Religion or Village?

Responding to the argument that religion’s primary function is teaching Right from Wrong:

The role of providing moral and behavioral guidance to each individual should properly--and pragmatically--fall upon parents. Parents and the village in which each child is raised (no invoking Hillary, please; "village" is not a dirty word). One hopes there were far more compelling reasons behind creating entire universal belief systems based on nebulous "retribution or reward after death" constructs than getting children to eat their vegetables and remembering that they probably shouldn’t kill the neighbors.

My own children are being raised Agnostic. They have been exposed to religion and taught to respect other’s beliefs, and are being taught to think outside the box as well. We talk about life and death, right and wrong and soul and conscience every day, within the context of what life brings before us each and every day and in context of the lessons of history.

They are headed towards adulthood armed with minds open to all possibilities …

1) that there is a phenomenon in our universe which we might all recognize as worthy of the connotations we place on the word "God,"

2) that our existence--our perception of it, anyway--is purely the product of natural processes that are likely to have been repeated or approached countless times and in countless locations throughout the universe,

3) that there are aspects of said universe so far beyond our current capacity to know or comprehend that to speculate, while intellectually stimulating and healthy, at the end of the day is still just that--speculation,

4) that we, as individuals and as a species, may never “know” Answers to the age-old questions about who we are, why we are here and where we might be going.

And despite all the apparent confusion, my children still generally eat their vegetables (not always happily, mind you, but understanding the "why") and I'm fairly confident our neighbors are not in danger, at least from them, in the dead of night.

It did not take scripted religion to achieve this. It took caring.

I do not presume to criticize any living creature's right to find their own way, pursue their own truth or to seek their own comfort. I have simply found mine in absolving myself of the need to Know, in the here and now, How It All Works. And in endeavoring every day to live my life in a manner I could defend with firm voice and a clear conscience before any court ... be it a court of Man, or the court of any entity worthy of all the connotations we place behind the word God.