The superstructure of my religious beliefs (...and this is something I've always kind of thought, although I was never able to name it until reading this piece) is
sumurhe, or the idea that things can be true with respect to Truth and true with respect to Beauty. There is probably no God, with respect to Truth, but I believe there is one (and, if asked in a poll, will answer that there is one) with respect to Beauty.
I identify as Jewish, and observe some Jewish holidays (very reliably, I'll hike on Tu Bishvat, get drunk for Purim, do a
seder for Passover -- which is the most formalized holiday for me, fast on Tisha B'Av, eat sweets for Rosh Hashanah, fast for Yom Kippur, give gifts for Hanukkah, and do some sort of remembrance of the 1940s conflicts, normally on May 9 but I'd like to transfer this tradition to Yom HaAtzmaut), but I'm very bad at many parts of Jewish observance, including some others find easy; I've never even remotely kept
kosher and I'm pretty bad at following the commandment against idolatry, which most moderns do not find difficult.
I've never been part of any consistent Jewish congregation, but I have more than once been proselytized into being part of a church community by a friend (a Catholic one in my hometown, and an evangelical one at Ohio State), and I have traditions such as visiting
a particular temple to Krishna on Election Day. (The last two E-Days I've taken the day off and driven from Ohio to visit my election-nerd friends in DC; I thought it'd be an odd place to stop at in 2018 and ended up saying a short prayer for success for the candidates I voted for. I repeated this in 2020 just because the roads in that part of West Virginia are so beautiful, and will likely do it again this year since I'm driving to DC again).
There are also some other religious traditions that I find sympathetic even if I would absolutely not identify as belonging to them (such as Mormonism), and I'm find with saying something like "the Book of Mormon is true with respect to Beauty" (or even sillier things like the
Principia Discordia), even though this introduces contradictions since I don't think this about the New Testament, which the Book of Mormon itself endorses. Religion is not actually a topic on which man needs to perfectly consistent.
