My Unhappiness

I am not happy with the state of religion in America, and even less so with its state in the rest of the world. Religious bigotry is common, as is religious indifference. At the core of any religion is a view about the nature of reality: at bottom, of what does the world consist? Is it exclusively physical, as so many of my academic colleagues believe, or not? This is a fundamental question with which every philosophy grapples, and about which every religion takes a stand. Most who are religious are so because of what they were taught as children. Yet, since all these traditions contradict one another, why should one believe the religion learned as a child is the true one? The antidote to religious bigotry is education, but it is hard to avoid the conclusion that for most of humanity, education in this matter has failed them miserably.