The helping friendly book
courtesy of Icculus
I don't know why, but the idea for this post has been lurking for a while and I seem to be in procrastination mode. I will at least start it now. I have lots of ideas which I probably won't get to at once, or maybe some will die by the way side, but what comes out will make it here. I am writing about religion - and ultimately - I must emphasize - since I like to use the word "ultimately" so much - MY VIEWS on religion. They are my views, they may not be yours - and I respect that they are my views only, and they may not necessarily be the universal truth that all must abide by. I don't claim to have the answer and state that if you don't believe what I do, that you will spend billions and zillions of years in a hot boiling place - but I do believe that respect for what others believe makes the world a better place to live in at the present time, and that the present is far more important than anything that may or may not follow real life.
I note we often see a debate between science and religion that plays out in the form of evolution vs. creationism. As with any debate, rather than deciding which side is right, I tend to believe that if you zoom in on them close enough, you can come to the conclusion that to a certain degree they are both "the truth" without having to pick sides. To me evolution and creationism have a lot in common. Sure God supposedly created the world in 7 days, but a day's length in itself is never defined, and God - as described in the bible - could have gone about it through evolution as a pretty effective means of getting us where we are. Those are my personal views - that science is in fact the most practical way of accumulating information and can explain more than any piece of religious writing, but that in itself does not mean that science explains everything. It describes how the car works and the machinery contained within pretty well, but the nature of the driver has many questions unanswered. What it does explain though, until I find something else to refute it, I am going along with. If science had a way of explaining our notion of "God" I am sure it would, but science hasn't gotten there - not yet anyways - other than possibly explaining it as a human instinct to believe in something like God.
And speaking of books - I am going to let you in on my book now - consider this my Bible so to speak. You can take as long as you want to read it - you can spend a lifetime reading it - or you can read it in about one second. You will find the contents of the book in the parentheses below - so here goes:
( )
and there it is. Infinity is contained within. Within those parentheses there may be nothing, or there may be room for every book ever written, including the Bible, Koran, whatever your choice of writing may be. In my definition, every book ever written can fall into those parentheses. Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" is just as much a book of God - as "The Bible" - to me anyways, because from my perspective, no one book has the answer. I am not going to buy into something just because a book says it - and if any one book claims to be the answer, by nature I am going to question it. That is not to say that book may have some answers, but as a thinking person, I am going to decide for myself that it is my answer. If one of the 10 Commandments gets changed to:
"Thou shall jump over the nearest cliff"
I am going to have some concerns there. A lot of the 10 Commandments need to be questioned from my point of view. "Honor thy mother and father" - well - I'm sorry - if they deserve to be honored, I've got no problem with it - but if they do something that (theoretically anyways) knocks them off the honor platform, I am not going to give them a free pass just because they are my parents and the book says I should. If my parents were to insult me, molest me, or assault me - should I still honor them anyways, or should I call the police and have them arrested? I could see this commandment getting people into trouble. I also don't buy the Bible's notion that only a man and a woman can be married - I have no problem with homosexuals having the same rights we do and some outdated book of over 2,000 years isn't going to sway me. A lot has changed in 2,000 years and looking back at a book from that age, some of it comes across as outdated and primitive. I am not planning on sacrificing any animals tonight for example, or sending up any "burnt offerings" to please the demanding dude up in the sky looking down on me.
Again - no disrespect to anyone who believes the Bible is 100% the answer - if that is what you want to believe - I can respect you as long as you can respect me, and even if you can't. I just have decided I like thinking for myself, rather than having a book spell it all out for me. A lot of my criticism with religion is that it is used as a crutch. God is asked to do a lot for us and then God may serve as an emotional toilet for us to dump all of our crap into. Of course all of this has been pointed out in an excellent and not too well known book that my buddy John gave me called God Laughs and Plays which he sent me after reading my "Dumb All Over" rant. If I am a sex addict for example, and I decide I am "living in sin" and that I will go from this extreme to only engaging in the act under the holy vows of marriage because this "pleases God" - it seems to me I am placing an awfully heavy burden upon God instead of taking the time to go into therapy or an AA group and understand for myself what has driven me to go these extremes to begin with. I would think swinging from one extreme to the other would have a pendulum effect, with one extreme waiting to follow the other.
The same thought method applies to life after death. I happen to side with believing that it does exist, but I can't know that. It is nice to have that assurance that we will live on - because a book tells us we do, and that as long as we follow the exact instructions of that book, that we will go to Heaven, not only have eternal life but that we will have the eternal life that allows us to be pretty happy on top of death. I don't know of anyone not going through a depression or terminal illness that really wants to die, and I would think most of us are pretty frightened of that. So organized religion plays on our fear by assuring us that as long as we send our cash or donation to their way of thinking, that we can be assured that we will live on. If I had 24 hours to die, I would imagine I would have a good chance of being converted to the religion of choice of the guy who came to see me in my prison cell if he was convincing enough. Are we going to choose to live our lives out of fear and the notion of appeasing that fear, or again - deciding for ourselves what is right? Death scares me too - but part of my faith is believing that whatever is going to happen is the way death, God/dess, or nature intends it - and that is about as much of an answer as I am ever going to have. It may not answer my questions, but it is the best I can do - kind of the way science is.
