Atheism - Agnosticism - Freethinking

Before starting the actual post, I first want to note that I will refer to some people I know, but I have given them nicknames. This is because I am not completely sure if my memory about what they actually said is accurate and I may have adapted their opinions a little for the sake of clarity. So, persons in this post are fictional. Yet, I can’t say that any affinity with reality is totally coincidental. The nicknames, to start with, are not completely arbitrary. :-)

Recently, I met Tom. He is an American navy veteran and lives presently in England. Calvin and me had a long chat with him one evening, about history, economy, politics, culture and religion. We switched from one subject to the other and found out that all three of us have different, yet related opinions on all of them. Tom of course, as the oldest of the party (and believe me, there is quite an age gap between him and us) had the most authority and spoke with experience. We were the idealists, Calvin the radical one and I the yet benevolent one. Basically it comes to this: Tom has been through many things and has carefully changed his viewpoints times and times again, but of some things after all he has come to be very certain. Calvin has learned through background and experience to stand up for some very honourable principles that he is very confident and combatant in. And I… well. I am ignorant. But it is through this kind of discussions that I gradually decide on my standpoints and principles. One interesting thing that I learnt that evening, I want to tell you about.

We were talking about religion. None of us is religious. But this already is a problematic assumption, because in English there is not, as in Dutch, the distinction between being religious (‘religieus zijn’) in the sense of having a religious disposition and being religious (‘godsdienstig zijn’) in the sense of being a believer in one or other religion, either Christianity, Jewish religion, Islam, Buddhism or anything (fundamentalist) of the kind. All people are religious, I was taught in the religion classes at secondary school. (By the way, I gladly believed that, though I have recently come to doubt it.) This only means that people somehow are looking for other than scientific knowledge. They try to find explanations for big life issues relating them to ‘higher’ and unknowable powers. But also, they like to add sense to ordinary events by attributing extra meaning to them. For instance, they define rituals and depend on them (in the sense of look forward to carrying them out and make the most of them, not being dependent on them). My personal opinion on why people do that is matter for another post maybe.
It is clear that this is still different from being a believer. The problem is that Tom and Calvin did not make this distinction, maybe because it’s not in their language (let’s not discuss the issue of the power of language over people’s way of thinking here and now, but we must keep it in mind!) and what’s more, they only acknowledged the first aspect of ‘religionism,’ namely that of finding other than scientific explanations for the big things in life: why are we here, what’s life all about (with a wink to Monty Python). For them, religion is “We’re here because God created us” and “Life is all about getting to heaven.” And, oh yes, also “God loves us all alike” as an excuse for committing sin and being pardoned straight away.
So, this was the kind of religion we focussed on in our conversation. I must point out, however, that I didn’t realise all this myself at the point that we entered the discussion, but only came to realise it during hours of post-consideration on all we had agreed on finally, feeling that somehow there must be an explanation for the difference between the opinions of Tom and Calvin on the one hand and mine on the other because basically we found that we had the same principles.

This may all sound very preliminary at this stage. The actual considerations I want to get across are still to come. Here are just some introductory notes. However, the rest will come in another post. Firstly, because there is lots of work waiting for me to be done today and secondly, because I am trying to keep my posts short and thus better readable. So please hang on!