I stopped believing in God when I was about 13 years old. Like dear old Bert Russell, I just didn’t feel God had provided enough evidence. I had been raised (sort of) to be a believing Christian. For a time I actually did believe, but only in the naive way kids can be said to really believe in anything. They were totally unexamined beliefs, held because I had been told to hold them. Once I began looking at the world through eyes of reason, God disappeared.
I wouldn’t say that I became completely unreligious, though. I spent my teens living in a sort of dissipated manner, but that was mostly because I had so little responsibility for my own life. Food and shelter were taken care of, and the pocket change my folks gave me for cleaning the house and mowing the lawn was enough to buy pot on the weekends. Why bother living my life by any code?
When I got out on my own, the empty pleasures of high school (which had never been that much fun anyway) weren’t enough to sustain me. I spent a few years feeling lost, and when I was 21 I became a strict vegetarian. I’m not sure anymore why I made that choice, but I certainly believed in it at the time. I think what attracted me to it more than anything was the asceticism of it. It demanded a level of self-control that, it seemed, would inevitably sharpen one’s sense of identity and purpose. And anyone who’s ever known or been a vegetarian knows how it becomes a religion.
After about 18 months of it, though, I began to question whether it was really such a healthy diet. I began eating meat again, but my eating habits overall may have become more religious rather than less. I cut out all processed foods, all grains and starches, and all but the tiniest amount of sugar. I also began working out in more intense and focused ways than I had before. It was the religion of yoga and bean soup shifted laterally to the religion of kettlebells and steak salad. I did and still do make the occasional exception, but so far it appears this religion is going to stick.
If there’s one defining characteristic of true religions, it’s that of practice. I say “true religions,” because much of what passes for religion in America is really just a Sunday-morning lecture series that’s forgotten as quickly as were the lessons of Political Science 101. Real religions require their adherents to do things. Orthodox Jews have kashrut and separate sets of plates (and sometimes even separate dishwashers) for meat and dairy. Balinese Hindus have their morning offering. Muslims everywhere have their numerous abstentions and their five daily prayers. It’s these rituals—practiced day in, day out—that give a religion its character.
I think most people hunger for some sort of religious practice. It reminds us who we are. But when we don't find it—maybe for lack of searching, maybe for the vagaries of fate—we'll generally settle for habit. Junk food, television, wasting money on stuff we don’t need—these things become religions by default. A good percentage of people find rituals that genuinely fire their character and inspire self-improvement. But many don’t. Those who do typically have a hard time articulating why, exactly, their rituals matter to them. It just sort of works, they might say.
A religious practice of fitness and healthy eating (like I’ve stumbled upon) is hardly groundbreaking, and it definitely doesn’t provide all the answers in life. But then, no one ever said that it would. What it does is give me just a little something that makes me different from a lot of other people, and it makes feel generally positive about my life. This seems like a good goal for religions, and if it were the goal of Christianity, I might have been more inclined to just stick with that one to begin with.
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