ON RELIGIOUS MANIFESTOS, KEEN'S

These things are never easy. After months of being pestered by my questions about their religion, a couple fellow English teachers asked me to explain my religion. Here goes.

I hesitate even to use the term "religion," a) because I like to think that my "religion" is different enough to merit a less ambiguous, less history-laden, and less highly-qualified term, b) because I don't want anyone to think it is something they can join (find your own religion, that's the whole point!), and c) when taken seriously, religion equates to an explanation of your life and how your live it. A religious manifesto, therefore, is essentially a self-justification.

You won't find any pillars of faith or fundamental precepts in an outline of my "religion." Rather, it is best characterized not by what I "believe," but how. My religion is about method. I will, however, have to explain what I do not believe, because a) my own religion obviously has formed in reaction to the other beliefs in my intellectual environment, and b) you readers need some tangible grounds on which to place where I stand on certain ideas. This is frustrating, becaus it makes my religion out to be one of negation, when I like to think that it is the opposite, one of affirmation.

But before I explain the "how" of my religion, I should explain the "why." What drives my religiosity? "Religion," or the array of behaviors and psychological predispositions that compose our definitions of it, is a human word for a biological phenomenon with a biological basis. My genes and my culture have rendered me deeply desperate for life, deeply disturbed by death, and overwhelmingly appreciative for people, places and experiences. Consequently, I am hyperbolically curious, scared and thankful. These traits create in me (and, I think, in most of us) our emergent religious impulse. It is the single source of both our supreme joys and our supreme affliction, a bittersweet adaptation brought about by gene-culture coevolution. Religiosity: can't live with it, can't Live without it.

As a methodology, two of my religion's goals are intellectual honesty and responsible inquiry. It follows that I do not believe in metaphysics, the divine inspiration of any Holy texts, an afterlife, or gods of any sort. I do not find any compelling evidence in nature or in the pews that God is real. Yes, I understand that "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence," but there is also undeniable evidence - namely, the simple fact that ideas and people have real effects on each other and the earth - that compels me to take the accuracy of my convictions very seriously. In doing so, accepting the idea of God and commiting to an explicit faith becomes impossible for me. I do not think that theism, particularly that of the Abrahamic religions, is a responsible choice. From the goals stated above, it follows also that I consider it irresponsible to be a member of any religious organization that enables or encourages the reduction of critical thinking and the sense of adventure with which we engage the world.

The most unfortunate and intellectually destructive aspect of conventional religion is that it forces new experiences to fit into worldviews rather than uses them to add to or change a worldview. Within religions like Christianity, experience becomes complacent and subjugated to prior opinion, messily if necessary, rather than used to serve the much more exciting and adaptive purpose of being transformative. Conventional religion, at its lowest and most fundamental frequencies, has robbed the religious life of primal adventure. Discovery becomes a threat instead of an opportunity. I have no interest in that.

Do I concede that God may actually exist? Of course. To say otherwise is to be blindly dogmatic, which is precisely what I am reacting against here. Do I know what evidence could ever convince me of God? Honestly, I can't imagine what form convincing evidence could take, but I am willing to be surprised.

Clarifying religious terms: Rather than the word "truth," I like to use the word "accuracy." I don't think I could ever bring myself to make a claim about the way things actually are. I consider such an act, which is the tendency of all religionists and some scientists, as nothing less than arrogant. Rather than identifying truths, I am interested in recognizing patterns.

The words "faith" and "beliefs" are used today to mean "convictions based on recognizably insufficient evidence." These words equate shameless to the "license people give each other to continue believing in the absence of good reasons to do so." This is, after all, the basis of blind faith and why employing it is placed on a pedestal in our world. I am not interested in that. Rather than "faith" or "belief" I prefer the admittedly bloodless word "conclusion," or maybe "conviction." Do I believe in evolution? No. I am convinced by it enough to provisionally accept it.

Ideas like "eternity," "ultimate truth," "divinity," and "free will" are distracting and irrelevant (especially the last term). The words "sacred" and "profane" are helpful if we tweak their definitions by equating them to the words "relevant" and "irrelevant," respectively, and toss out any metaphysical associations attached to them. To calibrate these revised definitions, I'll use Christianity: that which is sacred, from a Christian perspective, includes God, human destiny, Jesus, his words, salvation, moral righteousness, love, ultimate truth, free will, sin, fellowship, Christ's return, the afterlife, wealth, the Bible's contents, evil, and in some cases, the Creation. That which is profane includes scientific discovery, personal pride, good deeds, other religious perspectives, and the birds of the field.

