thread: 2005-08-09 : The New Open House 2: Religion
On 2005-08-10, James Holloway wrote:
I'm a skeptical atheist, raised as a liberal Catholic. My mother was a Scottish Presbyterian, and she waited until after her mother was dead to convert to Catholicism. Marrying a Catholic was one thing, but becoming one...? I dimly remember attending the occasional Church of Scotland service when visiting my granny as a child.
I remain fascinated by religion, and specifically by the Roman Catholic church. I don't feel like I understand it, or have ever understood it, but I can see that its philosophy, its structure, its changes over the years are vitally important. I find the dynamics of conversion fascinating. I study medieval funerary practice, so I spend a lot of time thinking about belief and practice as far as religion is concerned.
I find the question of whether or not there's a supreme being, a non-human intelligence of some kind that made the world or governs our lives or judges right and wrong, very uninteresting, as I do almost all metaphysical questions. I think I may not be wired that way. I find moral questions, however, very fascinating, and they do tend to bump up against metaphysics, don't they?
