I was sitting in my death and dying class yesterday and a funny little memory popped into my head.

I remember when I was in 1st grade one of my classmates asked me "do you believe in God?" and I said "no" and this kid flipped out, like I was in trouble with the teacher or something.

At the time I didn't even know what God was supposed to be.  I mean, people would say "oh my God" and that word was in the Pledge of Allegience, but I didn't know what it meant really.  And I wasn't raised in a Christian household, either.  So I guess I couldn't be expected to have any kind of notion of God at the time.

Of course, things are different now.  I'm still not Christian, but I know what God is supposed to represent for Christians, and I guess if somebody asked me "do you believe in God?" today it'd take a bit more thought.  But I guess that's how it works when you're not brought up with a structured theological perspective: you form your own ideas about spirituality from your environment.

Another funny thing about my childhood that I remember is how people would say all this stuff about God and I'd feel like it was something I should be learning.  You know, it's like if most of the people you know keep talking about how they go to church every week and say prayers before bed and all that,  you kinda feel like you should be doing the same thing, like you'll be left out maybe.  All this made on impression on me, believe it or not, and I remember afternoons at my dad's house where I had this big plan to learn more about God.  My dad would be out hanging up laundry outside or taking a nap or something and I'd kind of secretively read the Bible.

Of course, I didn't get too far because the Bible is really boring reading, especially for young kids, and nothing really stuck.  And now I look back on that and realize that kids really are quite impressionable when it comes to abstract things like spirituality.  It almost makes me wonder whether people reach their currents attitudes about God through conditioning or whether they were able to come to that conclusion themselves?

I suppose the answer lies somewhere in the middle, though.  I'm sure there are plenty of people conditioned to believe one faith and plenty of other people who decie that one particular spirituality is the right one for them, or speaks the "truth" or whatever.  And just as there are people who enter a faith, so too are their people who leave one for various reasons.

All this talk about conditioning makes me think too about political attitudes.  For example, I'm not a very conservative guy, but neither are my parents.  Is my liberal perspective on politics due to my parents' influence or did I arrive at that perspective on my own?

It's a difficult question to answer.  Right now I can honestly say that I don't agree with conservative viewpoints or priorities and tend to agree more with liberal viewpoints.  For example, if I were given a choice of lower taxes or better environmental support programs I'd choose the environment over a little extra money to pocket.  Something like that.  But would this perspective be completely my own?

There probably is no answer to that question, because right now it's my perspective and that's all that matters.  One could argue that by talking about political issues from a certain perspective around a child, that child will adopt those same ideas.  But one could also argue that a child raised in a liberal environment can be a conservative adult.

Maybe the answer to most things is "it depends."  People can interpolate (or extrapolate?) data and look at structured models for this kind of development, but who really knows what will happen in the end, eh?  You know, maybe I was conditioned by my environment to be a moderately liberal kind of guy, and maybe devout Christians were told that God is the one truth in life since the day they could understand language, but maybe not?

There have been articles in newspapers about how one-sided university instructors are, how the vast majority of professors are on the left and how flies in the face of the idea that college students are supposed to gather every perspective they can to make their own judgements.  Some people think that by having all these liberal professors all the students on a campus will be brainwashed to think left instead of right.  I think those people are wrong.  I think that by the time a person goes off to school they have a pretty good idea about what they're comfortable with.  I think that professors can't really change students' minds when it comes to stuff like that, and I guess they shouldn't be trying in the first place.

I was reading the online journal of somebody I knew in high school and I remember reading something about how people see only one way in college... something like: college students only see that conservatives are bad, liberals are good; alcohol and drugs are good; sex is good... something like that.  I don't remember the exact quote, but I get the idea, and I think it applies to more than just college students.  I think that humans tend to naturally divide themselves into "us vs. them" situations.  Conservatives vs. liberals, preps vs. punks, blacks vs. whites, etc.  I suppose people like me who don't see all conservatives as bad and all liberals as good are rare.

So, to kind of wrap up all this rambling I'd like to end with one last thought.  I think that humans have a tendency to forge such a vast divide between other humans that the people on that other side of the divide lose their humanity.  And what the world needs right about now is a little more humanity, I think.