Religion of some description is needed by everyone, some form of belief and value system that represents their outlook on the world. For some this can take the form of an organised relgion, maybe one they have been brought up with or found later in life, but others either fail to find a religion that fits or find one that almost fits but certain elements that are essential to the 'experience' of being a part of that religion that stop the religion from becoming that individuals theological structure.
For this reason I have tried to put down my own thoughts on the subject since it may allow someone who has found no belief system that fits the contours of their psyche to be able to put their thoughts in context.
I was brought up the son of a protestant (Church of England) mother and a Catholic father and baptised in the Church of England. I was sent to sunday school most weekends where I was taught other peoples ideas of what being a Christian is. Throughout this time I always thought that something was missing, I places the Bible in the same catagory as norse or greek myths, nice to read but pretty much a work of fiction, not realising that even myths can contain ideas and themes that are still relevent today.
By the time I was 7, computers had found their way into my life. I could program in BASIC to a fairly high level including designing my own programs from scratch. Computers have continued to play a large part in my life to this day.
Around the age of 11, I moved up from primary school to secondry school and science was a major part of the curriculum. I found that science could answer a lot of questions about the world that so far I had not found answers to. I was naive in that I thought that science could answer everything.
By the time I finished high school I had started to understand that science still had a long was to go before it could answer everything, at almost everypoint science still had incomplete answers. Newton explained that gravity exists, but noone can actually say how gravity works. Quantum effects being predicted by probability works a lot of the time but it felt to me that we are missing some, possibly obvious, piece of the puzzle.
I decided to bury my head in the sand for a couple of years and took my 'A' levels and started living in a sci-fi fantasy world.
It took until I was around 23 or 24 to understand that no one has all the answers.
The best way, that is, the way that I find easiest, to understand where you fit into the world is to realise that you are no better than everyone else and that you can distinguish yourself from others by the way you live your life. The fact that you may or may not believe in one or more Gods and/or an afterlife of some decription doesn't really matter. Since if we realise that if God exists then it is how we live our lives and whether we would forgive others and repend our sins that will be more important than pretending to believe in a God whom we are unsure that actually exists. False belief could be thought of as lying to yourself and as such is a negtive act.
So if we work with the idea that thoughts and actions during life are more important than belief in God then we should be able to take certain parts of religions that do fit our world-view and merge them together coming up with something that feels right to us.
For example, the ten commandments are fairly good guiding principles in that they state clearly that killing is bad etc. We could use them as a starting point. There are also the Buddhist philosophy of leading a moral life, to be aware of thoughts and actions and to develop wisdom and understanding.
If we expand these to cover nature as well we may add not eating animals and to look after the environment. To some these are the minimum we should do, to others they are simply held as ideals to aim for.
My personal aim is to buy a large amount of land somewhere fairly remote and build an energy efficient house and try to have a negative impact upon the world.
We can aim to reduce suffering where possible, whether this be mental suffering or physical suffering from diesease, malnutition or lack of protection against the environment.
If we take the element of the Buddhist philosophy 'to develop wisdom and understanding' to its logical extentsion then we ought to educate ourselves, because it furthers this goal, and others because it is hoped education will allow others to undertand how they can help themselves and those around them.
I hope I will be able to add some more to this later and if anyone has any questions please don't hesitate to drop me a line.
mike <at> technomonk <dot> com
Written sometime around Sept 2004 - Sept 2005