If you need someone to tell you what's beautiful, then how would you know what beauty really is?

The view from a mountaintop in Glacier or Yosemite. A view from the Hubble Space Telescope. The shared look between a mother and child. From my conversations with the religious I've seen little awe expressed by religious people. A deeply religious guy once told me that the only use he could see for the Grand Canyon was that it be used as a land fill. When I was religious I was constantly criticized for taking a weekend a month to hike and camp. So many Christians seem to be in awe of an invisible friend and overlook the real beauty that they can touch and feel.

or looking at a nice pair of jugs jiggling just so mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

This used to be my go-to way of evangelizing to people (aka - rationalizing to myself) when I was still a kid and going to church. I would see all the wonder in the world and think: this is somehow more poetic with a God in the picture.

But... the more I thought, the less this made sense. You can easily remove God from the picture, and suddenly parts of nature become unobscured, brighter, and more fascinating.

After years of leading my own life without religion, I can strip away even more (like my understanding of physics) and still get a profound sense of wonder and peace from being on top of a mountain or gazing up at the milky way.

I realized this sensation exists without religion OR science. It's something human. It doesn't require us to leap forward in faith or perform experiments to experience. It just is.

Maybe this is what people mean when they say things like "nature is my religion". That always sounded like psychobabble to me, though, because the whole point is to even forget words like "religion".

Why make experiences relative to cheap, hand-me-down explanations? Personally, I don't think most of my experiences need an explanation to have value.

Remote, vast, unending places give me this sensation most readily. I was camping in the Carpathian Mountains a couple years ago. After driving on horrible, pot-hole ridden roads for hours, we found ourselves in the middle of a grassy pasture. We were overlooking a cliff at the confluence of two large rivers.

On the other sides were rolling hills of green. This place was beautiful, and we were the only people seen or heard for endless miles. It was hard to believe there were only a few scattered cottages in the distance. No sounds of traffic or electronics. No signs either. There were rolling thunderstorms in the distance. Because of the silence, we could hear thunder from farther than I felt we should have.

That was amazing.

The lakes and mountains in New Hampshire and Vermont. The ocean in Maine, NH and Mass.