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To the editor:

I think the greatest benefit we get from our religious beliefs are the alternative options we arrive at from attempting to justify their value. However, in the first grade at St. Rose, I didn’t even try. I just accepted that God had no beginning or end. Later, the idea of Original Sin and a need for redemption didn’t make much sense either, because I didn’t think I was a sinner. In confirmation class, I struggled to believe that bread and wine are actually transformed into the body and blood of Christ, and finally I rationalized that it must be true — because Fr. Dodd most certainly believed it.

Thankfully, after the eighth grade I discovered the opposite sex and was distracted from those kinds of bothersome thoughts. My first girlfriend and I were too young to get serious, so we just hung out and did stuff together, including enough necking to keep it interesting. After a year or two we were separated by circumstances, and I had to cope with change — which included learning what a few bottles of beer can do for whatever ails a person.

After 10 years of curing my ills, I needed to get a real cure so I got sober, which was a blessing for my wife and three kids. Being sober also helped me become a good Catholic — for a year or so — when birth control and the freedom to use my own mind became important issues to me. During the next 10 years, my wife had three more kids and acquired the means and enough sense to get a divorce, and I had enough sense to stay sober through it all.

Regardless of circumstances, the joys and sorrows of life continue to come and go. After another marriage and divorce I settled into an ideal lifestyle — until age 40, when a mid-life crisis revealed that I didn’t have a clue about how to live my own life. It took several years of introspection and turmoil to realize that I alone am responsible for the quality of my own life and happiness, and I was able to develop a more logical worldview that is based on personal knowledge, experience and a new awareness about the results of cause and effect. A new understanding of the scheme of things awakened a contentment in my life that has continued for the past 30 years, and I’m still counting.

Common sense tells me that organized religion is a necessary part of human culture, and that individual beliefs and ideals are equally important. Creation results from the immutable laws of physics that cause change (and change brings about “God’s will,” whether we believe in God or not). Simply put, the laws of physics changed energy into matter and formed the universe, where environmental changes resulted in evolution and the establishment of life and the mind of man, and man’s immaterial inner-self gives credence to the idea of a spiritual realm of existence. Is it possible that the upward progress of each human generation could eventually bring about a “heavenly” existence on Earth?

Art Carney

Wasilla