When I came out of the atheist closet, a few months went by before my wife and I were having a conversation about the Founding Fathers and their religious beliefs. About how people like Jefferson or Washington had spiritual beliefs, but were clearly distrustful of organized religion.

“Is that how you feel?” my lovely wife asked me.

“How do you mean?”

“When you left the church – do you still believe in God, you just don’t believe in the Mormon church or organized religion in general?”

I thought about it for a minute. “No. Actually, the exact opposite. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in religion.”

Let me start by saying that I consider myself a “medium atheist”. In the current vernacular of the theist-versus-non-theist debates, a “weak” atheist is one who doesn’t believe in a God or divine beings, but that’s about it. A “strong” atheist not only doesn’t believe, but thinks that anyone who does believe in God or otherwise is pretty much on the level of a 40 year old who sits up waiting for Santa Claus to show up, and considers them either foolish at best or a danger at worse.

Then there’s the people like me. I’m usually content to allow people to live and let live, but if they get in my face or try to impose their laws upon me, I have no problem laying a case of holy hell[1] on their asses.

And that’s the real problem right now. We have Mormons in California[2] and Catholics in Maine being the main people behind barring gay marriage from being legal. That set of “my religious beliefs trump your civil rights” has gotten so ridiculous the governor of Rhode Island now won’t even let gay people be buried together. (What, they’re afraid at the zombie apocalypse there will be hordes of undead divorces?) There’s The Family convincing Democrats to turn on their base and ban abortions in the health care bill to please fundamentalist Christians.

So it’s no wonder that Sam Harris writes books insisting that only when people turn away from religion will the world finally become a reasonable and civilized place to live. Or Christopher Hitchens insists that religion poisons everything – and he means it, too. They and others like them would agree with Jean Meslier  that “Man shall not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”

Even my own life could be a testament to that, struggling and striving until I finally threw off the cloak of “belief” and started to really see and determined that no – I really didn’t believe in gods or angels or demons or any of the above. Only when I did that could I start to have that piece of mind that I had been searching for all my life.

And yet, and yet, and yet – I can’t quite throw religion aside like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Don’t mistake me: I think that “faith based decisions” are still the worst way to make choices (like going to war in Iraq to fulfill biblical prophecy[3]). I think that people who deny their children medicine in favor of prayer are criminals, that people who base their bigotry and racism on their religious texts are outright dangerous.

Yet I can’t help but see that there are things to religion that can be useful for good. Look at the abolitionists who opposed slavery in the name of their religion, and used their contacts and organization to push for freedom. Opposed, of course, by those who promoted slavery with the same religious core beliefs. The civil rights movement was formed in the churches, pushed by believers that there was and would be a better way.

So while I’m the last to say that religion has been good for society, there’s clearly cases where those communities of people acting on their beliefs have gone great things for humankind. I was speaking to a family member who has been having problems in their own church. “I don’t really care about the beliefs,” she told me. “I mean, I like thinking that there’s an afterlife. What I really like is the community. Knowing that there’s a place where I can make friends and meet people, where the kids will be taught good values.  Someplace where if I need help, or others need help, or if I’m going to move and need help or just want to go attend a party, where am I going to go? Where do people go for those things outside of church?”

Which makes me ask: how can we keep the good, and stop the bad? How can we keep those social contacts, that sense of community. I like getting called to help people move. I’m serious – because knowing I’ve helped out a neighbor is a good thing. Partly because now it means they owe me[4], but mostly because I think that’s what life should be about. You help people around you, because it’s the right thing to do. If everybody did that, we’d all live in a wonderful world.

I like the talent shows as hokey and silly as they are, I like getting together with people once a week or every other week. I like the idea of listening to intelligent people discuss philosophy and ethics.

I just don’t want the baggage of belief that goes with it.

I want religion without belief. Now, I know I could take the easy way out and say “Well, then just become a Humanist. Ta-da! All the social gathering but with a healthy supply of Science and Reason, part of a balanced breakfast!”

I could. Yet there are religions out there with such beautiful concepts and practices. I’ve attended a Bat Mitzvah for a young lady, adopted from Russia into an American family. I saw her perform the chants and read from the Torah, and while I may not believe in divine beings, I believe in the power of tradition, the knowledge that wherever that young lady goes, she’s considered to be part of a family. I’ve sat with Shia Muslims as men rhythmically thump their chests and sing a song of loss and grief over the loss of Imam Hussein. I’ve been to a Unity Church session where the members practice meditation, and people plan and work to make their community a better place to live.

I want to keep those things, that uniqueness of each group.

And that’s when I realized: the true enemy is dogma.

