June 21, 2010

I'm not a religious person.
That's not to say I don't believe in God. Frankly, I have no idea if God actually exists, but you don't either. True atheism requires a degree of confidence I could never have.
What I'm getting at is that I'm no atheist, but I won't live my life in debt to a being who's existence is questionable at best.
Yesterday, amidst a conversation I was having with a stranger on the train back to New York, we began discussing religion. It was a brief discussion, as the man I was talking to got off soon after we began, but I was asked one question before he left that I couldn't answer at the time.
"What exactly is your problem with a mainstream belief in God?"
It's a very reasonable question, especially given the way I tend to discuss God, and it's also one I realize I had never truly thought about. You see, I grew up in a semi-religious Jewish household that became a very-religious Jewish household when I was around thirteen or fourteen years old. I have no issue with an individual choosing to believe in God, that his decision. My problem lies more in that murky area where religion begins to dictate, subliminally or otherwise, how people live their lives.
My point is, I've had discussions about belief in the past. I've had discussions about where politics and religion meet and about the morality of God in the Bible, and even about where people "find" God, but I've never spent a lot of time thinking about God as a societal construct.

(Note: I may be doing a bad job of describing how I interpreted the question asked of me. Hopefully my answer will clear things up.)

Having had time to think about it, I would answer with something of a theoretical:
Imagine if every time a surgeon saved a life or a family survived a car accident or even every time an athlete got a gold medal, we congratulated the person on his ability and left God out of the picture. Imagine if every time humanity achieved, we chalked it up to exactly that: humanity's ability to achieve, and not to unprovable divine intervention. Would that change anything?
I have to assume it would.
Humanity is something to admire, and our achievements are things to behold. Every time someone thanks God, he is diminishing humanities ability to achieve.
Every time someone says we couldn't possibly understand God's motivation, we diminish the human mind.
Every time someone says it's a miracle they survived a fall or a crash, they diminish the human spirit.
Every time the underdog thanks God for a victory, they diminish the human will.

When Sarah Palin calls for "divine intervention" to stop the oil spill, she is saying that she believes humanity doesn't have the ability to stop this.
That's bullshit.

I guess what I'm saying is we, all of us, need to be more confident in our ability to achieve on our own, without the help of God.


on a lighter note, this is actually happening.