A few years ago I submitted an essay to This I Believe. I believe that life is worth living. For someone like me, that is a fundamentally challenging prospect. A) to want to live and B) to get out and do it.

But lately I've been thinking about religion and how it has never really had a place in my life. Is it a coincidence that out of the five children my parents had none of us practice the religion we were raised with? None of us really practice anything? Sure, Sus is into health food and new age-y stuff, and Netty has vaguely Pagan notions, and Buddhism appealed to Clint, and who knows what Roy thinks but it probably involves some form of anarchy. And I tend toward Burke-ian agnosticism, but not one of us worships any nameable deity in a ritualized way. Clint's the only one with a clue about the afterlife, and he's not talking.

So I've been thinking about what drove us all away from the highly organized, exclusionary Mormonism.

It wasn't until my teens that it even occurred to me that God was supposed to love you as well as want to let someone beat the shit out of you for eternity if you didn't do exactly. What. He. Said. Love was just not any part of it. I'm not sure that everyone has the same experience I did, but the reward seemed so unattainable (and pretty damn boring if you ask me) and the policy of exclusion and secrecy so distasteful to me. You can talk to people who don't believe what you believe, but only if they give you an inkling of a possibility of an opening that they will join your church. Otherwise they are simply less than. And I had a really hard time believing that a benevolent god let alone a parent would draw lines on a round ball and say "Everyone born here is awesome. I bless your country and your country alone. Everyone else, you suck. Either come around to my way of thinking or you're out. Forever." What kind of a parent even thinks like that?

I never belonged anywhere until I left Christianity. I don't know why I still crave their acceptance. Maybe because they're family. Who knows. God, maybe. If he's out there. If he's listening. If he isn't watching a celebrity or something.