belief

"Without relying on religion, we look to common sense, common experience and the findings of science for understanding," he said.

I read this sentence and the article where this sentence was quoted while Bungbung was going through regular checkups. I stopped and smiled and frowned and nodding and shaking my head. A lot of thoughts, unorganized ones, have been in my mind for some time since I came to the US, seeing unbelievable conflicts between religion and science. This leader (presumably the US) of the Western world is actually not entirely embracing scientific reasoning, but a loud proportion of it is taking symbolic religious wordings so unreasonably seriously.

The person who was quoted is a world-famous spiritual leader. I don't read much about him. I don't know much about him. I don't identify myself as a student of the religion he represents. I never had any particular fondness toward him. But I like him because of that sentence.
I also like Kim because she once said "God gives us brain because he wants us to think."

The point I want to make is that religion and science are not opponents. Dalai Lama is almost equal to Buddhism from a Westerner's point of view. Kim is a dedicated Christian, specifically United Methodist. They don't ditch science.

Therefore, I should not ditch religion.

Three hours after Bungbung was released, I was reading an essay in the latest issue of Observer. The title was A Deadly Philosophy. The author, Wray Herbert, tried to answer the following questions in a short simplified way.
Why is the 20th century the deadliest century on record?
Why do people kill people for religion, ideology, or philosophy difference?
Why an alternative belief system is a threat to your belief system?

Blindly religious people, such as those who do not believe evolution but optical illusions, claim that they believe what they see, but in fact they see what they believe. True scientists try not to be biased (and they admit the possibility of being biased) to understand the world. I try to "see" things unseen because I know that eyes and our visual system is not very reliable.

Recently (if you have followed my blog) I was reading American Gods. I finally finished it. My reading was slowed down because this fiction actually is quite philosophical.

When Shadow (the protagonist) died, he was asked to make a choice after the final judgment by a god or by an instrument of a god. He chose nothingness. He then was left in a dimension of nothingness. By definition, there should not even be a dimension for nothingness. He was in nowhere. He had no form, no label, no name, no feeling of time, no emotion, no nothing.
Such beginning of an afterlife is so philosophical and consistent with my superficial understanding of Taoism and Buddhism. At the end, there is nothing. Because there was nothing at the beginning, and life is a circle, so death is a return to the beginning, which is nothing. At the individual level, life or death has no meaning. At the society or species level, life may mean something.
But Shadow was still there in a dimension defining nothingness. That's why he could be found and revived by a god in need of his help. So what is nothingness? If even nothing cannot last forever. The novelist, Neil Gaiman, tried to give nothingness a definition. Humans are meaning-making creatures -- I agree with Wray Herbert.

Another example is a monologue of a character Samantha Black Crow. Several bloggers actually posted the entire monologue online, like this one . I also found a YouTube video recording an event where Neil Gaiman read the entire monologue to his fans. I read the monologue at least twice when turning the pages. The first half of it is not very touching to my heart because of the cultural barrier -- I am not an American. The second half may articulate part of my belief system.

"... I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.
"I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies.
"I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.
"I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it."

Life is what happens when you're alive.

As put in the previously mentioned article A Deadly Philosophy, humans may be the only creature who knows we are going to die eventually. But we are not freaked by this fact because of religious, spiritual, or personal philosophical supports in our head. Human mind is amazingly good at processing incomplete information and creating meaningful believes to feed itself.

So I don't ditch religion. I believe in something that cannot be tested fully or objectively. I am not offended or afraid when my belief is proved wrong. Time changes. People change. Believes can change too.
I believe that believes can change. You can be scientific and religious at the same time as long as you are a scientist who is on a journey of finding evidence for and against your believes. I am.
I am a meaning-making creature.