"Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness, these firmest props of the duties of men and citizens. The mere politician, equally with the pious man, ought to respect and to cherish them. A volume could not trace all their connections with private and public felicity. Let it simply be asked: Where is the security for property, for reputation, for life, if the sense of religious obligation desert the oaths which are the instruments of investigation in courts of justice ? And let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle." (George Washington, Farewell Address, 1796; emphasis mine)

In my youth, I was a member in good standing, formally baptized, of the Baptist Church. Since I lived in the South, I suppose one could posit that I was a "Southern Baptist." As I aged into my teens, I began to experience twinges of doubt about the absolutism of the church teachings and, indeed, The Bible, itself. I suppose we all go through this "wilderness of doubt," just as Jesus did. Late in my High School years, I experienced a rebirth of my faith in God and the Church and, in a fit of revival-inspired ecstacy, was re-baptized. This was probably the high water point (pun intended) of my commitment to organized religion and blind (N.B. I do not use this term in a disparaging manner in any sense) faith.

When I went to college, the gnawing questions of the divineness of man insidiously reentered my thinking. I suspect this happens with all college students who are relentlessly exposed to scientific rationality and that particular form of rigorous, evidenced-based analysis and, in no small measure, the propagandizing of agnostic academicians who infested campuses even in the 1960s. After all, astronomers had long pointed out that not only was the earth not the center of the universe, it was quite frankly a tiny outpost on the very edges of the vast ocean of space. Then, the evolutionist taught us that man was a temporary endpoint of the ongoing process of selection of the species. The indoctrinated student thus was forced to accept that man was plainly another animal that, as James Branch Cabell observed, was just "an ape reft of his tail and grown rusty at climbing." Thus, I (and others like me) were knocked down several pegs from being "just below the angels in the Eyes of God" to merely "King of the Beasts." This startling realization was to affect my thinking and my faith for years.

I have not attended a conventional church service for decades now. I do not often read The Bible. I pray, but not as a ritualized recitation or a pre-bedtime habit. From these admissions, one would probably assume that I have lapsed into some form of agnosticism or, worse, atheism. Both assumptions would be quite wrong. I do profess I have become more "religious" as I have grown older.

Now, before you begin to assume that this is just another ancient who, seeing the end of life’s tunnel, wishes to publically exclaim his rekindled religiosity in the hopes of claiming his place in Heaven or, at least, to hedge his bets. Don’t make that leap. However, I do find myself, once again, swimming against the tide of opinion and, possibly, common sense. For instance, I am not one who holds that membership in a church - any church - brings a greater or closer awareness of the Divine than self-reflection. Furthermore, I do not (as the sabers rattle amongst my enemies in thought and faith) believe that the Bible is anything more than a construction of man seeking to make members of his species less savage and more societal. I do not necessarily believe there is an after life in which we receive a Final Judgement and receive our just rewards though, on this, I keep an open mind.

So, what exactly do I believe? I believe, first and foremost, that there is a God. By God I mean a "prime mover" and a force that guides or influences the affairs of men. I do not mean that the Hand of God directly causes men to do specific things. My God is a "hands off" influence. God does not "allow" tragedies to befall mankind. He does not cause children to die before their parents, hurricanes to level coastlines or wars to level civilizations. We have no justification to "blame God" for any of the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that might befall us during our earthly existence. My God is not a vengeful God nor (to send packing another large contingent of readers) is He a benevolent God. God simply is. Human emotions and traits (kindness, jealousy, hatred, vengeance) are not shared by my God. He does not interfere in the course of history nor does he intervene in the lives of His Creation. Miracles, attributed to God, are merely occurrences that have not been adequately or rigorously examined to provide an explanation or, more commonly, are the product of random chance.

If God does not take part in the trivial lives of His creation, man, how does He remain in our lives and why does He deserve reverence? I believe he instills man with a sense that he is not alone and, more importantly, that he has a purpose on earth. God gives man a sense that he is part of something greater than himself. Without this innate awareness, man is adrift and rudderless in a sea of troubles. Disconnected from the Divine, man is a piteous creature without hopes, dreams, passions (other than bestial) or love.

As Emily Dickinson wrote in Complete Poems (no. 1551):

"The abdication of belief

Makes the Behavior small –

Better an ignis fatuus

Than no illume at all".

Let us, for a moment, examine the bleakness of the alternative: What if, as the atheist holds, there is no God. We - mankind - are, thus, unceremoniously downgraded to only members of the animal kingdom and, as such, our only singularity is our ranking at the top of the food chain and as Earth’s most dominant and destructive species. Of yes, we can also take great pride in the fact that we are the only animal living on Earth that is capable of destroying it and every other living thing upon it. Thus, ipso facto, all the struggles which constitute what Hume called the "solitary, nasty, brutish, and short" life of mortal man amount, in the eternal scheme of it all, to nothing. Man, absent God, is only one of many social animals (not unlike the emperor penguin or the chimpanzee) and his activities are only a cultural pattern of behavior for the good (or ill) of the species. His creativity and the "progress" of his civilization are attributable only to the fact that he has the largest and most developed brain among his fellow animals and for no other "higher" purpose.

If this vision is true, Michelangelo painted, da Vinci sculpted, Shakespeare wrote, and Einstein thought for no transcendent reason other than to put food on the table,to impress their fellow humans and, more to the point, their employers and to have sex with admirers. Evil exists in man (and, indeed, the world in which he exists) only in the sense that some men are asocial, pathologically egotistical, suffer from delusions of grandeur or are just insane. If one is to accept this position, man falls from dizzying heights of God’s Image to the gutter; existing but bereft of purpose. If society is simply the human equivalent of an ant colony and man has no other purpose on earth than to eat, drink, fornicate and die then, well, we are going about this living business entirely wrong. We should, if this premise is true, have sex a lot more and worry a lot less.

Therefore, I chose to believe in something - even if merely delusion - that allows man to see himself as something higher. To hold that, if not "noble," then he is at least lifted by spirit above the jungle floor. Perhaps, I am engaged in self-deception. After all, that greatest of pessimists and athiest, Bertrand Russell, has said "Man is a credulous animal, and must believe something; in the absence of good ground for belief, he will be satisfied with bad ones." It is quite conceivable that I have chosen "bad ground" but it is here I elect to stand. I, at least, am in excellent company.

Equitably put, without a shared, communal belief in a power greater than self, there can be no lasting and just society of man. Man, by nature, is a beast with unquenchable appetites and unbounded passions. As Edmund Burke (much less pessimistic than Russell and a quantum leap beyond him in understanding mankind) observed: "Religion is essentially the art and the theory of the remaking of man. Man is not a finished creation." Without the possibility of redemption through Grace, the spirit of man is but a sere and yellow leaf.

When a society ceases, in the majority, to hold to a Higher Authority, that society edges inexorably to anarchy. It stands precariously before the yawning abyss. Ultimately, that civilization will cease to exist. An abiding and generally held belief in God (by whatever name) links the society of man to tradition, to ceremony and to stability. Again falling back to Burke, our "prejudices" (Burke’s term for beliefs) link the souls and minds of man - "those living, those dead and those yet born" - to a guiding, mediating and governing past. Without such governance, society falls.

I do not believe in my God in order to hold society together. I believe in my God to hold me together; to bind me to those dead and to those yet born. For I chose to believe that man can be noble, just and capable of wondrous accomplishments. Without a consciousness of our Divine Spirit, we are but straw men in the wind tunnel of time. And our time on earth is but a blink of the eye of the Sphinx.