Nurture and Religion

Today at lunch I had the pleasure of being party to an engaging interfaith conversation that was neither full of touchy-feeling gushing with phrases like "our common ground" nor marked by aggressive arguments over why people had particular beliefs and practices.

Some of the topics covered were: the ultimate purpose of religion and philosophy, the nature of religious truth (as opposed to mathematical and scientific truth), Paul's tendency to write really long run-on sentences, the distinction between personal religious experiences and religious dogmas and hierarchies, and possible reasons why there is a much larger percentage of self-described religious people in the United States than in Western Europe.

One of the earlier points touched upon by a few of the people present was the quality of their experience with their religion, and how it differed in their childhood from the present. There seemed to be, at times, an unconscious message that when you have a "bad" experience with religion, you most likely leave religion altogether or choose a faith community very different from the one of your childhood.

A lot of the time, I think it's more appropriate to focus on what is the "right" place for someone, religiously. It's not just about how people in a community treat you, about how other people talk about G-d. The church in which I was raised was very nurturing and for the most part I had a very good experience there religiously and socially. Since it was a city church, there was (and still is) a large focus on outreach to the city's homeless and hungry. In the church youth group, we did a lot of service projects inside and outside the city, which were organized in the spirit of justice rather than pity.

However, as I realized later in high school, Protestantism did not click with my beliefs about G-d. My next course of thought was "this doesn't quite work, I need to find something that does." I know some people "drop out" of religion because their childhood religious upbringing didn't click with them or made them feel rejected, and I can understand why they make that choice. Religion in its major, organized forms is not for everyone. But I don't get the people who extend their anger from a specific religious experience towards organized religion as a whole. It's just a lot of unnecessary hate that hurts both nonbelievers and believers, and there's enough unnecessary hate polluting the world to begin with.