I think it's understandable that some of the religious fear agnostics and atheists. After all, it's difficult to predict the moves of one who does not subscribe to a familiar and clearly delineated moral and ethical code and adhere to it under penalty of damnation, with incentives like eternal life and reunion with one's deceased loved ones. Operating in the anguishing environment of absolute free choice, outside the circles of protection that religion affords, atheists and agnostics are not accountable to anybody except themselves and believe the same of everybody else, devout or not.
I was raised in a vaguely Christian environment by extremely ethical, thoughtful and loving parents with liberal beliefs. There is a lot of openness between my mother and I, and no squeamishness. My father and I are very similar - moody and analytical. I consider him a philosopher. I love both of them so deeply.
My education was secular after preschool and until high school, when I attended a Catholic school. It was a surprisingly liberal place, as Catholic schools go, and I was taught secular and religious topics equally. I wasn't particularly stifled, but I didn't develop very much in a philosophical sense; I just did what I was told and said that I believed what I was taught, while inside, I was ambivalent and self-centered. Not a period of my life when I was particularly insightful, brave, intelligent or passionate, but I've always been a late bloomer. I did, however, thoroughly appreciate beauty, even then. I think that's the one thing that has always remained close to my heart.
By beauty, I mean love and nature and cunning words and altruism. Human creations that convey concepts that somehow reach beyond human capacity to touch something else. Nature, which universally defies my ability to comprehend it beyond a certain point on my personal understandability continuum, the point beyond which I feel god, or the gods, or the deities or Something. A million times I've said to myself, "it's all in your head" and "you've just found the limit of your intelligence," and it very well may be so, which is fine. I accept that possibility while I simultaneously and hopefully feel that it's not so simple. There's no thinking there, no logic, no goals or self-interest, just a little sparkling feeling that has always been with me.
I don't believe in heaven or hell. I don't believe that there is a list of rules extant that guarantee life beyond death or a relationship with the divine. I don't believe that a deity interacts with our lives on a daily basis. I ascribe all miracles either to chance, nature, or to humans' abilities and ever-changing, ever-complex perceptions. I don't thank anybody or anything for anything I have accomplished, experienced or known. If I believe that the people around me are particularly gifted and beautiful, I have somehow attracted them to me, or my perceptions (which are based on my experiences, genetics and the endless comparisons we all make every day to make sense out of existence) make them appear to be so. Maybe I have displayed a smidge or two of beauty or genius myself, as arrogant as it feels to write it - and I'm going to write it because it's true.
After all, I don't particularly deserve any of it in the same way that crack babies don't deserve their fates. I have never seen the concept of "fairness" anywhere beyond preschool. The world is not a gentle place, and I am not a gentle person.
All I believe in is now, nature, love and soul. The mysterious force that connects the atoms together, mothers to their young, the barn owl to its lifelong mate. The reason why the cedar clenches the rocks in its great feet and strives toward the sun, why viruses are impelled to multiply. Now is the only thing I know I have. It is anguishing, to suspect to the depths that you'll never again see the people you've bid goodbye to forever, but it makes life, connection, pleasure, pain, experience and joy that much more valuable. It makes everybody else's - every other thing's - life valuable to you. This is where religions often fail. If you're in, you're loved. If you're out, you're Other.
I have an uncanny knack for being dramatic even when I'm not around anybody. Maybe since I lack it in real life, I gots ta make it up in my own brain. Have fake arguments with myself. Pretend like I'm actually torn between one thing and another for the sake of thought convection.
I was just reading the blog of a friend in undergrad who is probably one of the most liquid, vivid, messed-up people I have ever known. Every relationship she has is fraught with pits and traps and characterized by burning, undying love, the kind that melts your soul into a different shape when you encounter it. I both admire and pity her ever-changing core. It has to be vastly upsetting to be so deeply in flux. She's like a crucible full of molten metal, while I'm more like a lake - mercurial on the surface, but calm in the depths. I might sink a few ships, but this girl will burn you to cinders.
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