Faith and Star Wars

**If religion is one of your "hot-button issues", I invite you to stay, but will certainly understand if you choose not to read further. I welcome comments!

I have never been an incredibly religious person. I grew up mostly Catholic but was born, and can't remember being, Baptist, and in middle school I started going to a Presbyterian church; but I have never identified closely with any particular sect. In high school I went through a phase where I was really into Christian rock, but that was about as deep as I got.

For a long time I was just kind of told that there was a God, that He was good and He cared about me, and all those other Sunday school cliches, and I accepted it without question. It didn't really do much to govern my life. I mean, Catholic school kids were just as bad as public school kids, only they got routine forgiveness checks. So even in a school where we started every morning with a prayer (and when we got a new principal, an assembly in the hall to hold hands and sing), God wasn't really as present as everyone tells you He is supposed to be. He just kind of floated in the background, a forgotten fact, but a fact nonetheless, at least to us kids.

I accepted it without question, up to a point in junior year when "some shit went down", as the kids say, and I went through what is routinely termed "a crisis of faith". I don't know that it was much of a crisis, but I asked all the usual questions:

Is there a God?
If there is, why does He let crappy things happen to me?
If God cares about everyone, why does everyone get hurt?
Does he get so caught up in worrying about other people's problems that He has to let some people slip through the cracks?

and one of my own:

Am I happy believing that God exists?

Because that seemed to be the biggest thing, to me. Everyone I knew who believed in God seemed to be really happy about it all the time. It made them more sure of themselves, and they emanated this happy glow when they thought about God, or talked about God. They seemed to know exactly what they were doing, and if they didn't, God would handle it. I'd never felt like that. And there were other people, who I didn't know so well, who I'd really only heard about, who were always angry, and thought that God hated everyone, and were always citing "the wrath of God". Believing in God seemed to only make these people really angry, and that just didn't hold with what I thought I knew, or felt, about God.

Whether they were happy or angry, they were stirred up about it. They were emotional; it rocked them. I never felt rocked. So maybe, by the transitive property or something, I didn't really believe in God.

I went to camp that summer feeling annoyed and disappointed, and my answer ended up finding me, in the form of my favorite camp counselor, David (total coincidence, not the same David). I told him I wasn't sure what to believe in anymore, and that I felt like kind of a faker at services, and he looked at me and said, very simply, "You don't have to believe any of this, you know. You can believe whatever you want, as long as it makes you happy and as long as it makes you a better person."

I left feeling lighter and happier. To this day, it is the best advice I have ever gotten about religion or faith or God.

Here's what I believe, at 22 and having dealt with, well, a lot of things:
1) I believe that there is a God.
2) I believe that it is more important to be a good person, or a happy person, than a godly one or even a remotely religious one; I believe that it is more important to do what is right by your own personal standards than to align yourself with any sort of side or sect or faction.
3) I believe that you should be tolerant and respectful of everyone.

My version of God, because I think everyone who thinks of God thinks of Him differently, is a lot like the Force (or that midichlorian biology BS, if you saw Phantom Menace first); it exists in everyone, if only even a tiny bit.

My views on religion, which are what I really wanted to focus on here, are related to that analogy:
Some people don't believe in the Force. Some do. Jedi and Sith are two sides of the same coin; the Force is strong in both of them and they are both given the same opportunities to use it, yet one turns out good and one turns out evil. It manifests in different ways depending on the person who uses it.

I'm not fantastic at dealing in theology (I am quite acquainted with the Bible, but somehow I never feel all that qualified to use it; not to mention, it always bothers me when people cite things rather than tell you what they're actually getting at), so I'll use another analogy here.

A few years ago, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons, my mom was worried. Her only experience with D&D was when my dad and his friends played it, and they got way too into it, to where it [at least looked like it] bordered on obsession.. My mom thought it was some sort of cult or Satan-worship thing, because her only point of reference wasn't a very good one. (My aunt and uncle, for the same exact reason, worried about Kirsten playing.) I talked to Mom about it, and told her it was basically just a bunch of friends sitting around a table to roll dice and eat chips (not to mention, Al's dad would be home the whole time, geez Mom), but she still worried, and didn't really understand, until we finally had a session at my house and she got to see it firsthand.

After that session I sat her down and kind of talked her through the game, and she got to see how it really worked, and why I had so much fun with it. I explained to her that D&D (like video games, or literature, or faith or religion) wasn't an inherently bad thing; it just depended on who was playing it and how they played it. It should be good, and it should be fun, but some people take it too far.

In other words, my whole piece here boils down to a very simple philosophy when it comes to religion: Hate the player, not the game.