First Graduate

The Rules of Religion, and Why The Next One Just Might Be a Game
by First Graduate College Student Patricia Hernandez
(originally printed in Kotaku.com on 2/8/12)

The things that make us reconsider who we are and what we believe in are often bizarre, random, coincidental; sometimes completely unremarkable save for the sudden realization that concusses you.
Lately, things I've been reading and playing have coalesced into a divine cognizance for me. I've been reconsidering my faith. 

First, some context. My family may have not had an education past elementary school, or had something to eat every day while growing up, but they've always, always had religion. My father is a pastor, following in the footsteps of my grandpa, who gives service in a church that he built with his own hands. My grandma instilled the fear of an all-seeing lord upon my aunts and uncles through castigation - atonement for missteps was paid through the reading of bible passages while kneeling, or ‘creative' punishments based on bible stories, if not flagellation itself. It was that same grandma who, infuriated with a city girl who didn't know what to do with herself without TV and video games in rural El Salvador, made me read the entirety of the bible when I was 10.

"Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty."

I don't remember all of what I read, but I recall the sense of disquietude, the sense of discomfort very well. I knew, even then, that people like those in my family desperately needed something to believe in—religious belief seems to be endemic to poor, downtrodden communities like those in El Triunfo, El Salvador—but it was beyond me why they would elect to believe in something like this. A vengeful, jealous god who doled out punishments like hissy fits was the entity who oversaw mankind? Religion was supposed to be guiding principles under which to live life, to be a better human being, but there was an underlying ugliness that the bible revealed to me that was difficult to reconcile with the morals it was supposed to promote.

"Grandma, if God asked you to kill me to prove your love for him, like with Isaac and Abraham, would you do it?"
"In a heartbeat"
"Really?"
She stares at me.
"But why would I need to die to prove your love? Why does God DO things like that, ask such awful things of the people in the bible? Why do so many terrible things happen to people? Why?"
Silence.

Eleven years later, I can't quite describe the anxiety I feel when watching the intro of The Binding of Isaac.

My mother was always the wild child of the family. She was, for instance, the first in an entire village who dared to leave El Salvador for the land of the free. Before that, though, she ran away from home as a teen to work in the capital - meaning she didn't quite undergo the full extent of religious indoctrination in my family. My mother is still religious, she's just very 'fluid' about what she practices. A sampling of the hodgepodge she operates under: she believes in a Christian god, but she also gives special prayers to an entity called Death, and she gives offerings to a little statue of Buddha. This cacophony of religious entities and beliefs muddled together coupled with my traumatic experience with the bible meant that growing up I didn't see myself as a person of faith.

Right now that's changing. It all started with Decreation, a collection of writings by Anne Carson, a Canadian poet and essayist, about coming undone. The book is headlined by different three women—Sappho, an ancient Greek poet, Marguerite Porete, a French mystic, and Simone Weil, a French philosopher—who want to love God as fully as they can. So fully, so completely, that these women seek erasure—they see their existence as a hindrance. Religion, to them, is a method of de-centering oneself, a way of purifying and clearing the self such that only God and love itself can exist.

"She did not want to be a woman. She wanted to disappear."

I became obsessed with what, exactly, drew people to religion, what it took to create a captivating pull, or an interesting narrative that one might want to affiliate with.

These women are completely, completely insane, to be sure (though the erasure of the self brings to mind the idea of ‘immersion' in games, and some even argue that immersion in gaming is death) , but there's something weirdly poetic to it, too. These women seek ecstasy. The word ‘ecstasy' comes from ‘ekstasis', which means ‘standing outside oneself' and this is typically a condition prescribed by the Greeks to the crazy, the fervent, the brilliant, to lovers. Doesn't the idea of ‘Decreation' sound a bit romantic, when put that way? The clincher, the moment in which I knew that Anne Carson had seduced me with her dubious ideas, was the following quote.

"Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty."

A week later, a realization washes over me: I wanted to feel beside myself, I wanted to be poor. I wanted to feel ecstasy. I wanted something beautiful, romantic. I wanted love. Most of all, I wanted to come to an understanding regarding faith, what draws people to it and where it fits in my life. So I picked up my DS and set out to finish Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor.

Continue reading Patricia's full article on Kotaku.com.