In the years since college, I’d come to feel increasingly uncomfortable in churches.  They seemed to require me to say too many things I severely questioned.
 
For example, I couldn’t say the line in the Nicene Creed about believing in “all things visible and invisible,” because what in the world did that include?  The Easter bunny?  The tooth fairy?  The most charitable interpretation I could give to this odd line was that it meant I would believe whatever they told me to.  And who was “they?”  Originally, it was the Council of Nicaea—convened by a Roman emperor, with nothing more transcendent in mind than just the pragmatic and timeless objective of any administrator to get all the various squabbling sub-entities of his empire “on the same page.”
  
Also, I had reached the point where I felt I was probably never again going to have a sense of firm belief (at least not in this lifetime) about whether Jesus had literally risen from the dead, or rather that so many people continued to find his message and teachings so valuable, and his spirit so immanent and enduring, that the essence of him had not been killed, and maybe never could be.
 
I found I could accept this uncertainty, though, in essentially the same way a Jewish friend had told me that many people of his faith continue to regard the possibility of an afterlife:  maybe there was one and maybe there wasn’t, but in the meantime, they were going to go about the day-to-day business of trying to be a good person and live a good life.

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