I want to be little parts of different things

Recently, I’ve been thinking that our society allows for very little nuance or ambiguity in our beliefs. For example, you have to choose a religion. Church-hopping with my parents as a kid and then also with LaRue, I’ve found that I don’t want to commit wholeheartedly to one religion, I want different parts of different religions. I like the community atmosphere of the Orthodox church, the worship music at The Crossing, the communion at the Catholic church. How come I can’t be different percentages of different religions?

This same thing happens with politics. What if you were just given, like ten votes, and you got to distribute those among the candidates? So if you thought Barack Obama’s health care plan was great, but you wanted a woman president, and you’re pro-life, you could put in four votes for Obama, and three for Hilary and three for a Republican candidate (or something like that). This might force people to actually think about the differences between the candidates instead of just voting for someone who agrees with “most” of what they believe. In fact, I think I remember David P telling me about some kind of election reform that was similar to this. David, care to comment?

I hope I don’t seem as though I’m noncommittal. I believe that ideological commitments have many places and purposes. I just think that if people weren’t given the option of pigeonholing their beliefs in one place, they might be forced to think about and articulate those beliefs more clearly.