Dancing around the eternal flame, part one

Two people rather close to me died recently, and in the course of mourning their passing, I find myself encountering the difficult questions once again. For example, "What happens when we die?" and "what do you believe?" Especially since one of these people was a retired Episcopal priest, and God and spiritual matters was never far from the center of our conversations.

To get to answering these questions satisfactorily, I find that I have to back up a bit. Not that I want to avoid the questions and the answers, but there is a context that needs to be expressed. The stage needs to be set before the actors can come on and move us with their story.

First of all, I have never felt there to be incompatibility between science and religion. When I was nine years old, a classmate who I also knew from church questioned me on how I could believe in evolution when the bible tells us about Adam and Eve. Her question annoyed me - I simply told her "it's not the same thing." I still feel that way. I'm sure we will talk more about this later.

Second, I don't believe that God has much use for religion, or religions. Those are human institutions, that we have established for our own comfort, to suit our needs. They reflect all that is good and bad in us. They can be vehicles for great progress and profound good. They can also be weapons of horrific destruction and ignorance. How we use our religions, how we use all our man-made institutions, shows us where we are as a species, whether we are small-minded barbarians or truly evolved creatures using our power for progress and compassion.

But before I can talk about how I feel about religion, about what I believe, I have to talk about how I feel about my position as a member of the human race. Our race exhibits many kinds of behavior that distinguish us from other species. And while other species may behave in similar ways, when you put the whole set of behaviors we exhibit together, we are fairly unique.

Three things about us that I find noteworthy are that we are social creatures with a great capacity for imagination and curiosity. I will elaborate on this last point in my next post.