I'm always interested in noticing the coming and going of my interest in faith. I remember in the 7th grade, when I was still somewhat attached to Christianity, learning more about Islam. I was stunned to know that Muslims believed in our prophets too, and even in our Holy books. Plus, Islam was founded later than Christianity, and had more, newer prophets. So to me, this meant Islam had everything in Christianity, plus more cool new stuff.

This is telling about the kind of person I'd develop into. In some ways, what makes me a liberal is a thrist for what's new. Somehow, in my mind, everything behind me is a work in progress toward a better future. Conservatives have an instinct for the opposite, where the burden of proof is on new ideas. Jonathan Haidt's political studies show that one of the strongest traits dividing liberals and conservatives is openness to experience. Conservatives have a natural tendency for nostalgia. "Everything was better in those golden days of yore," they seem to think.

A large part of the appeal of religion has got to be its timelessness. There is a natural human desire to be hitched to something that lasts longer than us. Even many atheists want to achieve some sort of immortality through fame or recognition. But being attached to a timeless future appeals to me more than connecting to a timeless past. My view of history is that life was "nasty, brutish, and short," and that my generation and everybody in front of me are proceeding to make the world a more happy, modern, and enlightened place

So of course, the idea that Islam (founded in the 7th Century AD) has more new stuff than Christianity (1st Century) appeals to me. By extension though, both Bahá'í and Mormonism (both 19th Century) have larger appeal to me. The logical conclusion is that I'll ultimately be excited by a religion formed today, or even one that has the promise of being formed tomorrow, which eliminates all current organized religions from my interest. To me, the following statement feels more right: "If it came about more recently, then it must be more relevant." While as an adherent to organized religion is likely to believe, "if it's been around for so many years, there must be something right about it."

Organized religion is powered by the people's automatic belief in precedence.

I wonder how many living claimed prophets there are in the United States? Is it on the order of 1-100. Is it in the 1000s, or 10,000s? I'm guessing it's maybe between 5,000 and 10,000. If this is the case, by the sheer quantity and frequency of occurrence of prophets, a new major religion is bound to be formed every 50 years or so.

With so many candidate prophets, some of them are bound to be very charming and convincing. Plus, with the constant flux in social order, spiritual vacuums are constantly forming. As a result, opportunity meets talent frequently and produces new cults on a probably weekly basis. Some of these cults are bound to seem very credible, and some of them may resonate with the Zeitgeist. Combine the budding movement with a few all-star believers/promoters, and you have the genesis of a new religion.

When I ponder the way people behave today, I find it convenient to think back to a tribe or village setting, and imagine what kind of social roles get reliably fulfilled. Shamans and witches seem to be a regular and normal occurrence, so there is maybe a 1 in 2,000 chance that your son or daughter will specialize in awakening the spirits of others. While as most of these spiritual types will only be blessed with ordinary talent (like singers who only perform in local bars) a few will become superstars, and speak to the soul of the masses.

Modern theories of prophecy discuss schizophrenia as a possible cause. If that is the case, then it could imply that there is an evolutionary reason for prophets to regularly come along, shake things up, and form movements.

I have a strange feeling that The Purpose-Driven Life is very much a career self-help book. While Rick Warren states early on that it isn't a self-help book, you could replace the word "purpose" with "career" in the text, and the book would still mostly make sense. This thought came to me when I read this sentence in the chapter titled, "You Are Not An Accident:"

He [God] also determined the natural talents you would possess and the uniqueness of your personality.

This sounds like Rick Warren is sneaking in advice from career consulting canon. Career self-help books often talk about finding your "signature talents." In The Pathfinder, Nicholas Lore emphasizes that while you can train yourself to be good at delivering speeches, if it doesn't come naturally to you, you shouldn't form a career based on public speaking. And in What Color Is Your Parachute?, Nelson Bolles spends a lot of time helping you find out what your favorite transferable skills are by looking at pre-existing stories where your skills flourished. Other career self-help books focus on Carl Jung's typology theory, which sort of assumes that we have a fixed, God-given personality.

I don't fault Rick Warren for, intentionally or not, including career self-help into his book. A major part of my motivation to read The Purpose-Driven Life has been to help me with my career-search techniques. I had started 2008 off with reading The Pathfinder and What Color Is Your Parachute?, and I felt that they were helping to change my life. At the end of 2008, though, I still didn't have myself fully squared away with what I want to do career-wise. I felt I had exhausted all other options. This made me wonder if I had some other blind spots in my knowledge. And one potential weak spot could be my religious development. That's part of why I considered trying The Purpose-Driven Life.

Now, if I'm going to dabble in religion like that, I must somehow believe there's treasure there. Given religion's massive adoption rates in the world, it seems silly for me to write it off completely. At the very least, it should be one tool out of many I use to navigate life.

