A Reminder

[Lord J Esq]

Three Questions:

1. When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?
2. How did you come to believe it?
3. Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

In all honesty I doubt this thread will yield anything particularly useful or interesting here at the Compendium. But I urge you to prove me wrong. More importantly, I urge you to pass it along to your other online communities, apart from the Compendium, where the discussion may prove more fertile. When I saw these three questions, I was expecting to be able to reply in a short, boring couple of sentences. But when I allowed myself to engage these questions forthrightly, I instead found they were very carefully, intelligently written. Share them with your friends, online and off.

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

I reject the premise of belief. I subscribe to no religion, I dismiss organized religion as a glorified mob that at best can only hope to behave itself, I reject spirituality as the individualized form of organized religion, I condemn the use of faith as a source of personal conviction, I am atheistic toward every religion I have come to understand well enough to appraise, and on the cosmic scale I am thoroughly agnostic on the question of god.

I am “conversationally intolerant” of the devout in most instances, although I will silence myself either for diplomacy or tact on certain occasions. I am outright hostile toward fundamentalist religious factions, particularly fundamentalist Christianity here in the United States and fundamentalist Islam in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In my unflattering assessment, and notwithstanding their other redeeming qualities, those people are the blight of the Earth. In contrast, I tend to “pick my battles” and give a much wider berth to small, alternative religions based in the best traditions of liberal progressivism.

But, really, in my mind religious faith of any sort is a barrier to personal awareness and enlightenment, and my ability to forge strong relationships with believers, regardless of their beliefs, depends on my being able to touch parts of their minds that are not tainted by the fallacy of faith.

On a poetic and conceptual level, I sometimes use the terms soul and spirit to represent, variously, our sentient will, our emotional sum, or, as Lisa Simpson so well put it, the symbol of everything fine within us. However, these words do not mean to me anything unknowable, illogical, ineffable, supernatural, or infinite.

How did you come to believe it?

I was raised in a nominally Reform Jewish household. As my teenage mind blossomed and I really began to think about these sorts of questions for the first time, I very gradually realized that “God,” be it ever so popular, is just make-believe. In my final teenage years, and through to my current stage in life, the tenets of reason displaced any lingering spirituality I might have possessed. The closest I can come is an affinity for the wonder with which the late Carl Sagan beheld our universe. “Star stuff”...that appeals to me. But it is far from spiritual, let alone religious. Rather, I use these grand ideas as a source of meaning—not faith—and I acknowledge they are the function of my own, subjective perspective, and do not exist outside my own head.

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

Nope. My mom was raised a Jehovah’s Witness, and despite having had difficulty with her parents because of it, she still feels some connection with it. About a decade ago, when one of the chefs of the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies died of cancer, Mom was struck by how that woman bore her suffering by virtue of her Catholic faith. Over the course of a couple years, my mom became a Catholic herself, as she remains. She does so very privately.

My dad was raised in an orthodox Jewish household that became quite devout when one of his brothers returned from yeshiva. Dad himself was secular with a Jewish tint by the time I was born, then immersed himself quite deeply into Reform Judaism as I grew older and my sister was born, agreeing with my mom that we kids should have religion. I was subsequently raised Jewish. I was Bar Mitzvahed at thirteen. I taught Sunday school classes in my junior and senior years of high school. I even led our small temple in Sabbath worship on several occasions, before graduating and leaving California for college in Seattle.

Mainly to please and comfort Dad, I did all of this long after I had abandoned my own Judaism—which occurred honestly from the very first moment I understood what it meant to be a Jew. However, it is true that I greatly enjoyed and benefited from the community offered by my shul and a number of the people in it.

I am an agnostic…

Please be aware.

[Kyronea]

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?
I don't really believe anything. I have a supreme difficulty with faith in a spiritual sense in anything, and I always have. No matter what I do or what religion I explore, I always end up returning to my atheism. I'm a natural skeptic of all things and I rarely accept anything with weight to it without some sort of proof(though that doesn't stop me from occasionally making mistakes or being ever so slightly swayed by con men, such as a chiropractor fooling me into getting X-Rays taken until I did a lot of research on chiropractic medicine and realized it was a bunch of bullshit). As such, faith itself is foreign to me and I find it immensely difficult to understand how anyone can have faith. Like Lord J esq I find it to be somewhat abhorrant and I despise the religiously extreme.

