I once dated a guy who found out that telling me he was praying was a perfect way to get under my skin and start a fight. I don’t know if I still have a Tinder profile up, but if I did, there would be a riff on that line about “My relationship with God is really important to me.” In all honestly, I feel the same but opposite- my atheism is really important to me, and I feel that sentence in the exact same way I used the say the former in my teens and 20’s. My atheism resonates so strongly that I almost get teary-eyed when I think about how grateful I am for my higher education and for having found the Enneagram, both of which helped me leave the church in my mid-thirties: my atheism is part of my liberation story out of a claustrophoic ontology that was used to keep my world small, and me obedient.
I just found this old College Humour video after work today and had a good laugh. I feel a special affinity for this football player who understands what went into him being a great athlete, and the hypocrisy of thanking god after a win, which essentially captures the self-congratulatory nature of Western Christianity.
Which is why I’m so dissapointed when I find out someone I respect is religious. I once saw this quote at an art gallery gift shop: “The true New Yorker secretly believes that people living anywhere else have to be, in some sense, kidding.“ -J.U. I feel the same way when I see adults my age that are still going to church.
Today I was watching a beautiful, heatfelt interview between Bea Chestnut, Uranio Paes, and their guest Trent Thornley and I was postively swooning over this guy’s inner [Buddhist and Enneagram] practice, super impressed with what he was able to come up with in the moment (it seems like in comparison, my type Four tribe tends to be really unprepared for these kinds of interviews) and then near the end, he dropped the bomb that Christian faith is important to him. Lol. My heart sank. (Absolutely no shade to this guy otherwise, I am so very impressed by his wisdom and self-knowledge).
Christianity to me is just a cultural agreement to project one’s adulthood and intelligence onto a white male figure in the sky so we remain psychologically un-developped- so men can never grow up and own their anima and become whole, and so conversely, women can never be allowed to own their animus in public life (but also so women don’t do the Work either and then call the result feminism). There is something very evangelical about remaining psychological children that is so sweetingly sentimentalized today in Canada and the US, and it’s used to stay ignorant, helpless, and a stranger to the self- it’s a lame, grabby excuse to appropriate divine qualities into one’s egoice defence mechanisms where they don’t belong. If the Enneagram is about self-observation and Christianity is about God-observation, I was always discouraged from turning my eyes within because that’s where the devil “gets you”. According to evangelicals, doing yoga, for example, was “when the devil creeps in” because you’re noticing your body’s sensations instead of god, and what do you know- noticing the body was ultimately my salvation. It was the Enneagram that helped me own what I was projecting onto this made-up god, or at least understand what I was giving away psychologically in worship. Not to mention, I never got two of my major prayers answered after decades of pining daily at his feet, so I just can’t take any of it seriously. That’s just not love, period, and people who got what I never did can’t tell me that their neurological concoction loves me. Moreover, when I look at people who have less than me, how can I take that so-called love seriously? How socio-economically patronizing.
There was nothing there in the air to begin with- I was participating in a cultural, colonialist, economically-ravaging, sentimentalized patriarchal shadow theatre projected onto the screen of my Western mind. When you’re an astrologer, and can see the movement of the planets and can safely predict when something good or difficult will happen to a person, why do you need to add an additional layer of intention and meaning to the events? It’s insulting to our intelligence as human beings.
All this to say that I very much appreciated the interview, and I was humbled by how seriously he’s taken the Work and how little I have done in comparison, but also, lord god, I just can’t with Christianity. Comforting, sure! I’m someone who understands the need for that comfort. But serious, no. As we in the Enneagram community know all too well, comfort does not make something true.