Here We Go Again...

At any rate, I clearly need to get to bed earlier tonight and get a good night's sleep. Nothing beats illness, I find, like rest.

An old friend of mine told me recently that he's started going to church. This caught me by surprise, since he's never struck me as being in the least religious. Maybe he's more spiritual than I am, but heck, everyone's more spiritual than me. Well, almost.

This is slightly eerie for me since he's the second friend of mine to start going to church in the last year.

We've exchanged a few e-mails about the topic this week, which codified a couple of things in my mind. First, I don't have any interest in joining a religion myself because I look at religion and realize, "This doesn't really fill any of the needs I have in my life." I don't believe in god (the Judeo-Christian kind, or any other sort of mon- or pantheistic varieties), and don't have any inner discontent that there isn't some sort of higher power out there who's responsible for creating the universe, overseeing it, or providing us with any sort of purpose to our existence. I'm generally uncomfortable with ceremony, which seems to be part-and-parcel of religion. And I definitely don't feel the need to have any sort of connection with other people through religion - quite the opposite in fact; if I were to become religious, I'd most likely want to keep it to myself.

My second thought is that I do sometimes struggle with the fact that I don't have faith in a higher power. How strange it is to struggle with not having such a thing. I do sometimes think that it would be nice to feel that there is some externally mandated purpose or value to my life, or that simply by having faith I'd be able to grapple with certain problems and issues. But that sort of faith is essentially anathema to my way of thinking: I'm too firm about demanding evidence, and tend to think that religions are perhaps as likely the result of human imagination as faith in something which actually exists.

Mostly religion from a spiritual standpoint (as opposed to from a cultural or social one) is something I just don't "get". Religious tenets always seem too needlessly complicated to me, and Occam's Razor tells me that without good reason to believe in them, it's more likely that they're not based in truth. And I just can't make myself get past that notion. (I really get stuck on this point when I run into the concepts like "Jesus died for our sins", which seems like such a complex solution to a dubious problem that it took repeated explanations for me to wrap my mind around the very notion. Like some plot twist in a novel that you just can't buy no matter how hard the writer tries to sell it.)

I'm sure it surprises no one that I have very few churchgoing friends. (I might have more than I think, but just don't know it.) Although I think I'm solidly in the minority in the US in all of these regards (for instance, I know I could never be elected President simply because of my atheism [never mind my other electoral flaws!]), it's not hard to find groups and communities who either feel similarly, or don't care whether I'm religious or not.

At any rate, I think my friend lacks the sort of certainty that I have and is interested in exploring some of his own doubts, which is a motivation I can understand, even if I can't relate everything about it.

On a completely unrelated topic, today is the birthday of my childhood friend Josh Krasnow. If I recall correctly, it's in fact his 30th birthday. I haven't heard from him in years, but happy birthday, wherever you are!