Having Morals

THE KITCHEN CREW Cooks at the senior center are great, and folks jokingly beg them to never ever leave. However, just yesteday they fired the sixty year old lady who is a a Pentecostal Christian, dresses conservatively, and can be rather quiet. They fired her for allegedly, get this, stealing cash from the donation box, a brown wooden box up front where you pay, if you can, for your lunch.Each day when we seniros enter the building for lunch, we can stick a five or so in the donation box; its suggested, but nto mandatory. Soem of these eol people live on very modest income. The Pentecostal lady, hair in a bun, dressed for the nineteenth century, caught with her hand in teh cookie jar, so to speak. I shouldn't be shocked. My best guess, my intuition, is that petty theft and crime of all kinds is not much less prevelant within the religious community than anywhere else. We tend to have the idea that, to assume that religion improves people, without having the slightest bit of evidence that it actually does. They say that locking our doors doesn't keep out any crooks or prevent them from stealig from you, but that it does keep the rest of uw honest people honest. This I believe. I was taken to church as a young child, pre first grade, and I honestly cant remember whether I was asked whether I really wanted to go. I probably did. I was almost certainly given a choice, throughout my childhood, sixty five years ago. I do know that I stopped going at a very early young age, stopped going to Sunday school and church, at some point before fourth grade. One year, when I was about six or so, I was sent to "Vacation Bible School" as they called it. I had mixed emotions about it, mostly negative, and that didn't last long either. As I made my way through grade school, those explosive growth first through sixth grade years, I knew that I was not becoming religious, even as I was learning more and more about religion, including the Bible. I knew,just as I stillknow, that "religion" per se, was not, is not, for me. Now, at seventy one, I go to church, although I still haven't changed my view of religion; that it has both positive and negative aspects and qualities. But since I seemed to have found an organized religions perfectly suited to me, which still seems amazing to me, my general attitude towars organized religion needs to be, should become, so I believe, more tolerant, expansive, and inclusive than ever before. It wouldn't do well for me to gleefully eter a Uniterian Universalist church every Sunday, which is my intent, while simultaneously disparaging any other, or all other religious faiths and traditions. And if, for example, I happen by virtue of my inner nature to embrace Mark Twain's remark that "The Bible contains some noble poetry, clever fables, a vast quantity of obscenity, and no fewer than one thousand outright lies", well then, so be it. I take my bible to church every Sunday, or grab one already there. I ring the bell to signal church beginning. My attitude is "when in rome". I can certainly accept and respect the religiosity of every one else, while rejoicing in my own, as others seem to. I have no need to nor interest in converting anyone to anything, although I am always willing to teach what little I happen to know. Like everyone else, I make more mistakes before nine o'clock in the morning than....who knows who? Kant said: "I am in awe of two things; the starry heavens above me, an the moral law within me." Perhaps our greatest blessing of all is our awareness of both.