re: #230 Feline Fearless Leader

If my parents argued politics they apparently did it away from their children. My father was the conservative from what I could tell with my mother being the liberal. Both college educated (engineer, librarian), came from working class families (truck driver for coal company, steel mill worker), and prized education and choice for their children. Religion was not a major factor in our upbringing. Both our parents were raised Catholic, but my father was non-practicing and my mother attended a UU congregation and was pretty much a secular humanist. I attended “Sunday school” at the UU church at a young age, but that was pretty much more of a child care thing than an indoctrination.

My sister attended a UU congregation as well while my brother and I are pretty much non-religious. He terms it being “a-religious”.

If asked I refer to myself as a “hopeful atheist” and explain that as “I hope there is not a overseeing and interceding capable deity since I dislike the concept of being a lab rat. If said deity is not overseeing and interceding than it doesn’t make much of a difference.” If asked about moral behavior I generally respond that moral and cooperative behavior is to the benefit of society as a whole and that all altruism does not flow from religion.

Although I identify as agnostic, I definitely have a lot of the same philosophy. I look at the world as being the only one I know for certain. I want to make the best of it. I want to have fun but I also know I share it with six billion other people so I think there’s no shame in helping people. Three of my four grandparents were raised Roman Catholic and the other Greek Catholic so Catholicism has even though my brothers and I weren’t raised religious at all definitely influenced us.