F*ck Your Faith: A Journal Entry

⏱️ 10 min read | 🎧 Audio version below

This really was meant to be a journal entry. I decided to share it.

Watch this two-and-a-half-minute video I made first…

If you watch the video above this text, you’ll see a list of common spiritual platitudes over graphic images of war, starvation, child abuse, and grief. These platitudes include earnest yet insensitive phrases like, It’s all part of God’s plan. Allah wills it. Her past life karma brought it on. His subconscious manifested this. Her soul chose this suffering so that she could evolve.

And I ask you… Would you say these phrases to anyone’s face?

Maybe you would. But many of us, including a past version of myself that was a Christian, wouldn’t have the guts to say a single one of these. Not in real-time to a grieving father, a raped sister, or a cigarette-burned child. And so I ask you: if you wouldn’t say it, why would you even think it?

I don’t mean to be flippant. I know why. Speaking for myself, I desperately needed a reason for why bad things happened. One of the hardest parts of losing my faith was losing the comforting belief that everything occurred for a reason, that God had everything under control, and that he would justify his inaction once I met him in heaven. This belief kept me sane. I went insane without it. It took me years to resign myself to the pointless cruelty of existence, and still want to live anyway.

I learned to swap out faith-based platitudes for real-life compassion. I am now desperately encouraging others to do the same. Selfishly, my religious trauma is triggered when I hear remarks like, God works in mysterious ways. Less selfishly, I can only imagine how brutal it must feel for a grieving mother to hear that someone thinks her son deserved to die, because he either attracted violence to himself through his energetic vibration or because his karmic debt needed to be paid or because God wanted him up in heaven.

So here are some secular alternatives I offer to replace spiritual platitudes:

“It was God’s will,” can become, “This is horrifying. What can I do to help?”

“Her karma must be very bad,” can become, “What she went through wasn’t her fault. What does she need?”

“Their collective consciousness is attracting it,” can become, “This is appalling. How can it be stopped?”

You can do both, people say. You can believe in God, the Divine, fate, karma, and take real-life action. Call me blind, but it looks like trying to cure poison with poison. Here is where the crux of my anger and confusion lies:

How many of the problems faith helps to alleviate are caused by faith itself? How many theologies perpetuate callousness in the name of compassion? Violence in the name of peace? How many spiritual teachings teach indifference in the name of love?

Is the media really going to ignore the religious component to the Israel-Hamas war? I understand they don’t want to spread Islamophobia or anti-Semitism, but really? We’re going to talk about solutions without acknowledging faith-based causes? We’re going to overlook how both Muslims and Jews feel entitled to Jerusalem because of the city’s religious significance? We’re going to make this conflict about the indigenousness of Palestinians and Israelis, and who was there first? We’re going to talk about ceasefires while ignoring scriptural calls for bloodshed? We’re going to demand peace while overlooking Old Testamant calls for putting men, women, and children to death—calls Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has referenced himself?

How many cowardly excuses will we reach for to avoid the agonizing helplessness of admitting that we are as cruel as we are kind, that we don’t know why there is evil in our humanity, and that shit just fucking happens and there is no good reason for it?

If I sound disgusted and angry, it’s because I am. I am also sad, afraid, and hurting. I think many of us are feeling these with extra intensity lately.

I often share my thoughts but I don’t often share my feelings. I’ve never found it particularly helpful, and besides, I’m often told I feel the “wrong” things anyway, for the wrong people, while proposing the wrong solutions. Like, I don’t know, living in reality rather than a spirit realm. Looking at what’s physically in front of us rather than through an unprovable lens of myth. Caring more about people than imagined deities.

I know I’m supposed to say that I respect everyone’s right to practice their faith. But I don’t. Look at what faith is doing to us. I know I’m supposed to be spiritual but not religious. Call it what you want—it’s the same damn thing to me. There is no difference between saying, “God work in mysterious ways,” and, “We’re all just facets of Source expressing itself.” Both turn my stomach with their heartlessness.

