Back when I was in university, religion was still being taught in Quebec's elementary schools. Parents had their choice in enrolling their children in either Catholic or Protestant religion classes. Alternately, children could be enrolled in what was called Moral Education. It basically taught the same values as the other classes, but left God out of the equation. As I mentioned yesterday, Religious Education was taken more or less seriously in Quebec's public schools. In my grade four class, Religious Education period was devoted to personal hygiene for a full 3-month term. I guess they were covering the Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness angle...
I took two classes in university about religion. The first one was the really interesting one. It covered the story of the Bible from a historical viewpoint. I learned a lot, and at the time I wished I had learned all this before, not because of religion, but because it would really have come in handy in my high school English classes. There are so many allusions to the Bible in literature and I was always at a loss when these came up. Knowing about the Bible would have made the two years in Mrs. Durst's Hornors English and AP English classes much easier for me.
One day in the class, we were learning about the exodus from Egypt. The professor said something that day that made a bell go off in my head. DING! For the first time, I felt that I actually got it. What did he say? "When the Jews left Egypt, they felt that a force was keeping them together. They called that force God."
Before, I had always wondered how people could believe in God. It didn't make sense to me. I mean, if I compared the story of Creation to the Big Bang Theory, or if I thought about the miracles Jesus performed, I had trouble believing that what was written in the Bible was actual fact. Although it had been easy for me to believe and pray as a little girl, because it had all seemed so magical, as I grew up and learned about the world, the Bible stories just didn't fit into it for me somehow.
When my professor uttered that sentence about the Jewish people and God, a thought jumped into my head that kind of helped the pieces fall into place. For the first time, instead of seeing it from the angle that God created man, I switched the tables around and looked at it from the other side: not that God created man, but that man created God. I realize to most this would seem as blasphemy, but I was so happy to have this thought in my head. Suddenly, I had a certain grasp on something: there is good in everyone, though some may not manifest it. To me, the good that was in everyone was God. Once I recognized that, I could modify my previous thought from "man created God" to "man recognized God."
That is how I first came to concede that God may in fact exist. It was a great leap for someone who, although not an atheist, was at most agnostic. When I had thought about God before, I just couldn't believe, but I knew that other people believed and to me, that meant that to them God existed. But for me, it was impossible to prove. I had been raised by two very pragmatic scientists who dealt with facts (my mother was a pharmacist, my father a doctor, they have both gone into scientific research since then); I needed proof. But then, with this idea that there was no need to prove God's existence, but only to recognize it as the good that is in everyone, that was my first step towards belief.
There was another thing that my professor taught us in university. I don't remember if it was in this same class about the Bible or if it was in the second class, the one about how to teach religion, but at one point we were having a discussion about the miracles Jesus performed. In talking about the miracle of the loaves and fishes, we were discussing what our future students could learn from this story. The professor pointed out that one aspect of studying Bible stories was to try and see what the author of the story wanted to say to the readers. After much discussion, we came around to the subject of sharing to make sure that everyone had enough.
That discussion made it easier for me to accept that we could learn something from the Bible. Although I didn't know if the miracle of the loaves and fishes had actually happened, (I guess that is where faith would come in), I was prepared to accept that we should teach these stories to children to teach them about sharing. After all, in that story, Jesus was preoccupied with making sure that everyone had enough to eat.
So, thus far on my journey, I had become an open-minded agnostic. I couldn't prove that God existed, but I was no longer preoccupied with trying to prove or disprove it. If I said that I believed in God, I knew at some level that I did not mean this in the same way that, for example, Christians would mean it when they said that they believed. I personally simply meant that I believed there was good in everyone and, for lack of a better title, I called that good God. It was the beginning of a new chapter in my life, religiously speaking.
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