If God exists, I think God is so far out of our field of experience and frame of reference as to be essentially incomprehensible to humans. All of the world’s religions appear to be obviously objectively false. However, I think that humans make sense out of the insensible by thinking in metaphor, sort of like putting masks that we understand on God so as to deal with something which we do not understand. I think religion, religious belief, and religious practice can be positive, productive, and extremely useful both to society and to the individual, even if it is not objectively true. In fact, sometimes I am inclined to think that people can actually in many ways be better off with religion (though not all kinds of religion: a sort of Taoist awareness that “the thing that can be talked about is not the actual eternal thing” is incredibly important, and serves to neuter our dangerous–perhaps even insane–fundamentalist impuses). Since all religions are false but religion is nevertheless positive, I should be able to simply pick the one that appeals most to me and self-consciously run with it. However, I seem to be completely incapable of doing so.
(For what it’s worth, alternately, if God does not exist outside the human psyche, then none of this changes. We can label the unfathomable parts of our own existence and psyche “God” and essentially move on.)
Why am I incapable of picking one and just enjoying it? All kinds of reasons, really. Fear of commitment as a holdover from bad experiences with Mormonism (and a knowledge that “just trying it out” is actually a kind of commitment that can result in sliding down to total conversion if you’re not careful). Persistent gut feeling that the objective truth of religion matters (another holdover from Mormonism). A nagging feeling that all religions are equally, pitifully inadequate when it comes to accounting for all of life and existence’s complexities (even leaving cosmological models completely out of it), and a concurrent distaste for the idea of flavoring my entire life with any particular religious belief’s seasoning. Nervousness about the ease of self-brainwashing. The desire for some kind of mystical experience as a catalyst. And plain old reluctance, like when you’re about to jump off of something tall and your legs seize up and your body just won’t let you do it.
There doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about any of this, either.
Sailing to Byzantium 