A Religion of Realities
by Kenneth Patton
A religion of realities is a faith that the real world
provides sufficient beauty, adventure, and growth
for our needs and aspirations.
We are real creatures in a real world; only if we miss
the splendor of this world do we need fantastic substitutes.
This life is worth living, this world enough, of such
qualities and extents it needs no future life to
justify it; we forego hope for heaven.
We are content to be human beings on planet earth,
circling our modest star in one galaxy among a
billion galaxies, living out these lifetimes, loving
our human loves, enabled by human intelligence and
knowledge, limited to human powers and controls,
exercising human virtues, patient with our unavoidable
failures.
We strive to realize these brief lives in full, acclaiming
this one chance to savor the cosmos, to probe its
secrets and sing its glories, to love its creatures.
We are skeptics, unwilling to delude ourselves, our
brains unhitched from our longings, thinking what
they think, no matter how we might prefer it
otherwise.
Our eyes will not lie to us on demand.
We confront our fellows on human terms.
We work at a real bench and feed our children real food.
Our feet press real earth and stub on real boulders.
We are hot with the real sum, cold with real ice.
Our loves are native and human.
We live a real life, and we will die a real death.
We have seen sunsets a thousand times more beautiful
than heaven, minnows more justified than god.
We have eaten new peas sweeter than nectar, breathed
cool air finer than the substance of the soul.
A bird's wing, a snail's shell refute all disbelievers.
We are undone by reality.
Any child is miracle; what more assurance do we need?
We acknowledge the quandaries and dubieties of
the real world, but is less conjectural than a world
of fantasies.
We accept the human passage in preference to assump-
tions of divine arrogance.
The world is not limited to what is.
A religion of realities has its native dreams.
We are made and remade by incredible creations.
Out of realities, with drams for blue-prints rather
than panaceas, we make better worlds than we had,
reform cities and nations, become more affectionate
and caring, make the landscape more fair.
We increase science, technics, and wisdom, extend the
arts, increase fields and herds.
We could make the wild creatures flourish again in the
wilderness, make the deserts gardens again, make
effluent sweet water again.
Born realists, realists we must be, if we are to live
honorably with ourselves and our fellows.
V.
Other religions claim to go beyond reality, to out-strip
and out-bedazzle it, elongating these lives into
immortality, increasing mind to omniscience,
power to omnipotence.
Reality and religion have seldom been synonymous.
Yet all religions are grounded in realities, for super-
naturalisms and heavens are spin-offs from what
we are, projections of the human image, elabor-
ations of cities and homes.
The wishful seek, and if they do not find, invent,
religions complying with their needs, concerned
not with what they can realistically expect, but
what they wildly hope for.
The more unrealistic their beliefs, the better the religion.
Realists cannot credit assumptions for which no
evidence is adduced.
We cannot bring ourselves to reject the glittering world,
its tumultuous life, the alternately freezing and/
blossoming earth, this birth, growth, and age, our waning powers and final subsidence, this welter of achievement and failure, tragedy and ecstacy, for a passel of dreams.