Unlike Lord J, however, I can respect those who honestly believe in the tenets of their religion and stick to it, which is extremely rare. My parents are devout Christians but unlike most devout Christians in the United States they are extremely tolorant and open. They do wish I believed in some sort of spirituality but they don't care what specifically, so long as it is spiritual, as seen by my sister, who is quite Pagan, and my other sister who freely mixes Christianity and Paganism.

Frankly, though, I wish more people would stop using faith and religion as a way of ignoring reality. Too often people allow themselves to believe in the idea of Heaven and Hell, or some other form of afterlife, which is a barrier to living ones life to the fullest. For most of the universe's existance a person did not exist, so why do they find it so hard to accept that they will cease to exist after a period of time? By not accepting this fundamental fact of life they set themselves back in many ways.

How did you come to believe it?
I was rasied as a Christian, as were my siblings. I can remember attending Christmas Mass at one point, partaking of some sort of bread and actual wine. I think it might have been a Catholic church, but I doubt it because my parents are Protestant. In any case, I never really accepted any of it and was more amused by the ideas than anything else. Sure, I had a children's bible for a while that I read from--I had an audio recorder of some sort that I used endlessly to record cassettes of random readings from books and my own personal mutterings--but I never saw it as anything other than fictional. Even when I was an early teen in California attending confirmation classes--at the request of my parents--I never believed in it. As for why...well, as I said before, I am a natural skeptic, and I simply cannot hold faith in the spiritual sense, even if I try. And try I did for a while...when I was sixteen I was exploring everything from Buddishm, Sihkism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam,  Taoism, Shintoism...even some odd New Age Paganistic style religions, such as Wicca. While I had some respect for Buddism I found none of them to hold any meaning for me...instead I became disappointed in the vast ways we humans have created to delude ourselves.

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?
If only...my dad is thoroughly convinced of his God's existance...he believes that many years ago while rappelling down a deep hole to reach a cave--he was quite the spelunker in his youth--he slipped and fell and would have died had he not been saved by an angel and pulled to a cliff. He says it had to have been an angel because he did not remember ever grabbing onto the cliff and saving himself. I tried pointing out that he might have sustained a head injury thus explaining the memory loss but he would have none of it.

I am not so certain of my mother...for the longest time I thought she truly agreed with everything my dad believes but lately I've begun to see that she tends not to actually support opinions of her husband and friend so much as she does diplomatically. The telling point was when I was arguing with her friend Jean(amusingly enough my mom goes by Jean as well, a shortened version of her middle name Eugenia)about black poverty and neighborhoods and Jean held a slight amount of racist opinion, and my mother supported her during the argument but later informed me that she did not actually agree with her friend; she was simply being diplomatic. As such I don't know how to think of her beliefs when it comes to agreeing with dad anymore.

Still, she certainly does believe in God, as she goes to church quite often, is a member of a specific group...United Methodist Women or something like that...and has considered becoming a pastor.


In essence, the sum of my beliefs are an essential lack of beliefs. Unlike Lord J I am not agnostic: I am athiestic. An omnisentient God makes no logical sense and I do not see why such a being would exist. The only sort of God I am willing to even CONSIDER is the possibility that our entire universe is a computer simulation of some sort--and by that I don't mean Matrix-esque, but the entire fabric of reality is a simulation by some other beings--but even that is ridiculous, not to mention irrelevant from our own perspective. Thusly I am athiestic until someone can prove to me a god of some sort actually exists.

[Lord J Esq]

Hey, that's a thoughtful reply! I'd forgotten that some Compendiumites are either too new to have been here for the religion fights we had a while back, or have evolved in their personal standing on the matter since that time.

[Kyronea]

I surprise quite often, Lord J. With luck, there will be other thoughtful replies as well.

[cupn00dles]

Hehehe.

[Lu Su]

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?
i'm a roman catolic

How did you come to believe it?
i was raised a christian

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?
yes, both

note before you all start
1: whether God exists or not "ignorence is bliss"
2: when you watch someone die you relaise that if there is no afterlife then what is the point in living, if some one proved the was no afterlife i would commit sucide
3: if there is no God where did life come from?
4: finally not even i agree with all of the churchs decisions

[Lord J Esq]

I would like you to consider editing your reply to make it longer and more expository.

[Daniel Krispin]

Heh. I'll be brief for the moment, as I don't at the moment have the mental capacity to explain in further length, but will make it longer at a later time.

