Finding personal religion

To the editor:

After a mid-life crisis forced me to abandon my religious assumptions about the goodness of God and the purpose of life, I decided to look at the world as if there is no God. And after a year or so I became surprisingly aware of how totally dependent I am on other people and the cultural institutions of the community.

It slowly occurred to me that I was educated by the local school system, blessed with the benefits of my employment, nourished by the farming industry and sustained by a support system of family, friends and neighbors. At the same time, and just as importantly, I also learned to accept the good and the bad facts of life with equanimity and balance my own best interest in accordance with the good of others. In short, after half a lifetime of experiencing the physical activities and mental concerns of human life, I adopted a way to live that satisfies both my physical and spiritual needs.

During the next 20 years, I acquired a practical awareness of reality — which includes the grief of losing a loved one — and became mostly content with the circumstances of my life. Eventually, I came to realize that everything in the world really does make sense after all, and the truth of that simple fact soon became the basis of a personal religion of my own that explains to my satisfaction how I perceive the existence of the universe and the role of human beings in the scheme of things. My personal religion is the product of accumulated intellectual knowledge and emotional experience, coupled with an inherent awareness of “truth” that has been reinforced by many hours of thoughtful contemplation. We all have a personal religion, and it is at least a little bit different from all others.

Surprisingly, my acquired ambivalence toward the many faults and failures of organized religion slowly diminished as I came to realize that organized religions are a necessary component of human culture. In recent years, I’ve come to understand that the concept of spirituality is introduced to mankind through the ancient beliefs of organized religion, and at the same time, different groups of people are united through common beliefs and values that are generally good for the survival of the world’s different cultures. But even so, with or without organized religion, the self-conscious mind of a human being tends to develop a truer understanding of our place in the scheme of things, and we eventually learn to recognize the value of acquiring intellectual knowledge and emotional experience.

The process of living an ordinary human life contributes to the collective knowledge and experience of mankind, and if we take good care of our bodies, minds and environment, we might survive long enough to honestly appreciate the true potential of human life on Earth.

Art Carney

Wasilla