I'm feeling my way toward it, but I reserve the right to do so at my own pace, thank you

My posts on events and developments occurring in the moment are, as I expect them to be, less than exclusive.  I have yet to scoop the rest of the world with a breaking story.  That's fine; I write about those matters because, hopefully, I have some original observation to contribute.

What I like is when I see that fellow bloggers I respect a great deal choose to opine on a column or essay I found in the course of my daily Web perusal that really stuck to my ribs.

Such was the case with Dennis Prager's Townhall column today on the Ten Commandments and the discovery that Bookworm Room had likewise found it worthy of some remarks.  In fact, she was largely motivated to write about Prager's column because she had written about the Ten Commandments herself the day before (link provided in her post).  In that previous post, she had said that she and her husband, an agnostic and an atheist respectively, have always told their kids that the Commandments were the Big Rules that had to be followed to keep life from descending into chaos.

Running that whole matter of what Prager's assertion requires of the reader in terms of stating for the record what he or she is on a belief level has likewise been at the forefront of my thoughts all day today.

The "religion" field in my Facebook profile characterizes me as "leaning toward Christianity."  I put that there about three years ago; it's still accurate.

I'm not an atheist for what seems to me to be an obvious reason:  There's too much order in this universe and it's too fraught with meaning for it to be the result of subatomic particles bumping into each other just the right way, a la the thousand monkeys at typewriters coming up with the works of Shakespeare.  And agnosticism  - the notion that it doesn't matter whether there's a God or not - fails to satisfy my basic ontological quest.

But - and I was discussing this just this morning with someone with whom I regularly talk about these things - my insistence on taking my own sweet time to arrive at conclusions about the nature of reality is integral to my assertion that freedom is the most essential condition for human well-being.

I'm not looking down my nose at anyone who doesn't need the degree of convincing or revelation that I do.  Yes, to me, it looks like foreclosure on a range of intricate questions such as how to define God, and how literally to take Scripture, and what to make of the undeniable parallels between Christianity and not only Judaism but Buddhism and Hinduism as well.  (Never mind Islam; I'm pretty well convinced that it was a malformed ideology, rather than an actual religion, from the get-go.)  But people whose intellects, integrity and good sense I respect a great deal have declared unshakeable faith with far less in the way of explanation than I'm demanding.

The recent dust-up over Michelle Bachmann's statements on record that she feels Biblically commanded to be submissive in her marriage is another example of the kind of thing that hangs me up.  She's not alone. There is even a network of blogs maintained by women who are proud to be submissive.

I know, I know.  The Christian view of marriage is that the man and woman become one, and the the man loves his wife like Christ loves the church, and therefore there is mutual respect, but ultimately there is no doubt that what is being asserted is that the man is the captain, the leader, the one in the family who makes the decisions to which the wife and children will defer.  I like Michelle Bachmann a lot; she's one of my top three or four Pub presidential candidates.  But let's be candid; she's been dancing around the theological point since it resurfaced last week.

It's the same feeling - that a sticky yet essential-to-address doctrinal point is getting the gloss-over - that I get on the matter of mercy.  God's love is what makes all the church ads in the Yellow Pages.  God is crazy about you. God loves you in a unique and personal way.  Ah, but hang out at a Calvinist website for any length of time, and Hell and wrath and basic human depravity and the doctrine of grace alone are dealt with in hair-raising detail.

I have yet to completely move past my sense that this reeks of cosmic blackmail.

"Conservative" and "conventionally defined Christian" are not synonomous terms.  For a very recent example that this is so, see Roger L. Simon's Pajamas Media post entitled "Agnostics for Perry."  Or see atheist rightie S.E. Cupp's book Losing Our Religion, which posits that the left-leaning media and general culture are causing civilizational decay with their Christianity-bashing.

Ah, but once again, that position comes up short.  Isn't there something disrespectful, cynical even, about saying that Christianity is necessary for societal health even if it's not true?  Doesn't that reduce it to a behavioral motivator a la Skinnerian conditioning?

All the foregoing having been said, I do indeed lean toward Christianity.  Any Christian out there reading this, feel free to pray for me.  I'm drawn that way not because a parent, mentor, friend or author so stirred me as to shut down my insistence on satisfactory definitions for the basic terms (God, sin, revelation, mercy, etc.), but because my own expereience, observation and reflection lead me to conclude that, since we're accountable on worldly levels for what we do with our freedom, it must be so on an ultimate level.  And, foible-ridden critters that we are, someone or something is going to have to cut us some slack.  Not a day goes by in which all and any of us don't at least fudge the Big Rules.