✨ I Believe in the Stars More Than I Believe in God
“I believe in the stars more than I believe in God. If anything, the stars are God, and they write the universe.”
Written by Rebecca M. Bell
Catholic Roots, Crooked Questions
I grew up Catholic, the kind of childhood where prayers were memorized like multiplication tables, and faith wasn’t so much questioned as recited. God was supposed to live in the wafer, the incense, the hands folded properly on the pew. I was told the heavens declared His glory, but when I looked up at night, all I saw were a few scattered dots, drowned out by city lights. The rituals were tidy. The sky was not.
The Whitman Effect
Then came college, and with it the kind of double exposure that can shatter and rebuild your worldview. I was sitting in American Literature to 1860 with Walt Whitman on my desk and Introduction to Philosophy in my backpack. Whitman sang the body electric, Emerson dared to call nature itself divine, and suddenly the rigid God of my childhood looked suspiciously small.
Whitman once wrote, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” Pantheism gave me permission to contain multitudes too—questions, doubts, wonder—and to call all of them holy.
The First Real Night Sky
The stars became my scripture the night a boy drove me to the top of a mountain in Park City, Utah. We parked, got out, and the darkness swallowed us until our eyes adjusted. Then the sky unfolded: unfiltered, unpolluted, every pinprick of light stitched into the Milky Way. I had never truly seen the night sky until then. It was overwhelming, almost violent in its beauty, as if God had left His diary unlocked above us. That night rewrote me.
My Birth Chart, My Blueprint
Later, when I stumbled into astrology, people laughed. They scoffed at horoscopes like they were fortune cookies for the gullible. But to me, digging into my birth chart felt like archeology of the self. It didn’t predict the lottery; it explained the bones of my being. It was less about whether Mercury made me clumsy and more about discovering how the universe had wired me from the start.
The chart wasn’t destiny, it was blueprint. It didn’t trap me, it named me.
The Zodiac as Oldest Poetry
I think about how many people dismiss the zodiac with a wave of the hand, as if the stars themselves aren’t one of the most sublime features of the cosmos. Whether or not you care about your rising sign, the zodiac is humanity’s oldest poetry. Humans mapped their fears and hopes into constellations long before scripture was bound in leather.
To mock it entirely is to mock the fact that we are stardust trying to read itself.
Pantheism, Plain and Unapologetic
Pantheism isn’t mystical fluff to me. It’s practical recognition: the same carbon forged in stars is now in my blood. God isn’t somewhere “out there.” God is everywhere—inside atoms, in rivers, in lungs, in grief and in laughter.
If churches have stained glass, then the universe has starlight.
Closing the Loop
And so I return to my thesis. I believe in the stars more than I believe in God, because the stars are God. They write the universe in matter and myth, in silence and in story. When I look up at them, I’m not looking for answers.
I’m reading the scripture that was always there, waiting.
Under the same sky,
—Rebecca M. Bell
www.rmbellwrites.com
PS: If the stars have ever spoken to you louder than scripture, leave me a note in the comments—I’d love to know what they said.
Filed under: spirituality, philosophy, cosmos, pantheism
Your prose is stunning.
This is beautiful. I'm reading a few books about pantheism and it's really speaking to me. So open, like you say.