[UA] What Do You Beleive?

[zenith at evilkitten.org]

> This brings up a question which had just been eating
> at me.  I know there's a couple of pagans on this list
> and there's certainly one or two Catholics.  I,
> myself, am a snarling athiest (although, about 2am in
> the morning I have a nasty tendency to Really
> Beleive.)  What religions do we have represented in
> this mailing list?

I'm technically a Catholic.  I was married Catholic.  I was raised around
screaming, ashes and hair shirt Polish Catholics.  I have a large
consecrated statue of Mary sitting  on my TV entertainment center.  My
cats dig her.

However, my last name (or at least the first half of it) is a Jewish last
name that certainly comes from a very old and definite Jewish family.
How this works is left as an exercise to the reader.

I was, at one time, an agnostic.  And then I bothered to take, oh, about
30 credits of Philosophy, complete with a year of Chinese Philosophy
(post-Han) and a bit of Theology here or there.  This caused me
to believe that the Chinese had it all Sorted Out, as long as the Chinese
in question weren't S'ung Dynasty Neo-Confucianists.  This was, of course,
until I spent time at a Buddhist temple, and decided they Didn't Have It
All Sorted Out, Really and promtly gave up.

And then, of course, was the year of Arabic and Near Eastern Studies.  I
didn't like the food.  I enjoyed reading the Qur'an in Arabic, and it
definitely, well, hums.  But it's a shoe that does not fit.

Mix in a combination of intense studying of dead cultures, a lifetime of
Catholic guilt and Jewish moral superiority, a lack of conviction, the
Philosophy of Space Time, and a touch of advanced calculus, and generally,
at the end, you just get... someone who can spew the facts and recite the
Bible in the Language of Your Choice on a dime, but not someone who spends
much time sitting in a pew feeling bad about the dead guy up front.

I believe absolutely in God.  I believe in a God who thinks it is funny to
sew PI into the fabric of the universe, and watch us try to figure it out.
I believe in a God who hung items in space we can never reach, and enjoys
watching us guess what is up with them.  For every new find, there are
5,000 new mysteries.  I often suspect existance is one big joke, and the
joke is on us.

I don't conform to any Dogma.  Who has time?

**
Emily K. Dresner-Thornber


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