I believe I'm a pretty moral person. I have strong convictions and beliefs, and I try to stick to them. This is, of course, with the Ophrah-ization of my generation ("All beliefs should be treated with respect regardless of your own beliefs, and one should never try to forcibly push your belief systems onto others") has led me to largely lead a life quite different from my peers, where I've made conscientious life decisions. Oftentimes I'm confused over my own belief system in regards to Christianity; I think I let down people in both worlds - atheists who believe any religious faith is bad, and Christians who think my generally nonchalant attitude towards Christianity means I'm the worst type of sinner.

I was raised in a Presbyterian church until I went to college - in high school I was that kid who took religion a bit too seriously. Being raised in the church made looking at life so easy - things were evil and things were good. You were either going to heaven or going to hell. This made decisions in high school easy - drugs are bad, underage drinking is bad, not studying for school is bad (just kidding!).

There is an obvious disconnect from reality with this mindset - which is largely the problem with the fundamentalist Christians in America today. It's not that individual Christians are bad - personally I feel very comfortable with the Christians in my life and with their viewpoints - but when you aggregate them into a group, there's a tendency within that group for the moderates to be just apathetic enough so all you end up hearing is mumbo-jumbo from the fundamentalist extreme Christians about "intelligent design" and all sorts of ridiculousness.

Lately I've really started to believe in the impossibility of finding the "right" in any action. I don't want to delve too deeply into the philosophical and semantical problems with the concept of "right" (What exactly is the end result we're trying to achieve with a "right" plan of action given the vast parameters for success?), but I have a few examples that have largely been bothering me.

Look at poverty. Everybody in the world agrees poverty is a Bad Thing. Everybody agrees something must be done about it. So, of course, we say to ourselves, "Let's give Somalia a whole bunch of food! That'll stop the poverty and starving!" But what happens when you ship a whole bunch of food to a starving African country? The market price for food drops to zero, and the agricultural "industry" in Somalia gets destroyed. So one one hand, we give the Somalis some food that sustains and stops the death rate from hunger ... but in the medium to long-term, we've destroyed the one hope for the Somalis to become self-sustaining. That's not to say that aid doesn't help - if the Somalis in my previous example had a solid educational base where allowing them to skip the agrarian cycle for developed nations (farming -> industrialiation -> manufacturing -> services is generally the path that most developed countries followed), this would be a win-win in the short and long term. So we clearly have a situation here with Africa where the "right" thing to do seems to give them food, but this breeds a dependency and destroys the one industry an uneducated, underdeveloped country has a chance at succeeding at.

What about North Korea? I used to be pretty black-and-white with this issue as well. Kim Jong-Il and his regime is largely one which oppresses human rights, murders dissidents (and their family members), and generally makes life difficult for its neighbors. But who are we, as Westerners, to say that the lifestyle and ideology they choose is wrong? Reading some of the NK state propaganda, it seems that they largely have no interest in living a manufactured world where our lives are defined by the money we make and the things we buy. How many times have I read posts and heard people gripe about the vicious cycle of financial dependency that a capitalist system breeds? What if there are some North Koreans who value living in an underdeveloped nation that maintains a pristine environment and maintains that "true" Korean lifestyle without watering it down with Americanization?

Don't confuse what I'm saying by thinking I support the NK regime. My point simply is this - if we truly live in a Lockean society where every person is allowed to hold their own beliefs and the only rights of government are to protect the lives of its citizens and protect the right to property, is it really necessary to impose onto a group of people the idea that pure capitalism is the best way to live? What if they are willing to accept a more inefficient way of living which protects the environment or some other tangential issue that isn't directly addressed by the free markets?

Anyways, going back to the main point I wanted to address - the pervasiveness of Christian lifestyle in our political system today. I still very much consider myself a Christian, but my main reason for leaving the church was that the tolerance the church preaches was not being followed. Although many Christians I know are incredibly open-minded, I felt that going to church was a form of indoctrination that was making me less receptive towards other types of people. I also felt very uncomfortable with the idea that Christians should always try to preach the word of God to non-believers; if someone is interested in learning, I'll explain what little I know of the Christian faith, but never would I actively try to "convert" any one of my friends to that lifestyle for the same reasons I would never push a business issue onto my friends.

As an aside, I've always found people with strong convictions to be the most fascinating people. I mostly run into people who have opposing viewpoints as I do, but as long as their convictions are well-thought out, I've always had a deep respect for people like that. I'm always searching for people who live a completely different lifestyle with a different set of moral values that I do, which is partially why I enjoy consuming online journals so much :)

Going back to this whole evolution/creationism/intelligent design issue, I'm amused by the way the Christians are trying to polarize this into a 'right/wrong' issue. They claim that there are "two sides" to the story, and this I largely agree with. Throughout history, academic truth has largely been influenced by the lens of society. When the Pope was the ultimate authority, everything was viewed through a religious lens, and thus people like Galileo and Darwin were largely ignored. With the advent of the scientific age, our society largely ignores theology as a legitimate science because it's not "real" enough. The one lesson I learned from chemistry is that science requires a similar leap of faith for experimentations as well. Throughout time, theorems have been largely been accepted as truths until later we find out, "Whoa, that was wrong." Based on scientific evidence, at that time, those theorems were largely viewed as truths (not proofs though). Look at scientific studies today - two studies can find the exact opposite items; I think there's a fundamental force of nature (karma, God, luck, fate, the Force) that science can never measure or prove. That is to say, science is not as much of an absolute truth; if anything, good science and good theology are the same level of truth.

My main issue with Christians is that they are trying to push their version of history into the history books under the guise of "telling both sides of the story." But what about all the other explanations to the beginning of the universe? Are we going to start putting the "other side of the story" for every debatable item to our children? What about conspiracy theories that we never landed on the Moon? What about the arguments for racial purity for the sake of maintaining cultural distinctions among humans? What about the theories that FDR purposely allowed Pearl Harbor to happen to allow the US to be drawn into WW2? These are all valid viewpoints from a wide variety of "facts" that we could spend a lifetime explaining to children in schools. The point is that it's pointless to try to explain everything.

Children should be taught to think critically; what facts they learn are largely irrelevant. Teach them a love for books and an open mind; let them read about whatever theories they want in their spare time, but let's try to keep the schools as science-oriented as possible, since we live in a scientific age. (If I had a blog during the 15th cenutry, I'm sure this long rambling would have ended: "but let's try to keep the schools as church-oriented as possible, since we live in a religious age." C'est la vie.)

Edit: This has some minor bearing towards my post at hand, and I feel it's important enough to mention, but I'm far too lazy to fit it in with my crappy framework of an argument above.

People should always strive to expand their horizons in the way they think and the way they live. They should never fall into a habit of living in the comfort zone for their whole lives - disruption and change in life is great for learning. That said, I've seen semi-serious Christians go to church and fall into the routine of simply going there and accepting what they are told. There's no internalization of the lessons and application in one's life. It simply becomes a game of "I love God, God loves me, I'm so grateful for His grace." The extent of the impact of religion on a person is limited to that person - the only way religion ever seems to impact anybody but that person is when they evangelize. Rarely is there an expansion of ideas or an open-mind ... it's simply "Follow God's rules or your wrong." I can't stand the strict interpretation of the Bible.

I get the impression that whenever Christians do something, it's always to try to convert someone to their cause. There is never a purity to their actions - it's always marred by selfishness. Very rarely have I met Christians who are simply interested in improving the lives of people around them - it's always spreading the word of God along with it.