexuality as a missionary tool to attract, comfort and convert lonely men. They tried to get me to join them and even gave me a biblical name. However, I wasn’t lonely at the time and didn’t fall prey to David’s so-called ‘hookers for Christ’.
After bidding farewell to those poor dependent misguided souls, I entered a Buddhist monastery and embarked upon an intensive course of Vipassana meditation. I continued this practice when I arrived in London and found it to be a very useful guide in later life. Although Buddhism has a religious structure built around it, I tend to see it as more of a philosophy, and a way of life. Its meditations give us the tools for quietening the endless chaos of our thinking mind and enable us to see how thoughts only hold the power that we allow them and that we can let them go if we so desire, thereby avoiding possible negative or chaotic outcomes. Unlike Christianity, there is no supreme god or creator who hands down laws for living – and the dire consequence of eternal hellfire should those laws be transgressed.
On returning to Aotearoa in the mid-seventies, I attended festivals like Nambassa and Sweetwaters, the hippy versions of today’s Womad and Rhythm and Vines.
At one of these festivals a rock band named Hari Bol played fast, repetitive and I guess religious songs, as they were representing the Hari Krishna movement that chanted and danced up and down Auckland’s Queen Street several nights a week.
They also ran a very good, very cheap vegetarian restaurant there. I went to some of their meetings, participated in their chanting and read some of their literature which was based on Hinduism. The chanting was fun and the food delicious, but the complicated strangeness of the religious stuff didn’t attract me, nor did the saffron orange clothes that many of them wore, not to mention the strict vows of renunciation and celibacy that more serious members adhered to. I definitely wasn’t ready to give up the pleasures of the opposite sex.
Another group who wore orange or purple clothes were the Rajneeshees. Their guru Bagwhan Shree Rajneesh had ashrams in India and other countries and preached against organised institutional religions and belief systems, offering instead a blend of Eastern mysticism, Western psychotherapy and human development techniques. He was against traditional marriage and encouraged free love, ideas that attracted thousands of followers worldwide, including some of my friends. To me, despite its claims of freedom from traditional values, it was still an organised group, and I doubted the validity of giving one man or any organisation so much power over me. However, by definition a leader needs followers just as much as followers need a leader. I guess at the time I needed to be neither a leader nor a follower.
Some friends at that time, a couple who had four children, joined an evangelical church in Auckland. Jonas was a high school art teacher, while his wife Jane was an artist in her own right who designed and made beautiful stained-glass windows.
Unfortunately, their church discouraged involvement in music and the arts due to their materialistic, sensual and emotional nature, and so Jonas, being the so-called head of the family, forbade his wife and children from participating in any artistic or musical activities.
They asked me to join them at one of their weekly church services which I did but to no avail. The holy spirit didn’t enter me and I wasn’t given the gift of speaking in tongues. I have watched YouTube clips of people in American mega-churches supposedly speaking in tongues. I couldn’t understand any of it nor could I fathom whether anyone benefitted from it or not, but hey, who am I to judge any of the weird ways of others, especially if they don’t seem to be doing any harm. Fortunately for all of us, Jonas and his family’s infatuation with evangelism eventually waned and they were once again free to express themselves artistically and musically and I was able to resume having a captive audience for my twisted dirty jokes, thank god.
(to be continued …)
Words by Ross Liggins
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