I used to be a devout atheist. Non-belief was the first radical cause to which I attached myself, and served as the type for my subsequent political activism. I learned the power of dissent at the age of nine when, alone out of four hundred students, I refused to stand for the Lord's Prayer in a denominational school in St. John's in 1964. Christians taught me the ABCs of social exclusion.
An aversion to organized religion ran in my family. In Atlantic Canada fifty years ago, religion was comparable to race as a force of division and fear. The trials of an Acadian Catholic marrying a Salvationist Newfoundlander made fierce agnostics out of both my parents. Nevertheless, they took us to church in our early years for a hair of the dog that had bitten them. By the time I, the youngest of three children, was eight, they figured we were old enough to make up our own minds about religion, and we unanimously opted out.
Somewhere in adulthood, I lapsed in the ferocity of my antipathy to religion. The shift may have corresponded to my gradual loss of faith in political utopias: my realization that "the revolution" was quite possibly as distant and imaginary as the bland, unappealing heaven that Christians seemed so eager to attain.
While I remain committed to social justice, I distrust millennial political ideology as much as the religious fundamentalism it resembles. I also find myself sympathetic to Christians, like the current Moderator of the United Church, who think that trying to live like Christ is more important than affirming his divinity; for whom faith is more about how we live than what we believe.
The religion of the twentieth century was the materialist utopia of a perfectible life on earth. Communism and consumer capitalism are variants on the belief that technology can deliver and "manage" a world of constantly expanding affluence. It is getting harder to believe the claims of either sect, however, with homeless people freezing to death in the streets of both Moscow and Toronto, and the fish dying everywhere.
Our world is not unlike imperial Rome: a time of cultural pluralism when the public rituals are empty, pro forma observances; when rational philosophy coexists with a proliferation of bizarre cults, any one of which might emerge as a new imperial, universal, and catholic church.
In my worst nightmares, I fear that our fascination with aliens-those repulsive, reptilian, imaginary beings who form the basis of half of the programs on television-might translate into a full-fledged millenarian religion. Our attitude towards them is suitably ambivalent, combining our dread of viral invasion with our yearning for salvation by a deus ex machina in a flying saucer. The Heaven's Gate cult, who committed ritual suicide during the fly-past of Hale-Bopp, are the type of this new religious form. It is Christian fanaticism reborn for a technological age, with aliens in place of angels, and heaven now located in cyberspace. Aliens, with their huge infantile heads and their spindly bodies, have no sex, like the angels in heaven. Alien-worship, like the worst of Christianity, hates and fears the body, particularly the sexual body, as the voluntary castration of the Heaven's Gate followers vividly demonstrates.
At my most hopeful, I imagine the slow growth of a skeptical, plural, Earth-centred Paganism-environmentalism expressed through ritual and sign-that honours symbols without believing in them uncritically; that honours the body as well as the mind, and that accepts all existing religions in its tolerant embrace.
The word "religion" is likely derived from the concept of binding. To anchor the meaning of our lives, it is our nature as animals to attach ourselves to something, whether religion, possessions, power, or romantic love. In the absence of coherent communal values, what drives the juggernaut of technology is blind, insatiable human appetite. It may be better to choose-intentionally and with a healthy dose of skepticism-the symbols to which we attach ourselves.
Robin Metcalfe is a Halifax writer.
