Don't get me wrong @whatisis, like Voltaire said I'd defend to the death your right to believe, but I don't. I was taught by Jesuits right through college, so it's not like I'm unfamiliar with the domain. For me it's pretty basic -- years of Latin mass to the contrary notwithstanding, I can't accept the premise of the divinity of Jesus nor the Jesuitical leap-of-faith required to get there.
I suspect the most I could cop to is a loosely Taoist or Buddhist sense of the inevitably of suffering and the purely transitory nature of human existence. I don't worry about the hereafter or the thereafter, full stop.
It's not that I reject religion. On the contrary, I think it's a fine thing and I have fine and good and deeply Christian, Jewish, and Muslim friends. I admire the faithful and respect their beliefs. I have a nice set of Olde Tyme Religion on the iPod (very good for working out), and can't think of many places to hear better music than an A.M.E. church on the south side of Big Midwestern City. But I enjoy it as music, not as a musical road to the Spirit -- if this were The Blues Brothers, I'd be Elwood, and not Jake (and you have to love that this YouTube clip was taken from an Israeli T.V. station and so the captions are in Hebrew!).
It's not a question of "intellectual arrogance" or a belief that I know better than, or have no need for, some old book. I have no "feeling" about religion at all -- and that includes a(ny) feeling of need for...answers, rhyme and reason, help, protection, or any of the myriad other things one might seek in organized faith.
They say there are no atheists in foxholes, but I can't recall a single instance in 15 months in Iraq when even the faintest whiff of a desire or need to pray crossed my mind, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've been in a church of any denomination in any capacity other than tourist since 1990: my wedding, three other weddings, and a presentation I did at Coastal City Presbyterian.
But that's neither here nor there. I'm glad it works for you and gives you a space and place to go.
