I went to a church school where we had a school service in the attached church every Tuesday morning. I learned a lot of words that I later found out were Latin ("credo in unum Deum" etc.) and Greek ("Kyrie eleison" etc.). Later on I sang in the church choir.
Visiting Bali in the 1980s and 1990s, I felt deeply touched by the religious devotion of the people and the way their religious practice was so naturally part of everyday life.
More recently, I attended weekly raja yoga sessions, where the teacher was steeped in the Sanskrit texts and gave lucid, persuasive accounts of The Divine.
And much more recently, I have had serious discussions with Bible literalists, and seriously wondered about their view that we are approaching "the end of days" as predicted in the scriptures. One of my best friends, an outstandingly intelligent and erudite Irishman, converted to the Russian Orthodox Church a while back, and we have conversations on the subject.
The evidence suggests that I'm open to, and searching for some kind of spiritual home. I certainly value experiences that transcend the mundane.
However I am now coming to realise that nothing I have seen, read or experienced convinces me that religion - any religion - gives a definitive, factual basis for understanding the natural world that we inhabit, or how we come to inhabit it. The great religious texts may be works of literature, moral philosophy, history or psychology but their stature, for the people who follow them, depends on believing that they are the word of God.
I've suspended my disbelief on this point for most of my life. I've "fudged" the issue, but no longer. I cannot say in truth that I know with 100% certainty that there is no divine force at work. But I'm pretty close to 100% convinced that the various versions of god out there, in all religions, are figments of the human imagination, and the great religious texts are works of more or less inspired fiction. This throws a very sobering light on all the things that human beings have done to each other "in the name of god".
Visiting Bali in the 1980s and 1990s, I felt deeply touched by the religious devotion of the people and the way their religious practice was so naturally part of everyday life.
More recently, I attended weekly raja yoga sessions, where the teacher was steeped in the Sanskrit texts and gave lucid, persuasive accounts of The Divine.
And much more recently, I have had serious discussions with Bible literalists, and seriously wondered about their view that we are approaching "the end of days" as predicted in the scriptures. One of my best friends, an outstandingly intelligent and erudite Irishman, converted to the Russian Orthodox Church a while back, and we have conversations on the subject.
The evidence suggests that I'm open to, and searching for some kind of spiritual home. I certainly value experiences that transcend the mundane.
However I am now coming to realise that nothing I have seen, read or experienced convinces me that religion - any religion - gives a definitive, factual basis for understanding the natural world that we inhabit, or how we come to inhabit it. The great religious texts may be works of literature, moral philosophy, history or psychology but their stature, for the people who follow them, depends on believing that they are the word of God.
I've suspended my disbelief on this point for most of my life. I've "fudged" the issue, but no longer. I cannot say in truth that I know with 100% certainty that there is no divine force at work. But I'm pretty close to 100% convinced that the various versions of god out there, in all religions, are figments of the human imagination, and the great religious texts are works of more or less inspired fiction. This throws a very sobering light on all the things that human beings have done to each other "in the name of god".
