I’m always just a tad bemused by this particular idea about religion–it’s my private affair and doesn’t have anything to do with anyone else in the world. This poses religion as either monumentally egocentric or ridiculously inconsequential. Egocentric: “Hey I’ve got a God with a meaning to a universe that is all my own; aren’t I lucky! Oh, and by the way, the rest of ya’ll aren’t worth thinking about as I sit here and commune with myself and my God about my own deep truths.” Or ridiculously trivial: “Hey, I have a relationship with the God of the universe, but it doesn’t really make any difference to anything outside myself or how I live my life and the way I think society ought to be organized.” Fundamentally this is a fantasy that won’t work. We have visions, secular or religious, of how the world is organized, our place in it, and the ideals that we ought to seek. A better program might be to have the humility to admit that we don’t really know the whole truth, and that we can’t see everything, and that we need to listen to other people who believe in other gods or no gods to see where we can agree, disagree, or compromise. The idea of humility, of admitting the smallness of our own vision in the face of the deepest truths, is an idea shared by most religions. That political preachers and religious politicians forget that says something about them, not about whether our religious faith should inform our politics. What could would a religion be if it didn’t suggest to me how I ought to live with other people, the basic political question. And what would it be but dishonesty to hide the fact that it is my religion that helps shape my ideas about politics.

— Posted by Peter Kerry Powers