I grew up attending the Methodist Church (which up in Vermont didn't used to be quite the holy-rollers that they are in the South), and for a time in my youth was very religious.
I attended a Catholic school for middle school, and convinced myself that I would become Catholic one day. I expected that upon going off to college and being able to decide my own life that I'd covert quite soon.
Instead, I became a mathematician in more ways than just study, and began trying to generalize and abstract everything in my life. The oft-observed similarities of religions at their roots, but divergence at the "dos and don'ts" level gave rise to this conclusion:
In my being (indeed, in all beings, I should think) there is a place, a little box often marked "faith". There are a very large number of things you can put there, but the _important_ things that come out of it are always the same: be good to others, be good to yourself, be happy. Everything else attached to religions only serves to cloud those ideas. Though I could thus put anything into that box, it will always have the same result, and so for the moment, I leave it empty, and draw on the same lessons.
It's like there is an abstract class definition for faith, and I'm using a _very_ trivial implementation based on constants, because it's quite a bit faster and more efficient than the other options out there.
I attended a Catholic school for middle school, and convinced myself that I would become Catholic one day. I expected that upon going off to college and being able to decide my own life that I'd covert quite soon.
Instead, I became a mathematician in more ways than just study, and began trying to generalize and abstract everything in my life. The oft-observed similarities of religions at their roots, but divergence at the "dos and don'ts" level gave rise to this conclusion:
In my being (indeed, in all beings, I should think) there is a place, a little box often marked "faith". There are a very large number of things you can put there, but the _important_ things that come out of it are always the same: be good to others, be good to yourself, be happy. Everything else attached to religions only serves to cloud those ideas. Though I could thus put anything into that box, it will always have the same result, and so for the moment, I leave it empty, and draw on the same lessons.
It's like there is an abstract class definition for faith, and I'm using a _very_ trivial implementation based on constants, because it's quite a bit faster and more efficient than the other options out there.