How did I come to think that there might be gold in religion? It may turn out that a small comment from The Autobiography of Malcolm X will be what ultimately triggered my recent interest. In the book, Malcolm X mentions that the secular man has thirty-three degrees of knowledge, while as the religious man has more, and Allah has 360. Although in actuality Malcolm X said "white man" not "secular man," the big picture of the idea is meaningful to me: the quantity of our knowledge isn't as important as the type of knowledge we have.

This idea also relates to our contemporary attitudes toward academia. On one end of the spectrum, academics could be evaluated as being the end-all be-all wisemen of the world, the ones who should provide the "right" answers at the decision-making table. On the other end of the spectrum, academics could be valued as secluded bookworms, like how monks have been treated for two millennia. At the zenith of their valuation, they are wise professors. At the valley, they are lowly scholars. In the current state of our culture wars, the Christian Right is trying to diminish our dependence on academia. They constantly ridicule the secular liberal elite of academics. And maybe they're gaining ground in the culture wars. It's seeming more-and-more in vogue to go on a religious missionary rather than join a secular "study-abroad" program.

What kinds of knowledge are really important for living well? Maybe the best knowledge comes from experience. Obama would disagree with that statement. Maybe it comes from a great character. There are certainly some people who seem to go through life's basic rites with aplomb, doing things well the first time: they handled their first relationship well, it didn't take them long to find a career, their first marriage lasts forever, and their children are raised well. The ranking could go from those who never learn from their mistakes, to those who eventually learn through repeated trial-and-error, and then to those who don't seem error-prone at all. Finding out what the difference is between those types of people could probably be the most important knowledge we could have.

The basis of this entry has to do with these two principles:
- One of the most common causes of divorce are disputes over issues of child-rearing.
- All teams of equals need a tie-breaker.

Heated arguments seem to ultimately become a fight over who has a better handle on reality. But if both parties believe that neither of them are the end-all be-all, then they are humbled. They become open to ideas "out there." Belief in God has a "neutral third-party" feel to it. It assumes that there is a deity out there, separate from us, who has the real answers. If there are two people arguing with each other, a belief in God could lend itself to a sense, "well, it's not what I think, or what you think, but what some Third thinks." When an argument ceases (either through disagreement, agreement, or postponement), there may be less bitterness because the final settlement will occur during God's bookkeeping, not ours.

Of course, a belief in God doesn't automatically end dispute. A couple could argue with each other over their interpretation of God or religion. However, arguing over an interpretation of the neutral third-party seems less deep than arguing over "what I think vs. what you think." Plus, if both parties regularly attend the meetings of their organized religion, or maintain a strong belief in a particular dogma, there will be less room for misinterpretation.

In some ways, I'm arguing for the benefit of conformity in a relationship. I'm going to make the radical claim that "healthy" and "lively" patterns of disagreement deserve sarcastic quotation marks. While as debates are fun among friends or partners that don't have children, they're fatal to a relationship when you have disagreements about serious topics, such as how children should be raised or issues of money. Disagreement and debate can be fun when there are no serious consequences.

It's interesting that at the start of The Purpose-Drive Life, Rick Warren strongly urges you to go through the 40-day workbook with a partner. Warren says that all journies are better when they're shared. This jives with another important idea for strong, long-term relationships: it's important for both partners to grow together. Both of these are simply more charitable ways of saying that conformity in a relationship is better. Let's say Partner A takes off on their own for a vacation, discovers some amazing ideas about the world and life, while as Partner B stays home and develops a deeper relationship with their work/passion. When the two re-group, they may have disconnected from their cohesive and harmonious decision-making process.

One potential problem to the "neutral third-party" argument is that it requires both parties to be equal. If one partner is dominant, disputes seem sort of moot. But I don't know how prevalent inequitable relationships are over equitable ones. Some say not all relationships are 50/50, which may be the case in that no two people have equal levels of interest in each other. But, I more generally see partners talk to each other as if they're equals. Even among the households of immigrants from conservative countries, I've noticed that while women do behave like they're weaker, they will talk on the same level with their husbands when it comes to discussing affairs of the household or family.

All of the recent news about Rick Warren has encouraged me to investigate the nature of his success. In particular, I always wondered what about The Purpose-Driven Life has made it one of the best selling works of non-fiction (30 million copies sold).

The book has 40 sections, designed to be read once-a-day, and designed to help you find your purpose in life. And so, a few weeks ago, I decided to try to work through the book, as if I were truly taking the workbook seriously.

