God is a comic playing to an audience that's afraid to laugh. (Voltaire)

Or, Soapbox Part 2

This is not so much a soapbox as a backstory. The character of Shore spews out a lot of strange ideas. Some of them are innocuous, such as speculations about bending space and time. I think we'd all like to bend space and time on occasion. However, Shore also pontificates extensively about the inconsistencies of religion. Because Shore is a slightly crazed character, he can get away with saying some pretty outrageous things. They're not intended as MESSAGES. (that's my disclaimer, in case anyone gets really pissed at me for offending their religion. Let me just say I hope I have offended no one, or at least everyone equally.) Rather, they are intended as invitations for further reflection.

Shore's religious ruminations express the bulk of my life's religious experience thus far. It's been kind of a long, strange trip. Here's the chronology, as brief as I can make it:

1. I was brought up Jewish - in particular Sephardim, which are the descendants of Spanish Jews who were kicked out of Spain during the Spanish Inquisition. ("Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!") Many of them were given refuge, amazingly, by Islamic Turkey. It was near Constantinople (later known as Istanbul) that the Sephardic Jews built a large homogeneous community. All four of my grandparents left Turkey in the early 1900's and settled in Massachusetts and Brooklyn. There my parents were born, raised, and married.

We were not members of any Jewish synagogue, so my exposure to Jewish custom was limited to occasional temple visits, usually involving funerals and mourning. However, I was raised in the culture of Jewish food, Hannukah, and language smatterings of Yiddish, Ladino Spanish, and Turkish. And oh yes - guilt and foreboding. I remember being in the early stages of my first pregnancy, and wanting to start furnishing the nursery ... And my mother explaining to me that it was bad luck to start counting your chickens before they hatched (in this case literally and figuratively), because it invited the jealousy of the "evil eye". Even though I was a college graduate with a B.S. in math-computer science from UCLA, I took this admonition to heart. We did not furnish the nursery until one week before my due date, and even then, I felt like I was tempting fate.

2. When I was 19, I fell in love with a young man who had been a rather wild teenager, but was conspicuously tempered when he converted to Mormonism. He introduced me to the LDS missionaries, and I really enjoyed the attention of the weekly lessons. I liked the color illustrations they used to show families in the "before life" and "after life". They looked like the illustrations from the Dick & Jane books I learned to read from. Joseph Smith's search for the "one true religion" seemed entirely reasonable. And the fact that my LDS boyfriend REALLY wanted me to convert to Mormonism - and I REALLY wanted to get married - added to the allure. Before you know it, I was "Sister Savy". And soon thereafter, I got my engagement ring.

But!! Mormon Fiance' changed his mind. He decided he wanted to go on a two year mission to parts of the world unknown. I was heartbroken. The wedding was off - for two years, anyway. At that time I had just completed two years of community college and it was time to transfer somewhere. There was only one place I could go lick my wounds and immerse myself in the culture that would daily reassure me of my fiance's wisdom, selflessness, and commitment - Brigham Young University, Utah.

Part of B.Y.U.'s graduation requirement is a lot of religion classes - religious history, religious philosophy, etc.. One each semester. It was there that I learned a lot about both the Book of Mormon and the Old Testament. However, I got a little weirded out when my "Mormonism and Modern Science" instructor mentioned the part about becoming a god and creating your own world someday. I didn't remember this from any of the missionary's lessons. I couldn't even decide on a major - how was I going to create my own world someday?

Meanwhile, fiance' promptly decided, the second he dropped me off in Utah and drove home to California, that he didn't want to go on a mission. Nor did he want to get married. I didn't like the cold weather in Utah - or the crazed virgins in my dorm - so I came home after one semester and transferred to UCLA. I eventually married Noncommital Fiance', but that's another story about Complete Lack of Self-Esteem, and this is supposed to be a story about Religion.

3. When I was at UCLA, I took as part of my breadth requirements a class called 'Philosophy of Science'. It was excrutiatingly boring. Unlike math and computer science classes, this was a class in which students were encouraged to discuss and give opinions. I hate listening to other people discuss subjective things. However there was another student who sat next to me every day. He was always eating M&M's, and one day he noticed how I was eyeing those M&M's the way E.T. eyed Reese's Pieces. He offered me some of those M&M's, and a lifetime friendship was born. (yeah, I'm easy.) We started to chat informally during class, walking out after class, and soon, we were having lunches together. Brian was fascinated with the fact that I was a Mormon. He was a Catholic who had just spent time living in a friary - he's been a friar more times than I can count - and he was the first person to really ask me thought-provoking questions about my religion. His questions caused me to dig deeper into my own knowledge of Mormonism - and I was often confused and doubtful about the answers.

4. Fast forward through the next two or three years. I am now married to the Reluctant Fiance' (also named Brian), our daughter is born and baptized in the Mormon church, and I become a Sunday School teacher to 6-year-olds. One day someone gives us a copy of "The God Makers: A Shocking Expose of What the Mormon Church Really Believes." I read it, realized what a doofus I'd been, and stopped going to church. I reverted to the religion most familiar to me, Judaism.

Brian's retreat from Mormonism was longer - he sort of eventually fizzled out. Like our marriage.

5. My first job out of college was as a computer programmer. One day my Catholic friend Brian called to tell me that he was going to be teaching Biology at the Catholic high school. I was immediately jealous. I wanted to be a teacher too, but I didn't have a credential! No problem, Brian said. You don't need a credential to teach in private school. And a few weeks later, I was teaching Trigonometry and Basic Programming to Catholic High School students. That year I learned quite a bit more about the Catholic religion - including the fact that it was better to put on the job application that I was Mormon and not Jewish.

I also learned just a few years earlier that my birth father was French-Irish Catholic, and my birth mother was Russian-Jewish. So technically, I was sort of Catholic. Maybe I should have put that on the job application, or brought it up when they decided to 'let me go' at the end of the year.

However, I relate far more to the religion I was brought up in - Sephardic Judaism. Even though I'm whiter than white, I felt my roots lie in Turkey and Spain. And I still do.

6. I married Craig in 2000. Craig is an avid Atheist. I don't even know if that should be capitalized. I didn't care what he was, the important thing was that he didn't care what I was. Craig was a rare 45-year-old in that he had no preconceived notions of (or biases against) Jews. I had to patiently explain that if a name ends in "stein" or "berg", it's probably Jewish. That we're cheap. That we generally have wavy hair, olive skin, and big noses. So he can thank me for all his new stereotypes.

Craig has been writing a book over the last year called 'The Religion Virus'. I think you can tell from the title what the book is about. It's an extremely intelligent, enlightening book, and you should read it. So, you can imagine what many of our conversations have been about the last year ... how religious ideas have evolved over human history according to Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' schema. Most religious beliefs about God have gained prominence not necessarily because they are true, but because they overpower and eliminate competing beliefs.

I believe most of what Craig has written, but not all of it. I do believe in God. Why? As Lola says in my screenplay, "Because the thought of never seeing someone again is unbearable." I'm sure there are other reasons for God's existence, but that's the most important one to me ... I need God to be real.