I don’t think there’s much harm in that. It’s what my parents and best friend do, and I admire them. They say they’re religious, but when it comes to brass tacks they’ll use their own common sense every time.
Religion, worn lightly in that way, is just clothing for whatever your beliefs are. If you believe in social justice, say, you may quote Jesus or Isaiah to that end, but your convictions are pretty much your own. Religion, if not taken at face value, is a pretty nice bundle of poetry, song, holidays, and moral precepts, which may not be bad as a component of one’s life. I’m not entirely sure I don’t want to keep up participating myself, just to be a member of the community.
Religion taken seriously is a completely different animal. If you’re sufficiently literal-minded, you can’t wear it lightly. You wind up like I did in high school, working in a genetics lab and seriously believing that my gel electrophoresis wasn’t working because God was angry with me. I can look back on that time with some degree of amusement now, but it was hell. I was pretty damn close to drinking acrylamide on several occasions. (Happy ending of sorts: there turned out to be a physical explanation for why my experiments didn’t work. It wasn’t divine retribution, but contaminated reagents.)
The thing is, nobody asked me to be a superstitious, cringing freak. Most people where I grew up took their religion lightly. They had a little healthy hypocrisy. But I didn’t; I took it at face value, because I was literal-minded and had a good eye for logical consistency. And when you do that, you wind up praying over your gels.
I don’t think there’s much harm in that. It’s what my parents and best friend do, and I admire them. They say they’re religious, but when it comes to brass tacks they’ll use their own common sense every time.
Religion, worn lightly in that way, is just clothing for whatever your beliefs are. If you believe in social justice, say, you may quote Jesus or Isaiah to that end, but your convictions are pretty much your own. Religion, if not taken at face value, is a pretty nice bundle of poetry, song, holidays, and moral precepts, which may not be bad as a component of one’s life. I’m not entirely sure I don’t want to keep up participating myself, just to be a member of the community.
Religion taken seriously is a completely different animal. If you’re sufficiently literal-minded, you can’t wear it lightly. You wind up like I did in high school, working in a genetics lab and seriously believing that my gel electrophoresis wasn’t working because God was angry with me. I can look back on that time with some degree of amusement now, but it was hell. I was pretty damn close to drinking acrylamide on several occasions. (Happy ending of sorts: there turned out to be a physical explanation for why my experiments didn’t work. It wasn’t divine retribution, but contaminated reagents.)
The thing is, nobody asked me to be a superstitious, cringing freak. Most people where I grew up took their religion lightly. They had a little healthy hypocrisy. But I didn’t; I took it at face value, because I was literal-minded and had a good eye for logical consistency. And when you do that, you wind up praying over your gels.