This is an interesting experiment given my personal religious history. My parents didn't pre-set a religion for me. My mom was raised Catholic, and my dad was raised Hindu, and initially they argued about what religion I should have. They eventually settled on letting me choose for my own as I got older. However, my mom managed to get me and my brother into church, and even into catechism school. At the age of twelve, I somehow got the notion that I wanted to be serious about religion, and I decided to get myself baptized. In the ensuing three years, I carried a cross with me at all times. I prayed every night and every morning. And I made sure our family regularly attended church on Sunday. Then somewhere in High School, I became disenchanted with religion, and kind of stuck with the agnostic label. In college, I felt I needed to define myself more firmly, since discussions about identity were so prevalent in the dorms. After thinking about it some more, I stuck with the atheist label. The compressed version of my argument for atheism is simply, "I believe in God as much as I believe in the tooth fairy."

I'm still an atheist, but I don't have a negative attitude toward religion. Now, I'm not saying I shouldn't have a negative attitude toward religion. I'm just describing what I happen to be, and maybe in the course of working through this topic, I decide I want to be more antagonistic. As it stands now, my friends and the circles I dabble in are mostly secular liberal. But among them, I tend to be the one apologizing for religion. This may or may not be a good thing, but I'm just describing, from a 3rd-person perspective, what my attitude toward religion is ahead of time.

Having said that, in going through The Purpose-Driven Life, I'm striving to take it seriously. When I read the word God, I want to really feel/think/believe that I'm referring to the same muscular, gray-bearded God in Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel. When I sub-vocalize the phrase, "God will take care of me," I want to really feel what the devout feel. Of course, I'll never be able to fully appreciate what believers feel, but you'd be surprised how much you can approximate the religious experience. I'm only two days into the book, but so far, I'm liking what I've read. Rick Warren is a fantastic writer, and his work seems largely directed at someone like me, who, in his viewpoint, is a lapsed Christian and a secular liberal.

I, of course don't believe that I'm "lapsed," but rather "enlightened," but somewhere in the back of my mind is an adventurous voice saying, "What if this changes you? Wouldn't that be crazy?" And I don't think I'm alone in that feeling. I know two, smart, young ladies who last year both independently intimated similar fears/desires. One of them was hitting a rock bottom in the management of her neuroses, and pondered a few times, "What if my solution is to I end up finding God?" And another friend, who was hitting rock bottom in the management of her social life, echoed with half-seriousness, what her mother told her, "Maybe this is just God's way of teaching me something."

I'm curious to know how the Ancient Greeks treated religion. Was Zeus semantically equivalent to our God? Also, we tend to refer to a Greek mythology, but did they refer to their myths with words like "gospel" and "revelation"?

When we think of the word "religion," often we are imagining a Abrahamic religion. While as with Buddhism, I often hear it referred to as "Buddhist practice." And with Shinto, I often hear about "Shinto rites."

What is up with the Japanese who, I've heard, have "Buddhist births, Christian weddings, and Shinto funerals"? While I'm sure that is not exactly the case for the Japanese, there is some element of truth to that. For example, 64% of Japanese don't believe in God. However, the atheists in Japan are not militant. The basic attitude that would fly in Japan (or at least in Tokyo) is that "belief in religion has some benefits, though there probably is no God."

An anthropologist or sociologist could go to town with trying to classify the varieties of religious attitudes. For example, according to a Baylor University study in 2006, 91.8% of Americans believe in God, but that there are four different Gods we believe in: An Authoritarian, Benevolent, Critical, and a Distant God.

Maybe each of those Four should have different names.

Or better yet, why not try to come up with an inventory of all the different words (in their native languages), that people use to refer to religious concepts. What do they call their God. What do they call angels? What do they call their afterlife? Following that, it would be interesting to learn about the etymology of those words, or understand what those words mean in the context of their own culture.

For example, I think it's interesting that Americans think that Muslims believe in "Allah," while as Christians believe in "God." That's not exactly true, Allah is just their word for God, so they believe the same thing. (At the same time, that's also not completely true either, because Muslims in America still refer to Allah, not God). Is Allah splitting off from God?

Our culture is probably more secular than it has ever been since the Ancient Greeks (were they even that secular?) And so, where do people turn to learn Life Skills? Traditionally, people have turned to religion. But, for many, the mixing of supernatural ideas and "how to live" is an undesirable combination. Take even Buddhism, for example. The Buddhist practice of Theravada meditation has widely understood benefits to your entire life. However, it's hard for some people to adopt because the practice is taught together with alien concepts such as samadhi, nirvana, or chakra points. Those extra ideas can be a distraction from the basic, core teachings of mindfulness.

By Life Skills, I'm referring to knowing how to manage your happiness, your relationships, your health, career path, the development of your character, and your communication skills. Stuff like that.

