20. Contemplating one's navel
So a while ago, h_westenra posed a question in comment about faith, and what I believe -- was I agnostic or skeptic, specifically, but I have a feeling she was asking about the whole range of possibility.
I was raised with the rather typical Midwesterner's Protestant sensibility. I sometimes think the pot luck hotdish is more sacrament than the wafer and wine, the closer you get to the Great Lakes. Thankfully, I think, I had the benefit of wide exposure to other ideas and other cultures at an early age. Anywhere my dad's job in the State Department took us, we went. Sometimes that leads to people closing in, clinging to what they know all the harder. In my case? I ended up questioning.
I'm certainly not an agnostic or a skeptic, these days. But I'm not a devout anything, either, Christian or otherwise. I suppose, if I had to give it a label, that humanist comes closest.
I do believe in a god. Hell, sometimes I believe in gods; the universe certainly seems complicated enough to me that there could be more than one voice out there calling shots at one time or another.
I don't believe in religion. I know it's terribly "in" to diss organized religion these days, but I'm not trying to. For my personal take on the mess, though, I don't think any one book has it right...or if they did have it right, I think centuries of editing and retranslation have rendered the messages cloudy at best. Especially when it comes to matters of doctrine, and not just matters of faith. It's hard to argue against Christ having said "love thy neighbor", but just what the Holy Trinity really thinks about the place of the Papacy? Debatable.
Beyond all that, though, I'm personally of the opinion that God, or Gods? Have better things to do with their time than listen to us offering worship. I've seen some people argue that it's us who need the worship, but that really always felt very circular to me. It could just be that, in some ways, I'm inherently just very internal about some things. Faith, more than most things, is a matter for me to be worried about. No one else should be that concerned with the state of my soul, after all.
I don't believe in guardian angels. I don't believe so much that the Powers that Be are paying much attention to us at all, except in the big picture sort of way, now that they've set the world in motion. What is one human life in the universe?
But I believe in the inherent goodness of people, as a whole. We may be selfishly motivated a lot of the time, we may be afraid and scared, or angry and lashing out, but in the end...we're also responsible for a lot of what is good in the world. Sure, we're responsible for a lot of the bad too, but I like to think most of us are trying to do the right thing, most of the time.
I was raised with the rather typical Midwesterner's Protestant sensibility. I sometimes think the pot luck hotdish is more sacrament than the wafer and wine, the closer you get to the Great Lakes. Thankfully, I think, I had the benefit of wide exposure to other ideas and other cultures at an early age. Anywhere my dad's job in the State Department took us, we went. Sometimes that leads to people closing in, clinging to what they know all the harder. In my case? I ended up questioning.
I'm certainly not an agnostic or a skeptic, these days. But I'm not a devout anything, either, Christian or otherwise. I suppose, if I had to give it a label, that humanist comes closest.
I do believe in a god. Hell, sometimes I believe in gods; the universe certainly seems complicated enough to me that there could be more than one voice out there calling shots at one time or another.
I don't believe in religion. I know it's terribly "in" to diss organized religion these days, but I'm not trying to. For my personal take on the mess, though, I don't think any one book has it right...or if they did have it right, I think centuries of editing and retranslation have rendered the messages cloudy at best. Especially when it comes to matters of doctrine, and not just matters of faith. It's hard to argue against Christ having said "love thy neighbor", but just what the Holy Trinity really thinks about the place of the Papacy? Debatable.
Beyond all that, though, I'm personally of the opinion that God, or Gods? Have better things to do with their time than listen to us offering worship. I've seen some people argue that it's us who need the worship, but that really always felt very circular to me. It could just be that, in some ways, I'm inherently just very internal about some things. Faith, more than most things, is a matter for me to be worried about. No one else should be that concerned with the state of my soul, after all.
I don't believe in guardian angels. I don't believe so much that the Powers that Be are paying much attention to us at all, except in the big picture sort of way, now that they've set the world in motion. What is one human life in the universe?
But I believe in the inherent goodness of people, as a whole. We may be selfishly motivated a lot of the time, we may be afraid and scared, or angry and lashing out, but in the end...we're also responsible for a lot of what is good in the world. Sure, we're responsible for a lot of the bad too, but I like to think most of us are trying to do the right thing, most of the time.