When I was a Sunday School teacher (that’s a whole ‘nother story), Pastor asked if I could fill in for her Wednesday confirmation class. Trying to be the helpful person, I agreed and asked, “What’s the topic?” She replied she would get me the material, which ended up being 10 minutes before I walked into the church. I was ready to help 30+ preteens and teens have a discussion about their faith – What I wasn’t ready for was I would help them discuss science and faith.

The main question was whether you had to take off your lab coat before walking into church and vice-versa.  (Another class I was substituting was around sex and God…nothing like giggling teenagers at Church, again ‘nother story for later, thanks Pastor.)

So years later I take a Humanities course for my college degree…while my eldest is in college as well…sheesh.  I discover cycles where our world focuses on reason or religion. Seems we have all grown up with this idea we can’t balance these two thought processes.

What the actual f**k?

So let me get this straight – we dismiss logic and reason for our mystic stories to explain the world around us? And then we say I cannot be religious and accept that science can help in explaining the world around us?

Let’s take a focus on today, Independence Day for our country. Our revolution was during the Period of Enlightenment, or Age of Reason. Where people said, “Holy crap, we are treated like second-class citizens and by God we have certain unalienable rights!”

During this time, some people believed in the natural law of things, whereas God put down the laws and then didn’t interfere in the daily happenings.  (Deism, if you want to Google something today.)

Social Media at the time was based on papers and pamphlets written by some very normal people. These revolutionaries consistently spoke of God and the Bible while talking about equality and tolerance.

Then, like many things we humans do, we went and f’d it up. We, as a society, appear to have the inability to say, “Love thy neighbor” and “Scientific method” in the same conversation. We are a pile of extremists – “Don’t tell me how to live my life, but you should ________!”

Reason would allow us to think through things, see our world full of potential regardless of sex, creed, skin colors, heritages, and all the things. When we don’t have reason, we become intolerant of differences and others’ ideals – just like the stodginess of the England we declared our independence from. When did we become the grumpy old guy on the block!?

And there I was, in front of a big bag of emotional, hormonal kids who will become parents, politicians, leaders. They were able to have a better conversation than almost every Facebook argument.

We should be ashamed of ourselves.