Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
The marvelous has a good column, How to , today. In there he quotes a census stat and an explanation for it that I’ve always felt (and no doubt you too have felt the same) is bang on.
…78 percent of Americans still identify as overall, no matter if they actually pray or attend church or run for Congress or secretly snort meth and visit gay hookers as they run an megachurch in Colorado? It certainly seems like an impressive number, like no matter how you slice it and no matter how many new beliefs spring up, we are overwhelmingly, devoutly Jesus-happy.
I’m not buying it. I suspect a huge chunk of respondents merely check the “Christian” box for lack of something else, because they felt they needed to choose something, even though they don’t actually follow in the slightest, but since they’re not technically atheists and they’ve never really ventured out on a unique spiritual quest of their own, they merely choose “Christian” as the default American position, the fallback, the safe bet, sort of like checking “average” on a customer satisfaction survey or saying “fine” when your barista asks you how you’re doing today. Thoughtless, automatic, convenient.
There’s the nub of it. Whenever I hear the fanatical Christian claiming how nearly all Americans are Christian this is exactly the type of thought that goes through my head. I think most aren’t, it’s just out of habit because they don’t know what else to put. Since grade school they’ve always filled that box in on questionnaires and it has become a force of habit, no more, no less. Just another lie the Dobson’s of this world tell you to convince you to conform, to not be an outsider. If it wasn’t so sad it would be hilarious, it is so contrary to the that permeates American culture but which in reality is observed more in absence than in fact. The individualist is mostly a myth in America. Get lockstep in line behind the president or you’re a traitor ad nauseam.
In other words, maybe you abandon God by realizing it’s all God, it’s all divine, all hot, thrumming, vibrating connection in all places in all things at all times. And hence, to try and parse it and restrict it and beat it into submission and claim it for one people, one history, one country or church or authoritarian body, is actually the highest form of divine insult.
Or, you know, grand cosmic joke. Same thing, really.
Eggsactly 
I remember writing a paper once in a college philosophy course that I guess could be summed up as, all religions (and particularly monotheistic ones) are an attempt to codify that which can not be codified, the mystical experience. In doing so they lose everything and destroy that which they wanted preserved.