We generally acquire Life Skills passively, such as through parenting, observation, and trial-and-error. But there is an incredible demand for taught Life Skills. That's partly the reason people gravitate to organized religion. But even outside of religion, there's still an obvious, unsatiated demand for Life Skills. Look at how successful the following books are: The Secret, The Alchemist, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and The Purpose-Driven Life. All of these books attempt to answer that most awesome question: "How shall I live?" We are all hungry for answers.

In Middle School I took a class on Life Skills, and it was fascinating to me. We were taught how to resolve conflicts, manage anger, and effectively communicate our needs. Unfortunately, we were much too young to appreciate the lessons. These ideas would have been better delivered as a High School class or a Freshman seminar. Unfortunately, there's no room for Life Skills teaching. The emphasis for late teens and adults is usually placed on topical competency in major fields, such as mathematics and science. Even Literature—an indirect, secular vehicle for Life Skills—is dwindling as a respectable use of time at school.

A Life Skills school is needed. This school could ride on the wave of the positive psychology movement. Or it could house researchers in philosophy, communication, and psychology. Or better yet, this Life Skills school could just be an ordinary University that just so happens to require all Freshmen to take a heavy load of Life Skills courses. Whatever strategy the regents use, if a University could provide a world-class education, and somehow incorporate the concept of "Life Skills" in its title (just like Brigham Young University implies Mormon life philosophy, and Liberty University implies Baptist), then people will send their sons and daughters there.

Empathy, compassion, respect, honor, dignity, humanism. Where do we pick up those ideas? Some atheists, funnily enough, will send their children to Bible school. For many non-religious (not anti-religious) people, it simply sounds better to send your kids to Catholic school than public school. It'll make them "good," so the thinking goes.

I don't think modernism killed religion. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to poke holes into religion. I presented the Adam & Eve story to my dad, and he asked back, simply, "I just don't understand how Adam & Eve populated the Earth. What, did they have kids and those kids have kids? That doesn't make sense." It took my dad about five seconds to come up with that, and that's the kind of logic that could have been prevalent even in 100 AD.

So the question is, is the inaccuracy of the Adam & Eve story a deal-breaker? Perhaps humans have an innate need for authenticity, or some sort of reality principle wherein we only like to believe things that we know are real. Skeptics and science-minded people who cling to evolution theory would believe that a research paper is essential to have a proper origin story.

But I don't believe that scientific rigor is a prerequisite for a story to be meaningful. For example, I don't believe that Tarot cards have any special power, and yet I find that the readings I get are meaningful. We should separate logical consistency as one dimension of a story, and meaningfulness as another. In my opinion, the meaningfulness is what really matters to us.

The ordinary person hasn't read The Origin of Species, or any of the addendums to the theory of evolution. Nor has the ordinary person looked at all the arguments for and against intelligent design. At some point, we just pick a story that is satisfying enough and run with it.

One of the most interesting chapters in What Color Is Your Parachute? is "What to do if you get stuck." The author, Nelson Bolles, goes deep into a discussion about how getting stuck on the career search is a symptom of an over-active left-brain. The left-brain, the one that controls logic, he argues, is the safe-keeping part of the brain. We use the left-side of our brain to order our world. And ordering our world is an anxiety-relief gesture against overwhelming complexity. However, this is an inappropriate response in many cases, especially in something as thorny as finding purpose. An over-reliance on order will paralyze our thinking as solutions seem to dry up.

The right-brain, on the other hand, is the experimental, creative side. Bolles offers some simple suggestions, such as going for walks, listening to music, and being open to risk. But I think we can go even further and suggest that you turn to religion. It is my belief, that in order to engage religion, or anything supernatural for that matter, you have to activate the right-side of your brain. One of the principles of right-brained thinking is in imagining connections where there are none. Believing in angels, demons, and that "everything happens for a reason," all help to activate a creative style of thinking about the world. Creativity and dabbling in fantasy go hand-in-hand. Both require a leap of faith that transcends the protective logic of the left-side of your brain.

I guess I could call it/him/God my "Maker" and still keep my atheist conscience. I was made, indeed, inasmuch as I was caused by something; something complicated, something sublime, something beautiful, something with all the same wonderful features of life itself. Does that something have intent? Sure, it has as much intent as we can be said to have intent. Our intent is, after all, a creation of Its intent, and therefore a subset of It.

Okay, I have a Maker.

So, what swirls in my mind when I imagine my Maker. I'll tell you what is not in my head. There isn't some Dude in the sky, with a white beard (thank you Michelangelo). My Maker is smarter than an sagacious, muscular grandfather. My Maker is orders of magnitude more interesting than we can comprehend currently.

"My Maker will take care of me." Sub-vocalizing that sentence in my head, by itself, acts as a mild palliative for my generalized anxiety.