In his essay “How I Believe in God,” Roger Ebert observes: “Science is not ’secular.’ It is a process of honest investigation.” And then: “No, I am not a Buddhist. I am not a believer, not an atheist, not an agnostic. I am still awake at night, asking how? I am more content with the question than I would be with an answer.” He writes about growing up in a Catholic home, going to a Catholic school: “Most of my neighborhood friends were Protestants who were not interested in theories about God, apart from the fact that of course he existed.”

Ebert describes a way of living—an engagement with being—that is a process,  a voyage of exploration that’s driven by curiosity and guided by reason. It is not a response to marching orders because there are no discernable orders. You can look for them, you can claim you found them, you can find others who already agree with you, but you will probably never be able to persuade people that your orders are what you what you claim they are. If you persist, then one day you will probably find yourself old and frustrated, your curiosity destroyed, your reason dulled, and no one caring what you think or say. Having ignored your life in a futile effort to skip to the back of the book for the answers you believe must be there, you will find that others who lived the process are happier and better equipped for the changes that are inevitable.

Never stop your honest investigation of everything. You will be more content with questions than answers.

Ebert more recently wrote:

I grant you that if the universe was Caused, there might have been a Causer. But that entity, or force, must by definition be outside space and time; beyond all categories of thought, or non-thought; transcending existence, or non-existence. What is the utility of arguing our “beliefs” about it? What about the awesome possibility that there was no Cause? What if everything…just happened?

If you want to have a “spiritual” experience, ponder that last question. But while it’s useless to argue beliefs about what transcends existence or nonexistence and all categories of thought or nonthought, we have plenty going on right here inside space and time, within our categories of thought, sharing our existence. That so many religious people choose to ignore those things as the substance of life and the source of plenty of problems and questions that are worth arguing about makes no sense to me. Why do they shove aside the mysteries that shoot through every moment of our existence to exalt the other mysteries whose presence and existence are not obvious, and which first need to be persuasively established before anyone will bother to care about them at all? Paraphrasing John Lennon, life is what happens for everyone else while you are cajoling them accept your religious beliefs.

Shakespeare, through Hamlet, called the bluff:

There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life,
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

If the purveyors of divine edicts were as sure of their truth as they demand everyone else to be, then why not speed the way to that undiscovered country? Why not make your quietus? Why bother to grunt and sweat in life? Why bother to bear those ills we have? But conscience makes them cowards. They hang, like fools, between their claims to know the truth of what lies beyond and their inexplicable refusal to go there themselves. But we should rather bear the ills we have, and struggle through our lives, to join that voyage of discovery that’s driven by curiosity and guided by reason because we possess that now, and we know that the process yields great satisfaction.

That the religion-pushers fail to recognize their bluff, their cowardice, or their hypocrisy is pathetic on the individual scale, but tragic in the global extent of their number. Life is here to be lived, and they are here, too, but not living. They walk among us like zombies, purporting to carry out those marching orders that, despite their claims to the contrary, lie just beyond the other side of an unscalable epistemological wall. Most of them will never wake up.