I know I’m supposed to agree that religious freedom includes irreligious freedom. I don’t observe this to be true. I know I’m supposed to respect people’s right to believe what they wish, yet what do we do when these beliefs infringe on others and on us, and in devastating, physical, all-too-real ways? Turn yet again to faith? Spew more spiritual beliefs?

I’ve learned to live with my confusion. I’ve learned most people cannot help their spirituality—that their capacity for faith may, in fact, be neurologically physical. Perhaps even genetic. And so I just watch our human cycles with sardonic surrender. Angry acceptance. Tender grief. Useless love. I’ve chosen to laugh where I can, to live fully while I am able, and to practice my own version of physical compassion and practical empathy.

I am so tired of faking tolerance for other people’s comfort. Hiding my joy because others are feeling pain. Suppressing my sexuality because others cannot free theirs. Disguising my disgust because others cannot handle how my truth punctures their bubble of comforting lies. Holding back my anger so as not to cause offense. Freezing and fawning and fucking faking just so other people won’t be offended and retaliate. 

But I keep doing these because grace is value I hold dear. Integrity and compassion are values I esteem higher than the value of my anger. Sometimes the very best I can do is stay silent.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Don’t assume the people you want to speak will say what you expect to hear. Don’t pressure people into making a public statement you demand when they may, in fact, say the opposite of what you hope. Why should they put out their necks for your expectations? Maybe their silence, like mine, is the most compassionate thing they can summon in an effort not to make the problem worse. And you damn them for appearing indifferent.

Sometimes, like now, I choose to share how I really feel because I don’t see anybody else saying it and I wonder, Am I all alone..? Yet I know I’m not. There just aren’t many voices voicing this perspective—and with good reason, because we know how alienating it can be, and how hurtful it can land on those who won’t understand. But don’t we secularists deserve to see each other, too? Representation matters, right?

I will leave no part of me in this sordid, hideous, senseless world. I will not contribute to suffering by making more people have to suffer, and cause suffering to others.

“But their love could also help others feel love.”

No one would need to feel love if they didn’t exist in the first place. Love, to me, is nonexistence. An absence of consciousness. The beauty of nothing at all.

I know many find my worldview disturbing. Mentally ill. Dangerous, even. That’s how I find their worldview. The optimists, the faithful, the spiritual… They all get to share their worldview with accolades and tolerance and respect. But the nihilists, the faithless, and the ones who know we are merely animals, as vicious and depraved as we are brilliant and kind… We get cast out, vilified, and feared rather than embraced.

I think we all cope the best we can. I think we’re all a blip of existence on a watery molten rock that will be destroyed someday, by some asteroid or meteor shower or the inevitable death of the sun. Let the people have their fantasies, I tell myself. Focus on your own joy, since it’s too late for your own existence and you are already here. Let them have their hope and their faith. Find and nurture love that is real to you. Pass your time as meaningfully as you can. Take comfort in knowing that one day, despite everyone’s beliefs and non-beliefs, this will all finally be over. And just try to share good meals, invigorating conversations, and breathtaking scenery wherever you can in the meantime.

I am reminding myself of Ecclesiastes. It’s all just smoke and spitting into the wind, the quester said.

Preach, bro. *Passes blunt.*

How can you possibly see God in any of this? How can you possibly believe in an all-loving being when you look at these pictures? How can you, with any shred of a conscience, believe in karma? Or that this happened for a reason? Or that God is holding us all in his perfect fucking hands?

Fuck your faith.

Keep telling yourself what you need to. I’ll keep telling myself what I need to, and that is this: We are all just smoke, and spitting into the wind.

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I’m Alice Greczyn, an author, speaker, and co-host of Ideas Digest, a debate podcast. This newsletter is free because I think helpful information should be free as much as possible. Please subscribe, and if you’d like to donate to my costs (news subscriptions, image licensing, audio recording, etc.), I’d surely appreciate it. Thank you.