I refuse to have a theology. A theology involves assumptions about beings in a different dimension, things which cannot be perceived with the senses and I refuse to make such assumptions. I have a life-stance. Fortunately, I never needed to get rid of a family religion in order to get to that.

My parents were non-religious but very tolerant about it. When I wanted to go to church with my best friend they gave me the room to make up my own mind. I liked Sunday School, I even participated in the Christmas play, but after a year or so I decided that I couldn't hear any God talk to me, and that it was silly to pretend.

I am a secular humanist. Before I came to America I thought that there could be no such thing as a religious humanist (that would be an internal contradiction), but I found out that I was wrong. Apparently, if you start out with a religion, and then strip away all the supernatural hogwash there will something left when you're done, something like reverence or spirituality. I cannot talk about feelings like that because I don't think I've ever had them; there have been moments of heightened perception, of everything fitting together, but I couldn't call that religious.

The "fundamental" questions: whether there are gods, what is our purpose in life, etc., to me are non-starters, because they cannot be proven one way or another. I'd rather get my bearings from some facts we can all agree on:

• I am alive, here and now (and so are you)
• I will be dead in the foreseeable future (and so will you)
• I am unique in time and space (and so are you)
• Rules that involve both you and me should be based on reciprocity: I should not expect you to suffer what I don't like myself, and vice-versa.

Those facts provide me with an outer limit of ethics, a set of rules that allows me to judge the conditions I find around me with enough goals to spend my life on.

--Mr. Anne Zielstra