Wrestling with Religion

I know that I mentioned Thanksgiving was my favorite holiday but Easter is a perfectly reasonable holiday to. Colorfully dye and hide some hard boiled eggs, put out some baskets filled with a lot of egg and bunny shaped chocolates, watch the joy in children's faces and your good to go. Go where? If your me Church, and that would be Catholic Church and again, for me, a quandary. Why? Because believe me, I've tried to accept my religion without a fight and I sincerely envy those people who do and especially the ones who attribute their seeming bliss to it but, I just wasn't made that way. In fact you could call the questioning part of my life my religion. Without it my world doesn't make sense. For me, the quest for knowledge gives meaning to life and hope is as close to God as I know. What feels like blind acceptance of something this important is no more in my nature than attempting to fly without some form of airplane.
I do think organized religions around the world are important. They provide lots of hope and far be it from me to decide the role of spirituality in someone else's life, especially someone who wasn't as fortunate as I to have been born in a place like the U.S.
Religion is here to stay and although often criticized and rightly so as a continuing source of conflict, I believe that civilization would have evolved in a far less desirable way without it. I do wish moderation could receive a more important role, perhaps as an important pillar in their teachings but religion fills a void left by the enormous complexity of our lives which leaves most people unfulfilled.
In fact accepting certain truths without question frequently seems very appealing to me and at some point when I believe I've begun to chase my tail perhaps I'll reconsider. How does that square with now? Well I no longer feel the burden of guilt I once did about being askew with the Catholic religion and in fact we co-exist quite nicely. I've just learned like so many areas of my life to take it all far less seriously than I once did. And even in the convoluted world of religion I don't think anyone can argue that in the end it isn't all about hope.