Here’s the thing.

As patient readers know, I was raised without religion. We didn’t even have a “technical” religion, as in “Well, I guess technically we’re Catholic… ”

What I am saying is that there was no house of worship we “should” be going to but never do because church sucks. ^[1]

My mother had abandoned her Catholicism when she was a teenager, long before any of us kids showed up. And she did so consciously and deliberately. She didn’t slowly drift away from the church.

She left in a huff and never looked back.

So my embrace of religion might come as a surprise to some, but know that I am not accepting the existence of an omnipotent father deity with an oddly erratic parenting style. I am not capable of that.

If I ever believe in that sort of thing, it will be a conscious choice to believe in something because it makes me feel better, and nothing more.

But that doesn’t mean religion is wrong about everything. There are a lot of very good and valid concepts buried in the inner workings of the three big monotheisms, and I think it would be a mistake to throw them out with the proverbial bath water.

So here’s the ones I believe in.

I believe in sin. Not in the sense  of it being a negative number on your ecclesiastical scorecard, but in the psychological sense. A person sins when they act against their own beliefs. This “sin” will remain in the mind of the sinner until something is done about it. Sin is, in essence, the persistent form of guilt.

Speaking of which….

I believe in guilt.  Guilt got a bad name because a lot of bad religion made people guilty about far too many unimportant things and for the victims of this abuse of guilt, the only way to escape it is to abandon guilt entirely, at least in theory.

But guilt is a very important emotion. Guilt and anticipated guilt are the muscle and bone of morality. It’s the emotional enforcement wing of our ethics, ready to dole out the punishment for doing that which we know to be wrong.

Guilt is not the brains of the morality operation – that job tends to go to a melange of what we’ve been taught is right and wrong and what we have figured out on our own – but it is the heart of it.

Guilt can be a good thing.

I believe in confession. I consider the Catholic ritual of confession to be one of the most brilliant bits of folk psychology ever. People need a way to deal with guilt and the Catholics have a method. You confess, thus relieving you of the tension that comes with keeping a guilty secret. Then you perform a symbolic act of attrition which often involves a form of the mantra repetition method of blanking out the conscious mind and letting the subconscious do what it needs to do in order to heal itself.

I abhor the concept of original sin and I deplore all the ways Catholicism has made people feel guilty for merely being human, but when it comes to confession. I think they are right on the money.

But what about when the guilt and the cognitive dissonance associated with it, gets so bad that it becomes a crisis?

Well, religion has a cure for that too.

I believe in salvation.  When people are overcome by their feeling of sin and guilt and run out of ways to run away from themselves, it puts them in an extreme state of mind where their psyche is particularly open to change and where the conscious mind has been subdued. This allows the mind to relieve itself of its guilt in a massive burst of unimpeded emotion, and the enormous relief caused by this release is absolute bliss to the person and with that bliss comes the strong urge to thank someone for it.

Religion gives them someone to thank.

Now where this relief “comes from” is irrelevant. I think it comes from a buildup and release of electrochemical potentials in the brain , others ,might think it’s God, others Allah,and so on. It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that the human mind has the capacity for this kind of transformation, and I think this capacity should be both nurtured and trained.

I also happen to think that this capacity of ours is heartbreakingly beautiful and it makes me happy-sad to think about it.

I believe in contrition. To be specific, I think the only known cure for guilt is right action. Ideally, this should take the form of actually repairing the damage you have done via your sin, and thus, repairing the injury to your psyche as well.

However, there are many sins which defy contrition, and for those poor unfortunate souls plagued by this unresolvable guilt, symbolic acts of contrition are needed.

This should take the form of something as close to repairing the damage as possible, even if it’s only done in symbolic form.

And I believe in God.  Not as a magical sky god, but as a way of personifying our highest ideals in order to give us something to strive towards. Societies need this kind of ultimate inspirational ideal to act as a beacon that shows them the direction in which they want to go.

They also need comfort in times of trouble, company when they are alone in the world, the feeling of safety that comes from believing oneself to be protected by a powerful alpha male, someone to praise for the good times and curse for the bad, and dozens of other functions that religion performs for people.

Therefore, I believe in religion.  Nothing else could possibly take over all of those jobs all at once.

I might not believe in the literal truth of any mystical religion.

But I do believe religion does a lot of good in the world.

And I wouldn’t take that away from anybody for anything.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.