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

Monotheistic God, as confessed in the Apostle's, Nicene, and Athanasian Creeds, and particularly as explained in the Augsburg Confessions (which I hold to, at this moment, by trust rather than examination, having never yet read them. However, this is not much different than someone believing in the precepts of the American Constitution, whilst never having read it. It is a measure of ignorance, but the explanations I have heard that stem from the aforementioned Augsburg Confession have all made sense to me.)

Quite the contrary to what, I think, the majority on these boards would believe, I am a supporter of organized religion.

How did you come to believe it?

I was raised in it, and have yet to have had any sufficent reason not to believe. At any point in which I might have fallen away, I have asked my father about his views and opinions on various subjects, and always he has given me such clear and logical answers that I cannot but trust in what I believe. Indeed, to not believe in this circumstance would be as difficult as doubting the theories of physics whilst having a father who is a PhD level professor of physics. It's difficult to dissent, not because of being forced to comply, but because he can outargue any doubts that fall upon me. So my belief stems not only from traditions beginning in early childhood, but continual learning via my father who is a theologian of high calibre.

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

Absolutely, particularly my father. Or, rather, I believe as my father does, as I have mentioned before. In this case to fall away or dissent would be merely a matter of silly and childish rebellion, rather than any reasoned dissent. Basically, I would have no reason to leave it other than just abandoning it for it's own sake.

I am, I think, one of the few who has retained his childhood faith unchanged into early adulthood. That is, I've questioned, and examined, and all that sort of thing. But nonetheless I have never felt that aversion that I've heard some voice. It was never forced upon me, and so that is perhaps the cause for its longevity. 

[Sentenal]

...I am tempted to answer the questions in detail.  However, I am one of the people here who is old enough to remmeber those wonderful religion fights we had a while back.  I don't wish to renew hositilies on the matter, as last time, it practically drove me from the Compendium.  Maybe I'll give my answers later.  Maybe.

[Lord J Esq]

I'm not going to bite anybody's head off, Sentenal. =)

[Radical_Dreamer]

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

I don't believe. I seek knowledge, and when I gain more knowledge, or the facts change, I revise my world view accordingly. Belief is an impediment to understanding. At least if you are honest in your ignorance, you know that it is a problem, and can take steps to remedy it. Even with the best of intentions, people who cling to false beliefs are liable to make things worse upon their intervention, as one cannot solve a problem one does not understand, and by clinging to beliefs in the face of reality, one prohibts meaningful understanding.

That's part of why I don't like religions. They weaponize ignorance. Religions provide their adherents with constant stumbling blocks to understanding the world around them, to being able to make the world a better place, and then have the audacity to call this morality, and to even claim moral authority. It is both maddening and tragic that such a backwards worldview is so prominent in the world.

I am, in the abstract, an agnostic, as I cannot say with 100% certainty that there is no god, despite how vanishingly small the odds of such a creature exiting are. To borrow from Dawkins, I am an agnostic about gods in the same way that I am angnostic about unicorns. In the practical sense, however, it may be meaningful to think of me as an athiest. I have seen no reason to believe in any god I've yet heard of, nor any reason to find a theistic universe desirable, and I live a fully secular life.

How did you come to believe it?

It took me a while. I was raised Reform Jewish, and was a theist in to my early teens. I never took things literally, though. In my family, the Red Sea parting was most likely a fortuitous earthquake, and a day to a god needn't be twenty four hours. As I got in to my mid teens, various events, both in and out of the temple I attended pushed me further toward skepticism. Among the rabbis at my temple, their blessings in life seemed inverted to their goodness as people, and that struck me as bizzare. Further, the more I learned of science, the more it became apparent that gods were completely needless constructs; the universe could run itself just fine. At this point, I was more or less apathetic toward religion in the abstract, although I thought it was a bit silly. In my junior and senior years in high school, I had many conversations with believers. Their worldview was abhorent. They actively embraced their ignorance. I am not being rhetorical here; I was told that there were some things people weren't meant to know, and that it was best not to investigate such things. This disgusted me. It became perfectly clear to me at that point that religion was not just mostly harmless fairy tales and hocus pocus, but a force of evil in this world, and that I, wanting to have a positive effect on the world around me, could have nothing to do with it.

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

My parents are still Reform Jewish, although my father seems to believe more in a vague sort of higher force rather than a personal god in particular. We don't really talk a lot about religion.

[Burning Zeppelin]

Hey, that's a thoughtful reply! I'd forgotten that some Compendiumites are either too new to have been here for the religion fights we had a while back, or have evolved in their personal standing on the matter since that time.