So, given the methods I've outlined for constructing a worldview, what conclusions or convictions have I arrived upon? Answer: not many. And that is OK. Religions like Christianity tend to emphasize the importance of decisions to an extent that can pressure people into irresponsible choices. These religions are what I like to call very "claimful." Such claimfulness is irresponsible and unneccessary for religious fulfillment. I have heard many people use the following observation as a reason to believe in a higher being (I am guilty of using this when I was a believer): "There's just something abut reality - about the world - that makes the idea of God fit. It just makes sense." Npw, consider the alternative, more accurate version, and note the crucial difference:"There's something about how I make sense of reality, of the world, that just makes the idea of God fit." We Homo sapiens have inexorably religious minds, inclined to mystical thoughts and powerful emotions. Mistaking these evolved neurological quirks as outside evidence of a higher being is both irresponsible and unfortunate. We, not the cosmos or its Creator, are our own fountainhead for religion, meaning, mystery and transformative love. Realizing and embracing that is key piece of my religious identity. The result of doing so is being more interested in my own religiosity that in what I am religious about. The experience of religion is what interests me. Outsourcing and externalizing one's religiosity by devotion to a god is not only a mistake, it is also a loss. I am grateful for life and people, to a religious degree, but I am not thankful towards any ultimate cosmic order or personality. I am certianly in great debt, but I am not in great debt to anything ultimate. My immense gratitude and wonder is aimless, and that's OK - in fact, it is preferred.

Some might read a statement like, "the experience of religion is what I am interested in," as advocacy for believing whatever you damn-well please. It is not. In fact, it's the opposite. Having convictions is important, but as your neighbor I beg you to arrive at them as carefully as possible. What the above statement does do is free us to "believe" in something that is ethically helpful. Since fulfillment is provided by the experience of religion, we can reserve the recipient of our religious energies to something morally defensible. Often, this translates to more love towards people around you. Why love God because you love your life or your mother? Why not love life and your mother because you love life and your mother? What I love about Christmas time is the family time, the carols, the colors, the cups of hot chocolate, the contra dances, the fellowship and the community. I don't need to distract myself from those things and think about a baby in a food trough to celebrate the season well. Why celebrate the mythical birth of a dude 2,000 years ago by spending time with family, when you can celebrate family by spending time with family? We don't need unfounded beliefs to justify religious levels of love and reverence and celebration.

So far, I have only explained one half of my religion. While the first half focuses on the construction of an ideology, its complement has to do with the application of that ideology to my actions and interactions. Religion, in general, I believe, consists of two parts: ideology and application. Ideas and action. The biological analog is the genotype (DNA code of an organism) and the phenotype (physical maifestation of a genotype, e.g. translated proteins, eye color, or less tangibly, more extended applications like behavioral predispositions and ecological footprints). Both complement each other, and a proper understanding of an organism can't be achieved by attention to just one of the two. Thinking about religion along similar lines grounds big ideas in a world of consequences, which is important to me. While my religion's genotype (convictions) are careful and bloodless - that is, scientific - my religion's phenotype (application to the real world) belongs to the realm of art. Creativity and adventure have a rightful place in what you do with your convictions, not in the convictions themselves - there is too much at stake for that. A careful assessment of reality deepens the well from which our inspiration for life in the grandest sense springs forth. The idea is that my religion magnifies the most redeeming virtues of human's religiosity: our intellectual engagement with reality and our passionate exploration of the margins of our creativity. In this sense, religion fuses science and art, allowing a responsible and fulfilling engagement with the world. It's about science, and it's about dancing. Shifting our religious focus from needless claimfulness to the experience of life is anything but bloodless. Rather, it is transformative, immense, overwhelming.

Jesus, Buddha, and Billy Graham are people I can learn alot from. But so is everyone.

The single-most celebrated worship event in the Bible, the Last Supper, took place not in a synagogue or on a mountan top, but over dinner with some friends. With bread and wine. Religion belongs at the dinner table with friends, at sunsets and in late nights, in naked swimming and in the classroom. We emit sanctity, we do not receive it from above. I am alive with affliction, gratitude and wonder. I dwell in amazement at my ability to make so much meaning out of a meaningless world, and to care so damn much. I am horribly sad and inexplicably happy. Religion is about dancing, laughter and saving lives. It needs a responsible (that is, scientific and ethical) foundation. The Earth, girls, the past, the future, biodiversity, humans everywhere, youth, and growth are sacred. Irresponsible beliefs are profane.