When asked about which religion I follow, I can't exclusively choose Hinduism (although my family is Hindu) or Christianity (although I attended a Catholic school) or Islam (although I was born and raised in Nigeria, a majority-Muslim state). I'm a "nominal" Hindu, by virtue of the fact that I've been raised as one, and have absorbed and identified with many of its customs - but I don't follow those customs religiously, nor do I regularly partake in many specifically Hindu activities or religious observances.

I'm far more interested in the philosophical implications of Hinduism than I am in its strictly theological ones - and thus I am, in essence, not a "follower" of any religion. Nor am I an atheist - although I used to be one. The term that comes closest to defining me now is "agnostic theist," but even that's a tentative and not-quite-it sort of label. While it does explain my bizarre tendency to apply the Socratic method to my own theism, it doesn't account for my being a socially-identified Hindu, or for my exploratory interest in all systems of belief.

What's all this pussyfooting about, then? (You ask.) Why can't I just pick a label and stick with it? (Or let it stick to me?) Well. The reason I can't choose a religion is, frankly, because I don't subscribe to one. To any specific one. But I'm still a believer; hence the impossibility of atheism or agnosticism as alternative choices.

In the past few years, I have reasoned, argued and imagined my way from hardcore atheism all the way to tentative belief - with a long stretch of agnosticism in-between. In fact, as I'd said above, I'm still an agnostic intellectually, since I won't claim with confidence that a God or a godlike entity definitely exists. I'd like to think that it does. It makes sense to me. But I wouldn't declare it a universal truth, beyond doubt or questioning; it's a personal truth, and I always question my personal truths, anyway, as a matter of course.

There was a time (when I was an atheist) that I equated religion with all its associated ills. But religion - or faith, if you prefer - is not the source of these ills. Bigotry is. Bigotry isn't religious by nature, any more than it is economic or cultural or racial; instead, bigotry is a way of thinking that is willfully blind. Bigotry sees reality not in subtle shades but in stark black-and-white; it reduces complex situations to their lowest common denominators. Bigotry makes enemies of those who do not share in its blindness, and, if those enemies don't surrender, wages war on its imaginary foes. The tragedy is that, while its foes are imaginary, the victims of its battles are very, very real.

I tend to think of bigotry as a sort of hallucinosis. It begins in reality and partakes of it, but constructs out of those mundane particulars something far more sinister - a monstrous nightmare of interlocking fears, from which the dreamer refuses to awaken. That is what bigotry is. It's a kind of stupidity, a kind of insanity, a kind of violence. It's the worst instinct of the human mind.

But it is not, by itself, religious. Nor is religion the source of it.

So thinking, I began to ease up a little. I abandoned my atheism piece by piece, at a careful and judicious pace - just as a deep-sea diver must "decompress" before approaching the surface. I moved first towards agnosticism, and then, after treading its calm waters awhile, I finally swam towards faith. Not institutionalized faith, mind you, but a personal system that still made sense to me after all the science I'd read. Made more sense to me, actually, than science all by itself. Belief in a universal consciousness became the cartilage that connected otherwise disparate theorems and ideas; I could see them working together, now, like the limbs of a cosmic body. With faith, science moved. Was inspired into coordinated action.

(Well, in my mind, anyway. It certainly needn't do so in anyone else's!)

I've come to appreciate religion. And while I still don't subscribe to any single faith, I do - in a way - subscribe to them all. (To a degree. When it comes to their most basic tenets, anyway!) I'm more of an interpreter than a purist, which gives me a lot of leeway with religious texts; I can agree with the non-violence of Buddhism and the devotion of Islam, and not feel pressured to choose between the two. I focus more on the gist of each belief system than I do on its details - and I try, through reason and analysis, to avoid religious puritanism of any kind. Purists edge awfully close to bigotry, after all, and I'm more terrified of that than I am of anything else.

I didn't start believing in God because I found the concept comforting (although I do), nor did I start believing because I was deliberately brought up to do so (because I wasn't). Rather, I started believing because, without that belief, the world just didn't make sense to me. In subsequent posts, I will further clarify the reasons for my switch from atheism to faith - ranging from the mind-body problem to the impossibility of dualism, and from evolutionary theory to the Bose-Einstein Condensate (trust me, it fits in there!). It'll be fun.

So. Er. That's my protracted and unnecessary exposition on the topic of religion! Feel free to comment with your thoughts and ideas.

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