Once upon a time, in a land far away from everything that is evident now, a young lad--a fine young lad!--with adequate intelligence and a bad attitude toward authority, a combination which resulted in a crippling inability to memorize anything that did not have a kind of logic to it--things like dates, and names, catechisms--was herded by custom and community and a contentious religion toward a theological seminary.
There you are! The story of my life! But now, for the rest of the story:
(Think of that deliberately wandering first sentence as you might think of a speaker telling a couple of lame jokes before getting on to his lame speech!)
I suppose I should say, in the interest of disclosure, that the fine lad in question had a fine experience in a parish in California before he went back to graduate school to clear his sinuses, resulting in an easy landing in the (then) 20th century.
It is not to late to get to the point: in the seventy-plus years of my conscious life, I have come from a time when almost nobody I knew was secular--that is to say, not dependent on the authority of religion, but on what reason led one to--to a time, now, when a lot of people are comfortable being secular.
Western Washington State, where I was bred and born and sent up the road to Weyerhauser Grade School #303, was not then on the forefront of intellectual curiosity. It was more like a Northwest Arkansas, with junk in people's yards, and hard-scrabble living, and some Holy Rollers over on the Kapowsin Road. People born in Philadelphia, or New York, or Berkeley, would surely have had a different experience. But no one--no one completely sober, dependent on doing business with his neighbors--said he or she was not religious. At best, one might mumble some discomfort with people who were too religious, that is to say, hypocrical, or (as the years went on and the signals changed) with organized religion: you know, "I am religious but they are just interested in money, so I don't go to church!".
The years have brought a great change. We joke less about worshipping on the golf course on Sunday morning. Our mumbled discomfort about believing in private ways, or mystical ways, or vague ways, are fewer. We point, instead, to the criminal behavior of the Catholic Church, or the homosexuality or extra-marital absurdity of Protestant clergy, or of the outrageous treatment of Islamic women, and excuse ourselves from organized, or for that matter, unorganized religion.
We have come a long ways, here in this famously religious country, during the last fifty or hundred years. As one of those people, I know that life is much more comfortable, much more meaningful, much more promising, than it was when everybody was Sarah Palin, or Billy Graham.
There you are! The story of my life! But now, for the rest of the story:
(Think of that deliberately wandering first sentence as you might think of a speaker telling a couple of lame jokes before getting on to his lame speech!)
I suppose I should say, in the interest of disclosure, that the fine lad in question had a fine experience in a parish in California before he went back to graduate school to clear his sinuses, resulting in an easy landing in the (then) 20th century.
It is not to late to get to the point: in the seventy-plus years of my conscious life, I have come from a time when almost nobody I knew was secular--that is to say, not dependent on the authority of religion, but on what reason led one to--to a time, now, when a lot of people are comfortable being secular.
Western Washington State, where I was bred and born and sent up the road to Weyerhauser Grade School #303, was not then on the forefront of intellectual curiosity. It was more like a Northwest Arkansas, with junk in people's yards, and hard-scrabble living, and some Holy Rollers over on the Kapowsin Road. People born in Philadelphia, or New York, or Berkeley, would surely have had a different experience. But no one--no one completely sober, dependent on doing business with his neighbors--said he or she was not religious. At best, one might mumble some discomfort with people who were too religious, that is to say, hypocrical, or (as the years went on and the signals changed) with organized religion: you know, "I am religious but they are just interested in money, so I don't go to church!".
The years have brought a great change. We joke less about worshipping on the golf course on Sunday morning. Our mumbled discomfort about believing in private ways, or mystical ways, or vague ways, are fewer. We point, instead, to the criminal behavior of the Catholic Church, or the homosexuality or extra-marital absurdity of Protestant clergy, or of the outrageous treatment of Islamic women, and excuse ourselves from organized, or for that matter, unorganized religion.
We have come a long ways, here in this famously religious country, during the last fifty or hundred years. As one of those people, I know that life is much more comfortable, much more meaningful, much more promising, than it was when everybody was Sarah Palin, or Billy Graham.
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