At a coffee shop called East of Java on Drew Street in Clearwater, Florida, a Cuban friend of mine discussed his new calling as an ordained minister. So I became an ordained minister as well. And so did a few others at the coffee shop.

Yes, I'm completely serious. In the State of Florida, I can actually perform marriages. Really. I even paid $10 more and got the title of Guru, though I never did get that paperwork. What am I talking about? The Universal Life Church.

The pretext of all of this revolved around discussion of philosophy, religion, people and religion all over extremely large doses of caffeine. And so we called East of Java our Church, and we had mock aspirations that seemed real enough at the time. We would start a Church to deal with the disillusioned that we encountered every day. It was an idea that just kept growing no matter what we did. We decided that we were Nowherians. After all, [w:Scientology] pretty much controlled Clearwater, Florida. In fact, it still does. But I digress.

We sat down the first night and hammered out our dogma. The poor barrista wasn't sure how serious we were - we were mocking the whole thing as we did it, but our intentions were very clearly sincere. Everything we said, we meant - but there was an odd humor about the whole thing.

There were no burning bushes. There were no floods. We did not fast in the desert. We did not have any of these momentous things - though we did have one 'sign'. Someone had broken into an apartment of one of our fold and... only stole the frozen pizzas, leaving all the electronics. Obviously, this was a sign that we should try to feed the hungry whenever we could if only so that we could keep our own frozen pizzas safe. { Read more }

This writing started off in a bookstore in Gulf City, Trinidad where I had picked up a copy of The God Delusion. The young woman there who is cashing me out looks at me and says, "I never thought you were a Richard Dawkins fan?"

No judgement. It just didn't compute for her. So I told her to turn to page 42-43 of the book (it's a silver cover edition). When I picked up the book I thought, 'this could be interesting.' In leafing through it, I had come across this quote of Douglas Adams and that tipped me over to the purchase. Not that Douglas Adams said it, or that it was what was said. No, it was that I agreed with what he said from the center of my being¹.

So I responded to the young lady that she should open the book to page 42-43 and read the quote by Douglas Adams. She stared at me as if I had a second head, probably because she'd never had someone suggest she look in a book on a specific page for something a specific person wrote². After a stunned pause and, for some reason, a swallow, she dutifully opened the book and read what Douglas Adams was quoted as saying. And she said, "You know, that makes sense."

And I said, "That's why I'm buying the book." { Read more }

continued from here, started here

In a move hastened by being a young man in want of a better situation, as subjective as 'better' is and was, I left Trinidad and Tobago and dived into Irving, Texas. The college application to DeVry Institute of Technology asked for my religion, and I remembered wondering about that. As I recall, the cop-out was "Other". So I used that. This was to become my standard response to race and religion. "Other". And when they asked for an explanation I wrote in, "None of the above".

The first few years back in the United States were almost completely clean of religion, though there were some interesting points. One friend claimed to be an atheist but it was apparent that he was a poorly adjusted Christian.... living in a Christian dominated society. The parents of some friends who were around sometimes queried me on religion and I came up with some very creative answers - but most of the answers were answers of conformity rather than answers.

A few incidents stand out. One was where someone in one of my classes started thumping his Bible. So in a very serious way, I asked him if in his discussions with God that he could mention the dumpster in our living area (an apartment complex) that was overflowing. Maybe God could take care of it since DeVry administration and the apartment complex seemed powerless in dealing with this chronic problem.

That very night, as luck would have it, the dumpster appeared to spontaneously combust. Well, really, no one knew whether it had combusted. My roommate and I watched the fire department show up. The next day, I told the Christian fellow that God had certainly taken care of that dumpster. He didn't know what to say. I laughed, and I don't think we ever spoke again. { Read more }

(continued)

By the time I was beginning to figure out that there were some pretty big loopholes in the insular Jehovah's Witness fold at the age of 9, I was transplanted into Hinduism in Trinidad and Tobago.

Talk about a switch. The Jehovah's Witness folk were pretty big on bashing idolatry, and here I was suddenly dumped into a religion that appeared to do much the same. My father had the presence of mind not to have a hand in this; he let his eldest brother take me to the Mandir on Sundays where my cousins went to Sunday School. There were no options, so I sat around with about the same amount of interest that I wore a bow-tie in the other world of the Jehovah's Witnesses.

This, of course, caused problems.

After a few months of this torture - a torture of going from one insular religion to what appeared to be another - I think everyone involved figured out that no good could come from my going to the Mandir because, for some reason, it stopped. Instead, my father and I would go with a group of his friends to the beach where I was in charge of mixing the drinks. This was a pleasant change. But the questions from going to the Mandir were still there. Things like, "Why are there so many Gods and Goddesses?", "Why do the services in a foreign tongue (Hindi) when I can't understand a word of it?", "What's this about not eating beef?", and so on. My father, in his infinite wisdom, didn't talk to me about these things.

I suppose that it didn't help that everywhere I went in Trinidad and Tobago, I wasn't really thought of as 'Indian'. Anything I did wrong was attributed to being half white, anything I did right was attributed to my being half Indian. I would later wear this quote of Einstein on my sleeve: { Read more }