Oh My, Now the Friday Five Wants Me To Talk About Religion

1. Were you raised in a particular religious faith? Sort of. My family weren't very deeply religious when I was a kid... My father's since become very devout, but when I was growing up church and religion weren't very big parts of our life. I did go to church occasionally (Presbyterian) and I attended Sunday school for several years.

2. Do you still practice that faith? Why or why not? No, I abandonded it when I was in about the sixth or seventh grade (although it took me a long time to be willing to admit the fact to my family or anyone else). I am now an atheist. As for why... The more I read about both religion and science as a kid, the more I came to realize that traditional religious teachings just aren't a very good way of explaining the world. And the more I learned to think critically and use my brain, the more I came to believe that it's a good thing to question your own beliefs and your reasons for believing things, and to reject the beliefs that can't be supported logically. So that's what I did. Well, there's a lot more to it than that, but I don't necessarily want to get into a whole essay on the nature of belief, here.

3. What do you think happens after death? The world goes on without you.

4. What is your favorite religious ritual (participating in or just observing)? I don't know that I have one. For a long time, religious rituals in general made me really uncomfortable, actually, for a variety of psychological reasons that, again, I really don't feel like getting into just at the moment. That's not the case any more, fortunately; I've learned to relax and not feel too defensive about my own religious beliefs, which makes it a lot easier to accept other people's. But I still don't have a lot of contact with religious ritual of any description.

5. Do you believe people are basically good? I believe that people are basically... people. We do good things, we do bad things, we do things that are impossible to categorize. We do bad things for good reasons, good things for bad reasons, things that we think are good and others think are bad, things that we think are bad and others view as good... In other words, people are extremely complex, and trying to simplify that complexity into the simple dichotomy of "bad" vs. "good" is wrongheaded and pointless.