Goldberg on religion

Jonah Goldber has a column up over at Nationalreview.com about religion and the role organized religion plays in society. I don't agree with everything he says, and I don't agree with his conclusions. However, he does make a few interesting points. The two I want to single out are:

I also detest the tendency of Americans, Westerners, or "Moderns" to boast of how they've customized their religious views to fit their lifestyles. "I don’t believe in organized religion, but I’m a very spiritual person." Yuck. It simply strikes me as intellectually offensive to pretend that the engineer of it all goes out of his way to let individual people order off-menu their religious preferences in just such a way so as pretty much everything they do is exactly how God wants it. And, even if that were the case, even if God customizes the heavens, space, and time so as to make every personal indulgence divinely inspired, the trend of people being their own priests is not one I celebrate.

This is a sentiment I endorse heartily. Even hypocritically paying lipservice to an organized religion is better than making up your own, in my opinion. His other interesting point is one about Jews: "I sometimes wonder if it's a Jewish thing because I have run into far more observant Jews who balk at the idea of discussing the existence of God." That's just something to think about.