Real Religion is not about Believing in the Unbelievable. It's not even about Believing At All. It's about Thinking Our Way to Appreciative Understanding. And then Thinking Again.

We believe in one less god than most other churches. If you can understand why they don't believe in the other religions' deities then you will understand why we don't believe in theirs. There simply are no clear facts and no compelling reasons to believe in the supernatural. Still, we all live, in a way, in two worlds ...

Science Teaches Us About the World of Objective Reality

The best method found for discovering and understanding the objective world that we share is science. This is the world that we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. It doesn't matter who does the observing. We can build machines to do it, even machines that can perceive and measure things that are beyond the capabilities of our senses. We can fling such machines out into space and even out of our solar system to gather information for us.

Through these methods — and not through revelation or "psychic powers" and the like! — we have come to know that the observable universe is a vast and very old place. Most of it is inhospitable for life as we know it, and the distances between places that are suitable for life are so great that it is difficult to grasp. But some of the atoms formed in the nuclear furnaces of stars, given the right conditions, are able to form molecules that can replicate themselves and give rise to living things. This happened on our planet sometime during its four-and-a-half billion years of existence and from that event we and all organisms descended.

Religion is About Making Sense of Our Inner Experience

But there is another part of the human condition. It is the personal, private, subjective world of the consciousness of each of us as individuals. Science is at work explaining exactly how our brains construct the reality that we experience, but that is not the same as what it is like to be a human being, to be capable of the potential and aspirations as well as subject to the weaknesses that come with being human. This experience depends critically on whose experience it is, and it can change over time as well as vary from person to person. The enterprise of making sense of this subjective world is the task that legitimately falls to religion. Nor should it be lamented that this is "all that is left" to it because of the rise of science.

Religion is just not needed to describe or explain objective reality. But the creation stories of our ancestors do tell us something about their own sense of what the world seemed like to them. There are no facts and no reasons to suppose that deities exist. But it is useful to consider what a thinking being who is very powerful, good, and wise — such as we ought to aspire to be — would be, could be, or should be like. Similarly, there are no grounds to suppose that our consciousness can survive our physical death. But it is useful — even imperative — to consider and reach some conclusions about what it means to live life well.

This is what religion is to us. It is discovering and growing in a life of meaning consistent with facts and reason. We believe that we can most effectively do this by sharing and learning from each other even though, in the final analysis, we can never really fully appreciate what it is to experience life as others do. We believe that the effort is worthwhile and productive, because all we have in this life, in this universe, is each other.