NPR thoughts...

So I was listening to NPR on the way home from work tonight. I like to listen to NPR, there are a lot of good shows and its a good place to get unbiased news. At least as unbiased as it can be.

Anyway, there was a blurb for an upcoming special. The gist of it was that more and more Americans are giving up on organized religion. How, the announcer worried, could you live a moral life without religion? The upcoming special is going to try and answer this question.

I am of a few thoughts here. My first thought was that I hope this special is a podcast and goes up on the NPR site, because I would like to hear it. Im interested in the mindset of anyone who doesnt know how to live a good life without religion. In my mind, if you need the threat of an invisible father in the sky sending you to a very bad place to make you be a good person, you are fucked from the start.

I was raised in a VERY religious family in the South. Every Sunday you went to Sunday school and then church. Thats just how it was. In Sunday school one of the more hardcore religious adults from the congregation taught us stuff from the bible. Questions were allowed but not encouraged at all and if you asked anything other than a technical question about the wording or what a phrase meant, you were accused of "being smart" and told to have more faith and less questions.

For a long time I tried, I really did. I wanted to be a good Christian and make God happy with me and win his approval. But slowly at first and then faster and faster I realized I was being set up to fail. I ask questions if I dont understand something, its just what I do. Its who I am. Religion never had a clear answer for me. It was always "Because God wants it that way", "We just have to have faith that the Lord will take care of it", "Have faith and it will all happen as its supposed to". A friend of mine got cancer in his spine. He was way more of a good Christian than I was, he was hardcore into it and fully believed and had drunk the kool-aid. I knew this, even if not in those terms. When I asked my family and then our preacher why God would allow someone who obviously loved him so much to get such a terrible disease, the only answers I got were that it happened for a reason and that no one was able to know or understand the reason.

That was the moment my faith cracked and I started to doubt. I was 12. My friend was 11. He died less than a year later. Despite all of our church and a lot more people praying for him, asking God to help him, and giving hard earned money to the church as we were taught to, he died. My faith cracked a little more.

There was now a rebel inside me. The rebel took to the corners of my mind and soul and waged war on things I was told to believe and not question. His voice started out small but got stronger as time went by. I began to ask more and more questions, and when there were no real answers forthcoming I started to doubt the whole idea of God and faith more and more. I expressed these sentiments and was told that I was a bad person because I didnt have faith and accept The Lord without question. This happened probably 4-5 years after my friend died.

Somewhere along that time I discovered and became interested in science. Science answered my questions and then explained the answers to that I could understand them. There was no need to have faith, there was proof. It occurred to me that you could have faith in the proof. If you didnt want to that was OK because there was always an answer to anything you asked. I liked this a lot. I also started spending more time paying attention to the world around me. Sunrises, sunsets, the beauty of a forest or a mountain or even a swamp. Nature was amazing.

Thats about where my spiritual journey is these days, some 30 years later. Im still perfectly happy with science and nature and the beauty and proof they offer. I have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, yet I know that if I wanted to know why it would there would be a definite answer I could find. Nature continues to enrapture and transform me all the time. Just when I think Im jaded and cant be moved, I'll see a hawk fly into a flock of pigeons and take one out or I will look up at the sky at night and see millions of stars and I will realize that there is always more to experience. I dont need some insecure and sadistic invisible father telling me I shouldnt even think of any god but him and that he will burn me forever if I do, nature doesnt get jealous.

Dont get me wrong here, I appreciate sadism very much. Its just not a quality I want in my Supreme Being. So back to the original question: How does one live a moral life without religion? How about follow one simple rule. It has nothing to do with science or nature, its easy to remember and its all you need:

Dont be a dick.

If you can follow that one little rule, I think you will lead about as moral a life as is possible for a human to live more or less. And no one has to get nailed to anything, killed because they dont believe in something or damned to an eternity of punishment by an invisible sky father. I call that a win/win proposition.