For me, an incident …if an “incident” is allowed to take place over a 6 month period.
In Fall 1979 I was having a pair of simultaneous crises, one pertaining to my personal life & sexual identity, the other having to do with dismay about the political-social trajectory of the culture surrounding me between, say, 1970 and the current time. The kind of crises that involved massively emotional angst-y moments full of internal screechings, desperately wanting to know the answers but terrified that I wouldn’t like them very much if I did…y’all probably know the drill.
At any rate, the kind of stuff that one would pray to God about if there were a God unto whom to pray.
I wasn’t firmly of the belief that there was no God, but I was neither able nor willing to proceed on the unfounded assumption that there was one; on the other hand, in that state of being, the absence of God was kind of leaving a God-shaped hole, if that makes any sense. Didn’t have to be a greybeard, a human-shaped, any of that, but there was a heartfelt wish, if you will, that behind the human feelings about “how things ought to be”, both for myself and for society, existed something pertaining to those feelings.
I’m not sure I’m explaining that part well, but maybe it would help if I elaborated by describing its anthithesis, the alternative horror that I was contemplating: that all visions of a world both kinder and less coercive, a world in which people cooperated to make each other happy far more and competed to defeat each other far less, were
• not serving any purpose, human, personal, evolutionary, or otherwise; they were “just there”, stupid feelings existing for no reason; and
• weren’t in any shape way fashion or form hooked up to any trajectory of possibility; that life was not like that, we were not like that, existence in the broad sweep of its entirely was simply not like that; and
• that the feeling of those feelings, and the valuing thereof, was not only of no value but was actually detrimental to the pursuit of personal success on any relevant scale, including personal happiness, fulfilling relationships, etc, etc, as well as financial and political gain and power.
So I prayed, with great intensity and desperation to this God Who Probably Didn’t Exist, and I explained that I’d heard all the charismatic Christian stuff about how I should invite the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart as my personal Lord and Savior, but that I had no idea what the fuck that meant, and I needed to either understand this stuff or else understand why and how I didn’t have to understand it, quite aside from the fact that the Christian version was just one description to which I’d been well-exposed as a consequence of where I lived. And I went over the things I was fervently concerned about, my issues, and then while I was on the subject went back to the whole God thing, and also the other problems of the world, a world which looked distinctively UN-saved to me, and said “If you’re there, you’re kind of supposed to care, do things, send someone down, however you do it, this is all a mess for me but not just me everyone else. Now are you out there? If you’re not then you ought to be, but I can’t just ‘believe’, I need to know, I need to understand”.
That went on for hours on end while I paced around. Then, I dunno, it was like something very subtle happened… I went from all that intensity and total lack of satisfaction and desperate need to know to a tentatively relaxed (albeit exhausted) state and a sense that I should go inside, try to get some sleep and just…wait.
And everything important in my life just kind of hung in stasis like that for several days, maybe more than a week.
Then I started waking up in the middle of the night with a clear idea about something… sexuality, or personality, or how personality traits can be political, and with significant excitement I jotted them down. Would wake up the next morning, 9/10 expecting to find interesting insightful stuff like “higgamus hoggamus” and instead would read and re-read what I’d written and it made sense…
Some of it was specific to the “God questions” I’d asked. Other things I wrote were more tied up in the personal and sexual questions, or with politics and society. Most fascinatingly, they were all tied together. They were relevant to each other.
Now, I was a music major, from a hard-sciences town (Los Alamos NM) and had had scant education in social studies apart from the usual history one gets in mainstream high school. So I had to invent words and phrases for lots of notions and concepts for which terms already existed but I didn’t know it then. And I did my writing on whatever paper I could find, which was often the back side of xeroxed materials distributed in the courses I was taking. But I thought that after awhile it made such compellingly good sense, what I was saying, and it wasn’t in any fashion a repeat of anything I was aware of ever having been said — lots of overlap, lots of integration with existing ideas at the edges and so on, but as a whole it formed its own worldview. Including the theology, which was also neither Christian nor specifically anything else.
Obviously (said I to myself) I was desperate for answers and wanted very very badly for there to be answers. That this stuff is now in my head does not mean that there is a God, nor does it mean that these ideas are any good. They could cease making sense tomorrow. If I start believing that I’ve received a direct revelation from God and that all this stuff is, you know, The Infallible Word of God as Revealed to His Newly Anointed Prophet AHunter3, I’m going to be way far from sufficiently skeptical about this shit. But it looks good, it sure looks good, the world makes sense, my life makes sense, and I feel like I understand everything I prayed for answers about.
Nothing quite that vivid since then, but the content jotted down (later typed out in little notes, then expanded into longer papers, & finally in college utilized for term papers and thesis and so forth) is still very much the backbone of my worldview.
I consider myself to be open-minded, required by my own understandings to be skeptical of those very understandings (all part of the answers I received about religion) and aware of my own non-infallibility, but within those parameters I’m a consistent true believer and faithful to my own religion.