Religion

My local public library was kind enough to get me a copy of the 1971 book-length interview with Jean-Pierre Melville, Melville on Melville, which is quite rare and fetching a pretty penny these days. Melville died just two years after the book was published in French and in English, and had only one film left left to make, so we are very lucky to have this text. It is full of wise observations, but I was especially struck by this comment in the chapter on Leon Morin, Pretre:

Faith is something that eludes me because I can't conceive of believing in something that doesn't exist. I don't understand how people can believe in God any more than in Father Christmas. Why do people tell children that Father Christmas doesn't exist, and never tell adults that God doesn't exist? They seem to let this other legendary character go on for ever. To me they are two brothers, God and Father Christmas. They exist only in the minds of children and child-adults. Nevertheless, I do know some very intelligent men who believe in God, so I really can't go so far as to say that people who believe in God are fools. All the same it's amazing. It's quite beyond me.

That sums up my position exactly. I don't get it (as, apparently, I don't get many things). When people talk to me about their "personal relationship with Jesus," it's as if a child was talking to me about their imaginary friend. I understand Melville's willed politeness about believers, because one doesn't wish to be a jerk, but still...

In my failed relationship, my partner was very enthusiastic about his church because of its "open and affirming" attitude toward gays. It is indeed a nice liberal congregation, and I became a member despite personal misgivings about the intellectual hypocrisy involved (in relationships, one does the darndest things!). The church was good for me socially, and gave me access to some lovely people I might otherwise never have known (although I steered around issues of faith, believe me); but when the relationship ended, so did my participation in the church. It would have felt unforgivably hypocritical to sustain a pretence of belief without even the huge fact of a "life partnership" to excuse the imposture.

My several years of active membership in this church and exposure to varying intensities of belief gave me not a shred of insight into how intelligent people could seriously entertain the notions that Christianity embodies -- at least none beyond whatever I had already learned from reading William James, and my long-held intuition that people are awfully attached to the circumstances of their childhoods, religion included.