Since the beginning of time, humanity has sought answers. Why did the big yellow thing in the sky move in its orbit in the sky? How do we ensure that the crops will grow and the hunters will return with the food we need to survive? How can we drive away sickness, and when the end of life does come to our loved ones, what happens to the “them” that we so loved after their bodies fades?

Different approaches have come and gone. Dressing up like animals around the fire was tried, but domesticating animals has proven to be easier and more certain over the long run. Phrenology to map the bumps on our head to human behaviors has faded the way that the belief that bleeding people would make them better[5].  The Ptolemaic view of the universe with the Earth in the center fell to the Copernican revolution.  Laws have been established and debated since the days of King Hammurabi.

Religion is just another approach to establishing reality, ethics, the origin of the world, why things happen, what happens to people after death. The only problem is that too often, religion holds that “This is the answer – and there will be no disagreements!” This is especially true when it comes to literal declarations of reality, such as “Joshua made the sun stand still in the sky” or “Native Americans have darker skin because of a curse put on their Israelite ancestors[6].”

Just because something isn’t taken to be literally true doesn’t make it any less important. Knowing that Odysseus never fought a Cyclops doesn’t mean that I don’t value the story of the Odyssey, the morals and lessons of humility and that being clever is a virtue. Just because I don’t believe that Jesus actually turned water into wine or rose from the dead after three days doesn’t mean I have to discard his ideas of forgiveness and love for your fellow man.

It seems the only way that religion can provide the positive benefits of that community, of friendship and connecting without the negative aspects – is to lose the dogma. Of course, the problem is this is supposed to be the Word of God we’re talking about here. When Muslims look at the Koran, they’re not just seeing some stories and advice – it’s the word of Allah speaking. I’d say the majority of Christian ministers I’ve interviewed would hold that the Bible is the inerrant word of God – and if you believe otherwise, then you’re wrong.

The only answer that I have to that is: even if you believe that there were prophets who walked on the Earth, they were still human beings. Human beings with their foibles and failures and prejudices. Moses’s pride kept him from the promised land, Peter had to be scolded by God not to call what God had labeled “clean” as “unclean.”

Which means that it’s all right to think that perhaps, just maybe, the human who wrote the holy books might have gotten something wrong. St. Augustine instructed in “The Literal Meaning of Genesis” that:

Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]

Right there, we have a philosopher, possibly one of the most influential philosophers of Christianity outside of Paul basically saying “If you learn that something written in the scriptures isn’t literally true – shut the hell up.” We see this situation today, when people set up entire industries to oppose established science such as The Discovery Institute, although “ … they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]”.

I may have to revise my thinking; maybe St. Augustine was actually a prophet.

I want religions, every religion, to accept the idea of being questioned. There are several that have – Reform and its response of Conservative Judaism for example have accepted the idea of female ministers, and while the congregations may disagree on how much change is acceptable, they’ve found a way to keep the traditions of millennia and allow progress.

Everything is open to challenge. If your beliefs lead you to believe that abstinence is the only form of sex education that is acceptable, and the evidence shows that it only leads to more pregnancies and more sexual diseases – it’s all right to say “You know, it may be I’m wrong.” I’d even go so far as to say that you don’t have to throw out the idea of God if you don’t want to – but that it would be all right to say “Perhaps I did not understand the mind of God as much as I want to.”

If your ethics hold that its acceptable to despise people for their color, religion, or sexual preference to the point that you deny them the same freedoms you enjoy, it might be that you are wrong. And even if you quote scriptures until the cows come home, maybe you “…understand neither what [you] say nor the things about which [you] make assertion”. Perhaps, just maybe, it’s possible that you don’t speak for God as much as you think you do.

What I’m really asking for is some humility. An admittance that it’s possible that no, you don’t speak for the divine – so you could be wrong. That just because you read it inside your holy book, it’s possible that the person who wrote it, or translated it, or recorded it could have done it wrong, or had intentions that your divine being didn’t intend. That your interpretations could be incorrect, especially when it’s proven over and over again that they just – don’t – work.

So when science and reason proves that some assertion you make in the name of your faith is false, it's all right to say "the stories written in my holy book are an analogy, and don't need to be taken as literally true."

I like the community of many religions. I don’t want to lose the beauty of the sung poetry of the Sikhs or the joyous enthusiasm of the Pentecostals. I’d no sooner lose the soothing meditations of the Buddhists than I would want to lose the art of the Hindu faiths.

Maybe I want to have my cake and eat it too. Perhaps I’m asking too much that religions can keep the practices, keep the traditions, but change the beliefs based on new thoughts and evidence. Yet I feel that if we can keep the positive benefits of religions – the community, the friendship, the social interactions. I want to lose what doesn’t work – the dogma, the arrogance that says “Only I and I alone know what is true and what God intends for all people.”

Then we can stop worrying about strong or weak atheist or religious people – and simply live as our principles best suites us.