Believing in God

 SUDDENLY THE MAN  having lunch with me said : "I don't like people who don't believe in God".  My immediate reaction, which I kept to myself, was that I much prefer people who do not believe in God, and tend to strongly dislike people who believe in God fervently, and are fanatically religious. Maybe I should have extended the conversation, invited him to elaborate on his reasons, but chose not to. I think he might have said something untrue, like, "atheists are immoral". I was aware of his political conservativism, and that told me all I needed to know. In truth, agnostics and atheists, studies reveal, are at least as moral as "believers", and usually more so. Religion, particularly the Christian religion, can easily and often does serve as an excuse for bad behavior. In the end, all bad behavior by true believers is forgiven, so, why not behave badly, if it brings benefit, which it often does? I say all this as a person who believes in God, which I have for many decades. Like Goethe said: "When I realized that everyone invents his own religion, I decided to invent mine." I realized that I wanted the comfort of believing in God, that believing in God is a matter of defining God, that everyone is free to have his or her own definition, and that one need not choose one's religious beliefs because other people have chosen them. I selected the God of Spinoza, Jefferson, and Einstein, a deistic, pantheistic God. I chose, and choose to believe that the term "God" is synonymous with the terms "universe", "nature", and "cosmos". The most reasonable people to me are agnostics. There is never , or seldom any harm is saying "I don't know". In many if not most situations, the phrase "I do not know" is not only perfectly appropriate, but is the only position which is appropriate. It seems sociologically fascinating to me that all of the world's major religious are ancient, thousands of years old, and conspicuously false. All of them embrace a morality appropriate only to primitive civilizations, and utterly outdated now. People slowly but steadily evolve their religions, but are extremely reluctant to discard them altogether, and create better versions. Neuro science suggests that extreme religious devotion is a form of mental illness, obsessive behavior resulting from brain damage to the frontal cortex. There is evidence that religion is slowly being discarded from human culture. It may be part of the evolutionary process of intelligent species that they pass through a "religious" stage, in which they explain nature and themselves with primitive causation based on ignorance, ergo religion, but eventually their ability to perceive reality be direct observation replace religion with "science". Maybe humanity reached its highest, and final level of religious belief when Einstein said: "My religiosity consists in humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit which reveals itself in what little we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. I cannot conceive of a personal God who would sit in judgment over creatures of his own creation. Morality is of the highest importance, for mankind, but not for God." Until something better comes along, I will regard Einstein's religion as my own, and his quote as my scripture.