My views on this week's topic are pretty modern. Part of this comes from my own personal history with religion - as others have mentioned, my post on that is back at the beginning of our blog, and it'd likely help establish context if you don't already have it. Part of it comes from the circumstances that I find myself in, particularly in my personal life. These days, I find people who are seriously traditionalist about their religion to be people that I have little to no interest in spending time around. This was actually a more recent development - one of my better friends growing up was Mormon, in a very traditional Mormon family. He could never do anything on Sundays, and his mother had some extremely strict ideas about what was appropriate and what wasn't. Despite this, I enjoyed spending time around him, and he's still my friend to this day. Notably, his family has eased up on their traditionalist viewpoint a lot - they've taken on much more of a modern viewpoint, and that's likely part of why things haven't changed between us. I actually asked my friend and his brother earlier tonight whether they supported WBC, and they looked at me like I was stupid. His brother even said "Hell, no".Finally, part of this comes from my doubts about taking -any- text as the absolute rule for... well, anything. Who's to say that this one version of the bible is any more or less historically accurate than another? Who's to say that any of them are? One might remember that I mentioned the book Blankets, by Craig Thompson, in my religion post. (If you haven't read that book yet, you should.) There's a part near the end of the book where the main character begins to question sections of the bible that have either been altered, or had extra passages added to them, in order to deliver a more positive, uplifting message (as opposed to the original message, which basically said "Screw up and you're damned", or something similar... I'm going off of memory, here). This awakened a likely-eternal skepticism in me about the validity of -any- parts of the Bible. How are we to know what the original thing said, and what's been added or modified over the countless years? We know what we're told, and that's just not good enough for me.
No, my viewpoint is pretty modern. It's pretty simple. I've established to myself, generally speaking, what's "right", and what's "good". I try to be those things and/or do those things as often as I can, even when it's hard (ESPECIALLY when it's hard). I try to live my life more focused on making the people I know happier than making myself happy... and generally, when I can make other people happy, it makes me happy anyway. I try not to judge people (... not -too- much, at least), and I don't generally condemn people if their viewpoint is different than mine (unless they're just plain wrong). Things like that. It's worked well for me so far. I can't imagine anyone really taking offense to it, though I'm sure some people out there would. I don't mind the idea of traditionalist thinking, but in the instance of religion, I don't think the roots are strong enough to be an effective foundation.
Hopefully everyone enjoyed this week. We'll have a new topic announcement tomorrow!
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