Whether or not you believe in one or more deities or even in life after death, there are advantages to being religious.  This is counterintuitive but true. Being an atheist is not the same as being faithless, not the same as believing in nothing. Many atheists, are vigorous enough in opposing the widely accepted canon of Western religious doctrine as to make them persons of deeply held belief.  They may proselytize as vocally as true believers, witness the number of books on this subject by the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins. Why would these men write so many books and make their ingenious and convincing arguments,  if they didn’t take religion seriously? It’s a plain fact that most people don’t care about religion as much as many atheists do. Many atheists propose not simply to deny the belief in God. They have not replaced standard religion with nothing, but with alternate belief, and it is not as simple as believing in science, either.

Religion must be important for the professed atheist, only he finds the party line of most faiths, untruthful, or inadequate or simply outdated.  Examination of large issues transcending the single human life, and notion of the good life and ethics, are issues as critical for many atheists and theists as the standard religionist, even more pivotal.  These persons are not immoral as some religionists would have us believe, but the opposite. Atheists may find themselves unable to accept hypocrisy and violence which is part of standard religion, with so many examples of individuals who enrich themselves on charitable contributions, molest children, foist their beliefs on others and commit atrocities in the name of their church. Perhaps these crimes matter less to the true believer who can absorb some evil for the greater good, but they have driven away good persons of conscience. The  truly faithless person is the one you shouldn’t trust, indeed need to watch for, whether affiliated with a standard religion or not.

I am not one of those who counts as stupid someone who practices a standard religion. In fact I respect the pious person of any faith, assuming that through piety they express reverence for ethics, and above all people and human life and are looking up, wanting to understand the mystery in all things. Your belief system needs be influenced by modernity, knowledge and science, in my book. Too many are those who passively follow the faith of their own ethnic group. I fully understand how this grounds them in a system of inherited rituals and beliefs, as well as a social community in which people thrive. If you are not part of a community, you are isolated, on the outside looking in.

In my own faith, are many beautiful rituals. One is the constant blessing of every mundane thing, which by the alchemy of thought, transforms the ordinary into something holy, the elevation of every thing and every time.  I personally find this quite beautiful. I for one, have an inner feeling of warmth as I thank The Deity even as all communications seem one-sided.

Now that we have an idea about the immensity, how each small thing fits into a larger pattern than any human ever dreamed of, it seems foolish to believe that the Creator or all galaxies revealed Himself to an ordinary guy, a member of some insignificant little tribe in some little place in the Near East, or in some river valley in India, then eventually fell silent in modern times and has ceased intervening to save anyone or anything at all. He may have sent onto our planet  an avatar or representative of Himself.  Not only were His followers not rewarded, but commonly scathed and martyred in terrifying ways, hanged upside down or ripped to shreds .  Those were neat explanatory concepts at one time, and they move some of us even now.  Our  21st century knowledge base requires belief in a greater Deity if you are so inclined, than was referred to in any of the old religious texts. Such a God embraces enormous swaths of space-time. That in turn, forces us all under a much larger umbrella, of respect for traditions of others.  There are 7 billions of us humans now who have to live and plan together if we are even to survive. Systems of governments, methods of war and agriculture, all manner of things, become outmoded, and so many religious practices. We have no choice but to act according on the basis of what we know.  We are as Janus looking back and forward at the same time, reverencing ancient practice but influenced by modernity.