Ah, those were the days.

When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

I believe in God, and more specifically, that Islam is the true way to justice. But I believe in being open minded as well, and drawing conclusions based on what I can gather from various sources. I realized that the imam (in short, the Islamic version of a priest) have no divine right to decide what is right and what is wrong, and are people just like me, gathering information. I do not cast away the theory of evolution, as I believe that natural selection makes perfect sense, and the scientific theory of the creation of the universe also seems plausible.

Spiritually, I recognize that being muslim I have to follow the golden rule, and have to respect God's creation.

How did you come to believe it

As most people, my parents.

Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

In a general term: yes, we are muslim.

More specifically: no, my parents (moreso my dad) believe in a more strict sense of following orthodox law and rulings brought down by scholars and the such. This however can be linked to being brought up in Bangladesh, a country of patriotic pride and a heavily implemented set of ethics. Bangladesh was, and is, a seriously backwards country, and in the 70's, evolution and other scientific discoveries were just being brought in. And who can blame them, they were connected to an Islamic Republic for quite a while.

Also, my parents don't really have faith in an Islamic State very much. As I have said, they were put under an extreme amount of suffering as a result of their connection to Pakistan, and after splitting, they were made into a secular state under the constitution. After that, patriotism was basically a prerequisite of being called Bangladeshi, as another reason for wanting independence from Pakistan was to hold onto their own language.

[Ramsus]

1. When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

People hold religious beliefs too strongly, so as far as strangers are concerned, I pretty much believe what they believe. As long as you'll never see an atheist president, I'll never be atheist. I mean, everyone hates atheists.

So call me Christian. Understand, though, that my Jesus was a country boy, not some hypocrite trying to pull wool over God's eyes by acting out their petty ideals of decency. That's why I don't try to be decent. That's also why I don't read bibles or go to church.

I'd like to think that Heaven isn't some grand prize for the best actors and most disciplined ass-kissers.

Truth is, though, I really don't care about the ultimate truth to life or finding universal morality. I don't need anyone or anything to guide or protect me, and I don't need to believe in the possibility of eternal life. Spirituality is just a distraction from what really matters to me. If I place faith in anything, it'll be people and understanding, not the power of God.

2. How did you come to believe it?

It's too easy to alienate people based on religious beliefs. You just don't walk into a North Korean rally and start promoting free markets and Western democracy -- well, even more so with religion. Sometimes it's better to lay low and keep things vague. Given how strongly people in America associate with religion, it's the one area I'm never truly open about.

That could just be my lack of strong beliefs when it comes to religion though. Those sorts of things never really mattered to me. Maybe my own sense of purpose is too strong.

3. Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

Sort of. They're Christian. My dad used to be Catholic as a kid, but as an adult he's been very individual with his religion, having grown to dislike the rituals and hypocrisy found in churches. That's probably where I get my individualistic nature. My mom goes to some Methodist Korean church from time to time.

[Leebot]

1. When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

As with all things, I'm a skeptic. I apply the skeptic's razor to all manner of the paranormal, which ranges from a pseudoscientist presenting poor arguments for the efficacy of some treatment to organized religion. In the end, I rely on the Scientific Method (ask the universe a question by performing an experiment, then replicate, replicate, replicate), not because I have any form of faith in it, but because it works. (I made a post on my blog a while back which covers this in more detail.)

So with this in mind, I believe in anything that has sufficient evidence to support it, doubt anything that has evidence against it, and have measured skepticism for anything that hasn't been adequately tested. As for what qualifies as "sufficient evidence," I go by Carl Sagan's rule: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Religious claims, being some of the most extraordinary, would require some of the most extraordinary evidence for me to believe in them.

What evidence do they have? Generally, there's some old book, which often seems to contradict itself in many places. Maybe there are a few "faith-healings," which end up being either unverifiable or easily explained by the placebo effect or confirmation bias. Sometimes there are stories of answered prayers, when the holy book notably says not to expect prayers to be answered. This is the degree of evidence I usually see for religions which claim to solve the ultimate questions of the universe. In short, it's like they're trying to prove the existence of a mountain by showing a picture of a grain of sand (which on closer inspection appears to have been doctored).

So what then do I believe in, with regards to religion? Nothing, and I go so far as to doubt all religions due to their inconsistencies with the universe I know. Having no religion, I'm by definition an atheist.

