As promised, I’m delivering some thoughts on how I interpret Sagan’s piece. If you have not read my previous entry you should read it before proceeding.
As a person open to all spiritual possibilities, I hope no one finds empirical proof in interpreting Sagan’s piece as reason you shouldn’t believe in a God (or spiritual being). I don’t read his article as such.
I’m afraid of people who see something like Sagan’s article and say “Ah hah! See? I have proof that your God and your rules are bologna. Give up the charade.”
I’m equally as scared of someone who is on the opposite end of the spectrum, someone who by all accounts believes that if you don’t believe in what they believe, you are wrong.
To support my openness to religion, spirituality, and a god, I look at the piece Loutre recommended, Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus with an open mind. I believe the message in both is closely related. I equate Santa Claus to the goodness in a belief. I equate the inability to show tangible proof of the existence of God simply to be just that it can’t be proved and nothing more.
The goodness in religion? So many people today have this terrible idea of religion. That it’s this roaring beast (dragon) about to bite everyones head off. Ignore it! There are great ethics and family values taught in religion. It serves as a great fundamental baseline for decency. There’s much, much more and you can take it wherever you’d like to, but for me I find a hard time going beyond the baseline of decency and having faith in something more.
Some people have faith and some don’t. I’m one of those people that has trouble accepting something on faith alone. I’m not bad. Just like your religion isn’t bad.
The two articles go hand-in-hand to support my opinion that everyone has every right to believe in anything they want, whether it be Santa Claus, the Christian god, Buddha, or the bottle of ketchup sitting on my desk.
If one article or another convinces you that you’re “more right” in your way of thinking, I strongly urge you to consider that while you may be right for yourself, you’re not right for me or the guy down the street buying a coffee from Starbucks right now. Once you try to impose your morality set by your god, it’s absolutely within my right to question the existence of your god and expect some sort of tangible evidence. That’s what Sagan is all about right there. As he so eloquently said, you can’t prove anything, so beyond explaining your concept of spirituality you don’t have the right to say that what I believe is wrong.
I think a cartoon I just saw properly depicts my point here:
Who is Carl Sagan and what is he saying in his piece? Carl Sagan is that girl in the fourth cell saying “Wait a second…”