Ok… a bit out of order here. I realized typing those last few updates that I never really closed out the Peace Corps section of this blog. I won’t go into detail here about the last months at site, but something needs to be mentioned. I ended up in Baltimore, working with the Shriver Peaceworker program and going to graduate school for my Master’s in Public Policy. Early in the year, we were asked to write a statement in the vein of NPR’s “This I Believe” series. It seems as good a thing as any to serve as the transition from a Peace Corps to this new fight. Essay after the break
Lesotho is a very religious country. Eighty percent of the population describes itself as Christian, mostly Roman Catholic, but some evangelical Churches have been making inroads. Talking with local friends, it was a matter of time before they asked if I believed in God. For some of them, it was a simple question of what church I went to, but others seemed to be asking for something more- what is at the core of how I look at the world?
The question of belief in God is a difficult one for me. I was a Religious Studies major in college, and it seems unlikely that someone could come out of a semester of critical interpretation and still believe the Bible (or any holy book) is the literal word of God, or even divinely inspired. Religion is without a doubt a human construct, and man if nothing else is a deeply flawed animal.
Of course we created God in our image, what else were we to do? Religion may provide a salve for the existential horror of the human condition, but in the current age of knowledge it’s like a cold compress to lower a fever just before antibiotics were discovered- it may help the symptoms, but we know it doesn’t cure the problem.
But really, a negation of religion is not enough to make up a worldview. When people in Lesotho asked me if I believe in God, I generally answered yes. While it certainly made the conversation easier, my belief of religion as human construct does not preclude the existence of something which many people call ‘God.’
The very fact of human existence is miraculous. It certainly doesn’t require a personal God meddling in the affairs of us earthbound omnivores, nor even an omnipotent or omniscient creator. All it needs is nature and the chance inherent in natural selection. Through the uncountable generations since life began on this planet somehow things ended up so that I am sitting at this desk, typing this essay with technology that uses processes that cannot even be observed to function. This simple fact leaves me with the same awe and gratitude that many people attribute to God.
On a day-to-day level, I am constantly amazed by humanity. The greatest minds of our time are working to develop a unified theory of the most basic, fundamental forces in the universe. It is an almost impossibly difficult task. To even predict the behavior of a large wave formation in the ocean is nearly impossible. Compare this to a relatively simple, common human interaction, say a dinner party, and wave theory looks like simple arithmetic.
Human nature, and people’s interactions with each other, are the most complex systems I can imagine. Reinhold Neibuhr wrote: “man has always been his own most vexing problem.” It is here that I believe religion and philosophy still have something to teach us. I am hard pressed to think of better students of the human condition than Confucious, Spinoza, Okham, or Tolstoy. Even in the last century we’ve had Gandhi, King, and John Paul II. Science has tried in Freud and the whole field of psychology since to provide an explanation for human behavior, but in many cases finds ground already covered by the great religious thinkers of previous generations.
So I keep religious writers on my bookshelf, and when asked in Lesotho, I told my friends that I believe in God. I take the jaw dropping wonder of existence, the sheer improbability of it all, and choose to label it God. A matter of semantics maybe, but one that I feel allows me to better reconcile a fundamentally scientific, rational understanding of the universe with a rich intellectual tradition of studying humanity.
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