2. How did you come to believe it?

My parents were Christians of different denominations, and so they raised me and my sister as generic Christians. We attended churches of different denominations, but they never committed us to one (as in baptising us). I even attended a Catholic school for a period. I can't pinpoint when I gave up Christianity, but I believe my time in this school weighed in on this. Essentially, there were a couple problems that arose at that school:

1. I asked questions that they didn't like to have asked. "How do you know?" was a particularly common one.

2. When I played by their rules and tried to find out things about the universe through introspection, what I came up with never meshed with the dogma. This revealed one of the big problems with this manner of learning about the universe: Different people always come to different conclusions.

In the end, it feels like I simply grew out of religion, much like I grew out of believing in Santa Claus (I figured that one out on my own); it just took a few more years.

3. Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

My mother's faith has weakened throughout my life, and she's gone from an average Protestant to a Deist. She's very sensitive about talking about religion, though, so I can never really bring up the subject with her.

My father, on the other hand, is best described as a "heretical Catholic." He attended a Catholic high school, and actually ended up not passing because he got into a big disagreement with one of the teachers about the meaning of "Catholicism." Essentially, where his beliefs differ is in the church's presumption that only the believers will be saved. On the other hand, my father felt that the religion was supposed to be "For all," as was the original meaning of "Catholicism."

[FaustWolf]

OH MAH GAWD, how could a thread as awesome as this be left so virgin, and for so many years? This is rich, rich stuff.


1. When it comes to religion/spirituality, what do you believe, if anything?

With regard to spiritual and cosmological philosophy I've settled on something that I can't quite put a name to, but I suspect it's closer to deism than anything else. I try to avoid preconceptions regarding "God." Its evolution as a concept throughout human history suggests that humanity can only misunderstand what it is to some degree, if we believe in its existence; all this time we've been projecting our own wishes and desires onto it, and thus God has evolved alongside humanity. One day, when we have the scientific tools to finally wrap our minds around the origins of our universe, we may simply overlook it without even realizing it, either because theistic attitudes have been lost by then or else because God does not meet our expectations of it.

The only characteristic I could think of to use as a test to separate what is God from what is not God is its ability to defy the laws of conservation of mass and energy; had Steady State Theory held, God would essentially be the C-Field from which matter arises to maintain the universe's density. That's if I'm understanding it correctly, of course. The supposition of this "C-Field" suggests to me that the universe is essentially not a closed system; what lies beyond -- a region where the laws of physics would not seem to apply whatsoever -- would essentially be the "realm of God." For all the grief Lemaitre received over the potential theological implications of the Big Bang, it's ironic that the Steady State model would seem to lend itself to pseudo-religious belief far more than any other scientific theory, arguing purely from a cosmological standpoint.

It's much more difficult to argue for the existence of a God on a logical basis when it comes to the expansionary/contractionary cosmological model, where the universe's lifespan is essentially a succession of infinite Big Bangs followed by contractionary periods from my understanding. The laws of physics indicate that matter cannot be destroyed, which certainly suggests that the universe is infinitely long lived; but nor can it be created, which suggests our universe is a contradiction in its very existence. I'm not comfortable with this contradiction, unless we can make it not a contradiction by opening the system and exposing it to something that is analogous to the "C-Field" of the Steady State Theory; and that is what backs up my core preference to believe in something that is outside laws of physics that are liable to remain stable for the foreseeable future, and therefore "God"-like.

I guess I never saw God as a bearded dude in the sky; nor would I be able to tell for sure whether God has a consciousness. I do sometimes get a nice warm and fuzzy feeling while worshipping in my own way, but the most likely explanation is that it's the result of my own mind/body interaction aroused by the idea of doing something spiritual. I've found prayer a worthwhile stress reducer; just as SETI operators need an environment that minimizes cosmic white noise when they cast their gaze to the sky, someone who entertains the slightest hope of communing with the source of the universe needs a clear and calm mind free of the day's stresses.

I'm not sure that God is interested in justice. In fact, our common experience suggests precisely that if there is a God, it is not interested in human morality whatsoever; it was a brief look at the writings of a Sufi mystic that rammed this home for me. What a bitter pill to swallow for some of us! Although, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, and maybe it does constitute an expression of love for human beings. God, at the very least, is either a being or a realm not subject to the known laws of physics, or at least a subset of them; imagine the power it would have over us if it interfered in our lives -- pulled us out of every danger, stopped us before we were able to hurt another. Unless we were given complete freedom to do good and evil on our own terms, what else could we be other than God's marionettes?

