Are you a glass half full or a glass half empty type of person?
Are you religious?
You do realize that the first question should be a no brainer if you answer yes to the second.
Religion by very definition is optimism as a system of belief.
In social scientist speak, the question is do you believe in the tragic vision of humanity or the utopian vision of humanity?
The tragic vision is, unfortunately, what seems to rule the day in most western cultures.
Humanity is basically completely flawed, and so we have to create rules that curtail human activity and bring society together.
A classical Christian way of saying this would be that humans are inherently fallen, and we need God's intervention and boundaries in order to help us be 'adopted' children of God.
If we follow the Ten Commandments, usually out of fear or in order to gain some reward, then we will be good enough.
Fear of God, a sense of awe and reverence, a knowledge that we will be punished for wrongdoings and rewarded for right all make up this idea of how the faith is.
Whenever people have a problem with those who are religious, they usually have a problem with these folks... and here is the reason, it never seems to pan out.
Good folks have terrible things happen to them. Evil folks prosper.
Atheists do good deeds for no reason. Faithful people cheat on taxes. You get the idea, it just does not explain the reality of creation very well.
That is because religion is supposed to be utopian. It is a glass half full type of way of seeing the world.
In a utopian way of seeing things, it is the social system that is flawed, not necessarily the people. In fact, it is up to us to work together to fix things.
This is far more in line with the way that Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius, and Jesus saw the world.
We have the potential to do anything; we could move mountains if we believed we could and, together, we are working to make the world, which is fallen, into what God intends.
There are strains of this in the political world as well, the Kennedy family being a good representation.
Ted Kennedy, the senator who so recently passed away, said this at Robert Kennedy's funeral in 1968: "All of us will ultimately be judged and, as the years pass, we will surely judge ourselves on the effort we have contributed to building a new world society and the extent to which our ideals and goals have shaped that effort.
The future does not belong to those who are content with today, apathetic toward common problems and their fellow man alike, timid and fearful in the face of new ideas and bold projects.
Rather it will belong to those who can blend vision, reason, and courage in a personal commitment to the ideals and great enterprises of society."
I am tired of being labelled as someone who lives in the past, who does not believe in the world, who is against progress.
That is not what it is all about at all. When people ask me why I go to church, let alone work for one, the answer I give is that I believe in the power of organization to allow us to change the world.
That is what Jesus wanted of his followers when he refused to be worshipped or to allow them to focus on following the rules.
It is about love, it is about how we treat each other, it is about working together to change everything that is wrong from the economic system right on up.
I think some of our biggest disagreements come from the fact that we do not communicate end goals, but focus on day to day problems.
If the end goal is to be co-creators of the world as it was intended to be, we are almost all working towards it.
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