Raised agnostic, I’m still fairly agnostic on religious doctrine. I seem to operate on two “faith criteria”: 1) Like Thomas the Doubter, I only believe a statement of divine-human relationship that matches my own experience and rings true in my heart. I entertain the possibility of explanations describing others’ experiences that I haven’t shared, but I don’t “believe” them, 2) I believe statements that are outside my experience if they are robust (as in statistical robustness, i.e., the result persists despite change in populations sampled). In other words, I believe religious observations or explanations that are found across faiths and cultures. This is why I often cite similarities across religions as a belief criterion. Although different religions emphasize different aspects of the divine-human relationship, most major tenants are present in some form in all major faiths. I tend to give weight to those. I consider theological postulates and doctrines that are unique to one religion to be expressions of local culture and not generally applicable to all humans, much less to "the universe" as a whole. However these are interesting in that they illuminated the diversity with which humans experience and interpret relationship with the larger non-human universe.
copyright R. Elena Tabachnick, May 2006
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