Miracles would be an interesting thing if they're indeed real, and if I experienced one that was scientifically verifiable, it would force me to admit to possible direct interaction between God and the physical universe. A lot of the religiously-oriented miracles that have been described from time to time -- the stigmata always fascinate me -- could probably be explained by complex mind/body interaction when they're genuine.

As for beliefs regarding specific religious doctrine, I've only read the New King James version of the New Testament (published circa 1979) from cover to cover. It was a rich experience; in lieu of trying to put this into my own words for a second time, I'll just quote from an essay from back in senior year of undergrad.

    [Within the New Testament I found]...what [Cornel] West terms the “Socratic commitment to questioning” – a “…questioning of ourselves, of authority, of dogma…a relentless self-examination and critique of institutions of authority, motivated by an endless quest for intellectual integrity and moral consistency” (16; emphasis mine). I personally attribute my own development of West’s Socratic commitment to the New Testament Book of John, the eighth chapter of which relates Jesus Christ’s refusal to stone an adulteress whose case apparently met the requirements for capital punishment earlier handed down by Moses (John 8:1-11). According to Matthew 5:17 Jesus told his followers that he had not meant to destroy Old Testament law but rather to fulfill it, yet clearly Jesus appealed to some ethical standard higher than scripture when confronted with the adulteress in John 8 (New Testament). Thus, paradoxically perhaps, religion taught me that I should in fact search outside the realm of antiquated scriptural codes for a universally correct morality. As for what such a morality might entail, I have come up with nothing better than that “…we should live with humility, love our neighbors, and do unto others as we would have them do unto us,” precisely the prophetic standard to which West subscribes (146).

  ...In order to distill prophetic messages of acceptance and humility from scripture, liberal Jews, Christians, and Muslims must set aside, or otherwise significantly re-interpret, certain teachings and practices endorsed by orthodox Abrahamic institutions.  [Sam] Harris asks, in that case, why religious liberals would still defend the passage of Abrahamic scripture from one generation to the next, especially given the existence of Eastern religious traditions like Jainism, which needs no reinterpretation to communicate the prophetic moral principles West sees in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. I would contend that the unique value of Abrahamic religion lies in the fact that those who find it necessary to distance themselves from Jewish, Christian, or Islamic orthodoxy develop a valuable distrust of authority that they carry with them into civic life. Religious authorities are among the first children born into the Abrahamic tradition encounter in life – be they priests explaining official Church doctrine during CCD lessons or clerics instilling the Qur’an into madrasah enrollees. If one concludes that the scripture from which these individuals teach is an imperfect guide to morality, then he or she has established within his or her mind the permissibility of questioning authority in general. It takes significant courage to reject part or all of a holy text accepted as truth by successive generations of one’s ancestors; scrutinizing a politician who has been in office less than one lifetime is a far less outstanding feat in comparison. West finds a “…deep democratic energy…” in the Socratic commitment to questioning, and it is perhaps for this reason that he believes prophetic Christians have a key role to play in perfecting social justice in the United States (16, 162).
...
     Selected Bibliography for Compendiumites
     Harris, Samuel. Letter to a Christian Nation. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.
     West, Cornel. Democracy Matters. New York: Penguin Group, 2004.

Note that I tend to view Jesus as wholly human, although I am tempted to ignore Nietzsche and call Jesus an example of a true Übermensch, inasmuch as Jesus acted according to his own moral code and did not settle on deferring to the moral codes of his own forebears. To me, Jesus is a symbol of human evolution; His value lies not in the state of his moral code at the time, but the change in state that he was willing to produce. To me, Jesus is about producing moral momentum.


2. How did you come to believe it?

I hope there are others out there who have also found something like Cornel West's "Socratic Commitment to Questioning" through a religious text, and who did so after being exposed to official religious doctrine. I, for better or worse, cannot make that claim.

I specifically asked for the New Testament from my parents after becoming curious thanks to the "chicken and egg" question brought up in elementary school, and read it without any guidance or pressure whatsoever. In retrospect I'm thankful for that opportunity. I would say that I was raised "religiously unaware" up to the point that I took it upon myself to learn about my parents' religious heritage, and thus my own religious heritage.


3. Do your parents (or did they when alive) believe the same?

Not quite, since they were raised in much more religious households than I was, although I sense that they are considerably open minded with regard to moral standards. For that, I have always been thankful.