I think everyone goes through a religious crisis of some sort, kind of like puberty. It may not be a huge one, as a professor of mine wasn't. He was a preacher's kid and he spent a couple of weeks during his 17Th year ascertaining that yes, Christianity did not make any sense and dropped religion completely. Never looked back. Mine was huge. I'm more of a follower than a leader, so breaking from the pack was kind of traumatic; particularly if you add in the sheer terror of hell that most of us the US are raised with.

When I was 15, everyone in my social studies class was assigned to write a report on a religion that he or she did not belong to and then give a presentation on the basic doctrine, its history, who believed in it, and where it was generally located. The only atheist in class was peeved because he got stuck with Christianity. The goal was to look at it academically, not to convert anyone. I picked Islam because the image in the text book had a spider web and I thought that was cool. I really liked learning about Islam and doing some comparison and contrast between what Muslims believed and Christians. Our textbook called them Mohammedans, but the library books said that they hated to be called that. I told my surrogate-grandfather, one of the founding elders of our church, how much I liked doing the research and that I was planning on reading about other religions. He told me that I shouldn't until I was a little older and had a mentor in the church to keep the devil from tempting me astray. It sounded perfectly reasonable then, but later?

I was 29 when I asked, "Why am I a Christian?" It was about six months prior to 9/11 and Saddam Hussein's face was all over the news. It occurred to me to ask, "Why am I not a Muslim?" The Christian answer is that 1) because I am saved and 2) because I know the truth.

I did know the truth and it sucked to admit it. I was a Christian because I was raised to be one. If I had been born in Baghdad, I would be Muslim. If I had been born in Mombai, I would be Hindu. Tianjin: Tao. Tibet: Buddhist. My father had officially swapped to atheism two days after he'd left his mom and dad for college. I thought about just going that route, but then the question comes, "Why atheism?" And the answer to that is simply because it's easier to deny the Christian god than to comparison shop for religion. I think, at least for me, it would have been an emotionally easier route to just deny that god exists (and therefore remove my terror of going to hell) than to figure out what I believe to be true about the universe based on my experience in life and then to see if a religion fits. Maybe it's the follower in me. I want a pack. In the end, I vetoed simply abandoning religion because atheism is similar to religion in that it's a belief system taken on faith. Yes, it's skeptical and logical, but it whines about requiring proof to believe in religious hoodoo; in the end, it's still a philosophy that can't be verified. It's like a congenitally blind man denying that color exists because you can't prove to him that it does. If I have to take a belief system on faith, picking one as a reaction to the first is senseless.

Took a few years, but I did find a religion that fits. I was actually kind of shocked because my view of defining reality requires the scientific method and I believe that nothing can "save" me except myself. What religion would have a deity that would embrace these two notions? None, actually. Deities prefer to define reality, regardless of evidence to the contrary, and they also prefer to sit in the place where your fate and salvation is up to them. Zen, though, has no deities. Zen says that if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet the Patriarch, kill the Patriarch. If you meet the Teacher, kill the Teacher. Why? The only way to Nirvana (which doesn't require you to die or ascend to get there) is through your own experience and your own efforts.