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[quote=Anonymous]I didn't grow up in a religious household, and since I wasn't surrounded by people proclaiming belief, there was never any peer pressure to believe.

Growing up I was fascinated by mythology (first Greek myths when I was little and then in in large part due to comic books and D&D), and in high school I took a class that combined bible as literature/comparative religion/history, that dissected the various bible stories (and the inconsistencies and conflicts between them) and compared them to earlier myths/stories from other religion. We looked at the way health and societal rules were encoded into religion (esp. the OT and kosher rules) and the political influence of churches. It's hard for any religious text to survive that level of scrutiny.

Lacking any fundamental "faith" or familial/societal pressure to conform, I looked at the evolution of religion as an explanation for mysteries and the way science has pushed the explanation of those mysteries further and further back, and pushed our understanding of the universe/possibly multiverse broader and further to the point where "god" is a somewhat meaningless construct (eg, "god is love," or the almost Force-like "god is the life force of the universe"). See Sagan's discussion of the invisible dragon in the garage.

My concept of "afterlife" is consistent with others who have posted. I don't have any expectation that my consciousness will continue  past death or that I will be reunited with loved ones, dogs, ancestors (although I will be very pleasantly surprised if I turn out to be wrong on that front!). I look at the fact that our bodies are made of atoms made in the fires of supernovae and scattered across the universe (as Sagan said, "We are made of star stuff!").  And those atoms will continue to be reused until the end of the universe. My "afterlife" is the effect I have on the lives of others.

I look at the moral constructs associated with the current major religions, and while they can be good guides if actually followed, they have been consistently distorted - frequently in an ends-justifies-the-means manner - to support whatever social values people wanted at the time and to suppress another group as "different." As physicist Stephen Weinberg said, "With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

I don't feel any need for a religion in my life. But, while my "philosophy" (for lack of a better term) works for me, many individuals take great comfort in their own religions, and having some kind of spiritual belief structure is healthier for some people and the community provided by shared beliefs is helpful. While I'm an atheist, I firmly support the right of anyone to believe what they choose and practice the religion of their choice, mostly on the basis of the Golden Rule and the Wiccan principle of "An it harm none, do as ye will." [/quote]

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