(After NPR's This I Believe.)

Many people's belief system is centered on their religion. Unfortunately, many times this belief mutates into something more - a separatist fanatic's belief that theirs is the only way and everything else should be destroyed. This, despite pleas and fiery statements to the contrary, is not religion. Religions - all of them - should be welcoming to all and exclusionary to none.

I come by this view from personal experience. I was born to mixed parentage; my mom is of Lutheran stock, my dad of Jewish. Neither are practicing or devout and I was raised areligiously. In my later years, my friends have characterized me as a 'jewtheran' - that is, a combination of Lutheran and Jew.

I like to believe I possess many of the trademark characteristics of each religion: from the Jewish side, I am jollily mordant. From the Lutheran side, I am oddly pragmatic, perhaps best illustrated by this story about a great-aunt:

Mae was walking through the woods one day, when she saw a boot in the brush. It looked fairly new, and Mae figured she could use it somehow, even if she couldn't find its mate.

When she looked more closely at the boot, she discovered that it was still attached to its owner - an immigrant Finnish bachelor farmer who had made his fortune and was ready to return to the old country as a rich man. Sadly, the story goes, he stopped at the local saloon for a last snort and was apparently waylaid and relieved of both his nest egg and his pesky habit of breathing by some person or persons unknown.

This is not part of the official story, but I like to think that Mae checked the corpse for a wallet as well.

In my later years, I have fallen increasingly under the sway of Buddhism, primarily for what I interpret as the importance of self-reliance in its tenets. I guess this makes me a Juddheran.

With this sort of mottled religiosity in my background, you can see why I have strong feelings that religions should be inclusionary - if they weren't it would be likely that I would have to hate and kill myself.

Given my background, I hope it's understandable that I have a hard time boiling my beliefs down to a concise essay length. Lately, I've been thinking that you could best describe me as a 'compassionate objectivist', although since the recent wrongheaded appropriation of pairing the word 'compassionate' with any word describing a set of beliefs. I prefer the term 'zen objectivist'.

Despite my lack of a belief in any structured religion, I do have a handful of nearly religious beliefs.

The primary deity in my world is a caped superhero (and if you think that's hard to swallow, I ask you - how different is that from the true believer's notion of Christ or Mohammed or Buddha as an omnipotent and omniscient being?).

My superhero goes by the name of the Karmic Regulator, and his job is simply to quietly reward good and selfless actions and to quietly punish the opposite behaviors. It's not that different, I suppose, from the precepts of other religions - good things happen to good people, like end-game trips to a heavenly afterlife, and bad things happen to bad people, like eternal damnation (or an endless screening of the director's cut of 'Patch Adams' with additional scenes).

I constantly walk a tightrope, as I think and hope most people do, between feeling I am the most awful and selfish person on the planet and feeling that I am so beatific that I walk on the air a foot or two above the ground at all times - sometimes both simultaneously. The endless self-examination this dichotomy provides for is both maddening (because constantly examining the motivations for your own behavior makes it difficult to act spontaneously, if at all) and healthy (because it helps keep your motivations sincere).

The faith that there is someone - some other thing - that I believe has my back and will make sure that the wrongs I cannot personally right will be taken care of anyway allows me to concentrate more on controlling the only thing I really can - my own actions.

Oh, sure, there are other things in my personal makeup I strongly believe in: like the redemptive power of long solo journeys, that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, that all of the people who have ever wronged me in any way are sociopathic losers en route to their own sorry end and that all of the women who ever told me to get lost or broke my heart are militant separatist latent lesbians, but it's the Karmic Regulator who has continued to stand by my side ever since he (or she - I've never figured that one out) was revealed to me during a mythically tortured period in my life.

The Karmic Regulator is the best I can do.

...and this I believe.