Wrestling with Religion

Why was Christianity so transparently bogus--or, at least, without substance--to me as a young adult--and to some of my intelligent, well-read friends but not to others ? It's easy to say that people believe whatever makes them feel good, to dismiss faith as mindless conformity and intellectual shoddiness.  As social media makes clear, people often read a sentence as meaning how they feel when they read it, not as what the grammar and definitions factually add up to. The mainstream media make everything into a crisis , a friend wrote yesterday. Everything ? I missed CNN coverage of my afternoon nap. OK, my forty years as a comp teacher are showing. Climbing off my pedagogical high horse, I'll note that two kinds of reading, his and mine, yield two distinct meanings, one absurd and the other reasonable. One is nonsensical, the other merely a hyperbole--a figure of speech. Seeming credulity may be this kind of difference: reading religious language, not as word-for-word m...

Religion in the old South Growing up in an Alabama Protestant town and a Baptist family in the 20th century, I had a clear idea what religion was, but a limited one. Most local religion was austere or invisible in the frontier tradition, all about words and the "truths" they signified, scarcely existing outside of songs, prayers, sermons, books, and pamphlets. A "mixed" religious family was one where a husband and wife disagreed about which church to go to Sunday morning. There was a Catholic church--small but thriving in 1950 as university influence made Auburn vaguely cosmopolitan--but I've heard that the church was founded by mistake. Around 1910, when no establishment of religion meant promoting all Christian denominations equally, students were required to sign a log at the church of their choice every Sunday morning. Since there was no Catholic church in Auburn, if they registered as Catholic, they could sleep in, and the story is that thes...