It's interesting to watch an intelligent agnostic try to navigate his way through all of this. I can understand wanting to keep the traditions of one's people, even if one doesn't believe in the god who supposedly gave one's people those traditions. And I can understand chucking some of them out because they're too hard or they don't make sense or they're more trouble than they're worth.
My mother was conventionally Christian, rather than Christian in any deep religious sense, so I was expected to be Christian but not given a whole lot of pressure to be so. And Christianity seems to me to be behind an awful lot of what's wrong with Western society in general, from its denigration of women, to its insistence that the natural world is something to be subjugated rather than cherished, to its demonization of sexuality, to its conditioning people to believe in improbable propositions for which there isn't the slightest proof. So I've rejected Christianity quite thoroughly -- one could even say that I hate it, though that's different from hating individual Christians. But that leaves me adrift, without any traditions. In spite of the horrible history of oppression, I find myself envying Jews...
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My mother was conventionally Christian, rather than Christian in any deep religious sense, so I was expected to be Christian but not given a whole lot of pressure to be so. And Christianity seems to me to be behind an awful lot of what's wrong with Western society in general, from its denigration of women, to its insistence that the natural world is something to be subjugated rather than cherished, to its demonization of sexuality, to its conditioning people to believe in improbable propositions for which there isn't the slightest proof. So I've rejected Christianity quite thoroughly -- one could even say that I hate it, though that's different from hating individual Christians. But that leaves me adrift, without any traditions. In spite of the horrible history of oppression, I find myself envying Jews...