Rational Religion


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Faith Without Training Wheels

 

The Rational Religionist can't look outside herself for help, except to the larger Human community which is quixotic and unreliable at best; exploitive and mean-spirited at average operating levels; hostile and evil at worst.

 

There isn't Anybody Out There to bail you out if you screw up. 

 

You have to be Responsible; and alert.

 

It isn't for everybody; even a lot of those who philosophically would qualify.

 

In the first place, you can't be a perfectionist. 

 

In the second place you can't be too sanguine.

 

You have to keep trying to do better, but you can't get suicidal if it doesn't always work.  Sometimes about all you can accomplish is damage control.

 

Human beings, as a species, are neither very smart nor very nice.  You have to give yourself points every time you, personally, achieve either; double points if it wasn't an accident.   

 

And for a Rational Religionist, an affirmation of a belief in "eternal life" is about as close to blasphemy as you can get.

 

As part of a process, rather than the initiator or controller of the process, we have to die.   That is really the only human inevitability.   Everything else is negotiable.

 

Metaphysicists would likely say that our birth was just as inevitable, but that is a self-centered illusion.  

 

Each of our individual births is so mathematically unlikely, before the fact of conception, that it verges on the impossible.  After the fact, of course, it's a fait accompli; an out bet.  Reasoning from this viewpoint, it can look inevitable.   From a light-year or two out in space we could appreciate the wild improbability of it; just as we could see the inevitability of death.

 

Death, for living things, is simply biology following the larger laws of physics; succumbing to entropy.  Death is part of change.

 

And on a Universal scale as well as the subatomic one, Change is the Only Constant.