You are to be commended for having the nerve to admit to being religious in our modern culture. With few exceptions, popular culture treats Judeo-Christian believers as either muddleheaded or outright psychopaths. I'm trying to recall a sympathetic priest in the movies since Bing Crosby. I suppose there must be some, they just don't come to mind as often as the ones carrying axes around or chasing teenage boys.

I suspect that a lot of people who claim to be agnostic do so for the same reason a person might claim to be "moderate" in politics: it avoids a lot of grief that people might otherwise hand you for a less fuzzy set of beliefs.

I myself am a skeptic, but generally keep it to myself. I take my family to church regularly and participate in church activities. There is much to be learned there about one's place in life and society, and my daughter building homes in Mexico or feeding homeless workers staying at the church teaches her something about being a person that she won't pick up at public schools. A church is, of course, not the only place on can learn such things, but it is one of the best places.

And my pastor, like most other good ministers, has spent most of his life immersed in the most intense experiences of human existence around us. Birth. Death. Marriages. Funerals. Sitting at terminal hospital beds, and baptizing new babies. I dare say I have something to learn about life from him and others like him.

I think some people who take up some kinds of religions like the idea of religions that have them in the driver's seat, or at the very least are impersonal and non-threatening. Something that sits quietly in the little shrine in the corner and leaves you alone, or follows cold mathematical rules that can be dealt with.

The idea of a deity that, as my pastor likes to put it, knows you by your name, and has a specific and personal interest in how you live your life, is extremely uncomfortable if you think about it, and it's not surprising that many people discard it in favor of relaxing impersonal concepts like Universal Oneness or All Is God. When you're thinking about crossing the road illegally, it's the difference between dealing with a traffic light, and dealing with a large policeman--who knows where you live--standing on the corner, and looking you straight in the eye.

In America, I tend to think religious people tend toward conservatism, but I would bet money my pastor is a Democrat, although he never discusses these things.