I was baptized Catholic.

I received my First Communion in the Episcopal Church.

I was confirmed as a Lutheran.

However, since I left high school, religion has not been a big part of my life. I am spiritual in a way that works for me. I choose not to attend church services. I've been extremely disillusioned by people in the world who claim religion as the excuse to be intolerant pricks and war mongers.

Even as a young child, I remember getting into heated debates at the Baptist Vacation Bible School that I would attend. "How was it fair that just because a person is born in another part of the world, they would go to hell because they weren't born into a Christian family?" I would challenge. No answer was ever good enough for me.

Currently, the Episcopal Church is under a lot of heat for their "liberal" stance on issues such as allowing both women and homosexuals to be members of the clergy. Time Magazine did one of their "10 Questions" interviews with Katharine Jefferts Schori, a woman who has recently been elected as the Presiding Bishop for the USA. Read the article here.

Two of my favorite questions and answers in the article:

What is your view on intelligent design?
I firmly believe that evolution ought to be taught in the schools as the best witness of what modern science has taught us. To try to read the Bible literalistically about such issues disinvites us from using the best of recent scholarship.

Is belief in Jesus the only way to get to heaven?
We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine. But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.

It is nice to see a religious leader who is sane enough to recognize that there is a real world out there and that trying to encompass all of it within the realm of theology causes us to discount a big part of what the universe is all about.



Almost makes me want to wake up early on Sunday morning and go to church.