The more I consider my place in the culture war between a multiplicity of dogmatic extremes, I often wonder where the average believer lies. Given the massive bias professed by practitioners of both science and religion, I wonder too, if we'll ever come close to a a functional consensus.
I just finished reading Stephen Jay Gould's essay "Nonoverlapping Magisteria," (Natural History 106, March 1997: 16-22) which offers a more lucid and functional solution to the problem at hand. In the essay, he claims that creationism is a fundamentalist doctrine rooted exclusively in American culture. Due to my own religious upbringing, I tend to side more with Gould than I do with Dawkins. However, I would still categorize myself as a functional atheist. I recognize that the idea of God has social currency and even individual value, but I just can't at this point, live my life as if God is constantly watching me. That is to say, there are no forseeable consequences, in the short or long term, to living a life as if God never existed. Of course I may be wrong, which is why I hedge my religiosity at any given moment as "provisional." I'm sure that as soon as I turn 50 I'll have a crisis of faith as I'm confronted with the increasingly nearing spectre of death; but I'm still young. There's time in my life to consider the potentially eternal conseques of my place on the religious spectrum.
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