Current mood:

busy

Book the Twenty-Third, or, Who Said Anything About God?
I know, I'm behind. Took me forever to read this one, not because I was piddling around, but because I loaned it to someone when I was half-way through it. So, I finally finished it, although I've had it for a close to a month!

Against All Gods is a great little read, pretty short but very powerful. Written by A. C. Grayling as "Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness," the book really struck a huge chord with me. As I get older, and I hope more mature and more rational, my "belief" systems in all things deific are on the wane. In fact, if someone were to ask me at this very moment what spiritual path I followed, I would have to say none. I may claim Paganism or recovered Catholic or lapsed Lutheran, but when it comes down to it, I do not believe in a higher power, and haven't for a very long time.

What I am, if I follow the essays in this little book, is a Humanist, or an Ethicist. I am either too rational, or too stupidly unfaithful, to have any belief in an entity that will come along and rescue me from my ills, which are 99% self-induced. The reality? I must pull myself out of my own pits of despair, since I dug the pits to begin with. They are my problem and my problem alone. Against All Gods rather reinforces that for me. Here is a quote from the end of the very last essay, "The Alternative: Humanism:"

For that is what humanism is: it is, to repeat and insist, about the value of things human. Its desire to learn from the past, its exhortation to courage in the present, and its espousal of hope for the future, are about real things, real people, real human need and possibility, and the fat of the fragile world we share. It is about human life; it requires no belief in an afterlife. It is about this world; it requires no belief in another world. It requires no commands from divinities, no promises of reward or threats of punishment, no myths and rituals, either to make sense of things or to serve as a prompt to the ethical life. It requires only open eyes, sympathy, and the kindness it prompts, and reason.