Personally - I believe in something powerful. I can't walk and drive through some of the most amazing landscaping and wonders of nature without feeling inspired and feeling a sense of wonder. My own book - the empty book - explains it about as well as anything can - because I find the more I try to explain it, the further away I get from it. Why for example do so many "bad" things happen in the world - well I don't know. I know I have been pretty lucky in comparison to those starving to death or suffering hell in a concentraction camp. Why it happens to some, and not to others - I can't explain. Nobody deserves those things - at least I believe that. I can't live my life believing that we are all chemicals and particles, the way some atheists can - because I do believe that we are spirit as well. An atheist is taking just as much of a leap of faith in saying there is no God, as a religious person who says there is - because on either side of the equation, you are making a decision based on faith that something this powerful does or does not exist. Science can't prove it either way, other than to say that no scientific tools have proven God does exist. I choose to believe that we have some element of spirt, or God/dess within us all - and that is far as I will go. I can't try to explain something that can't be explained, and I cannot prove it either. On faith I believe it is there and in believing that, my life is richer, but my faith cannot assure me exactly what will happen in my dying moments. I will probably be pretty scared - but maybe in the face of that fear some faith will kick in and I will be calm as well. I at least hope so. Buddhist writer of "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" states that our biggest test is how we face our death, and that we must spend our life preparing for that moment.
If I take a little from all religions I have come across and studied - the One God concept of Judeo-Christianity, the meditative and introspective aspect of Buddhism, the harm none concept of Wicca-Paganism, combined with the questioning and evidence gathering nature of science - somewhere in all of that is an answer. My writings here are just as much the writings of God as the Bible to me - in that I see us all as individuals cells of something God-like, and once it is written - whatever it is that is written - it becomes part of the infinite "Helping Friendly Book" to speak.
A whole other realm woften ties into religion - morals and ethics. I have my own beliefs what is right and wrong. I don't think that a lot of good comes out of taking a human life for example, but a cow might call me a big hypocrite for eating one of their dead brethren the other night - and who am I to say what is right to me is right for everyone? Maybe we do kill each other out of some biological instinct to limit our population. I am not planning on doing it any time soon, or at all - because I have decided it is not going to help me or others. Again - the 10 Commandments provide a lot of order for us, but what is right and wrong makes a lot more sense if we come up with it on our own, instead of believing in it because some book tells us to. Whatever you may agree or disagree with here is your decision, but I wouldn't tell you to believe it just because I wrote it. As the shirt says "God is too big to fit inside one religion". My own view on religion comes down to three words - think for yourself. Don't believe it because it is written, believe it because it makes sense to you. And of course...
Believe it if you need it if you don't just pass it on.
I don't know why, but the idea for this post has been lurking for a while and I seem to be in procrastination mode. I will at least start it now. I have lots of ideas which I probably won't get to at once, or maybe some will die by the way side, but what comes out will make it here. I am writing about religion - and ultimately - I must emphasize - since I like to use the word "ultimately" so much - MY VIEWS on religion. They are my views, they may not be yours - and I respect that they are my views only, and they may not necessarily be the universal truth that all must abide by. I don't claim to have the answer and state that if you don't believe what I do, that you will spend billions and zillions of years in a hot boiling place - but I do believe that respect for what others believe makes the world a better place to live in at the present time, and that the present is far more important than anything that may or may not follow real life.
I note we often see a debate between science and religion that plays out in the form of evolution vs. creationism. As with any debate, rather than deciding which side is right, I tend to believe that if you zoom in on them close enough, you can come to the conclusion that to a certain degree they are both "the truth" without having to pick sides. To me evolution and creationism have a lot in common. Sure God supposedly created the world in 7 days, but a day's length in itself is never defined, and God - as described in the bible - could have gone about it through evolution as a pretty effective means of getting us where we are. Those are my personal views - that science is in fact the most practical way of accumulating information and can explain more than any piece of religious writing, but that in itself does not mean that science explains everything. It describes how the car works and the machinery contained within pretty well, but the nature of the driver has many questions unanswered. What it does explain though, until I find something else to refute it, I am going along with. If science had a way of explaining our notion of "God" I am sure it would, but science hasn't gotten there - not yet anyways - other than possibly explaining it as a human instinct to believe in something like God.
And speaking of books - I am going to let you in on my book now - consider this my Bible so to speak. You can take as long as you want to read it - you can spend a lifetime reading it - or you can read it in about one second. You will find the contents of the book in the parentheses below - so here goes:
( )
and there it is. Infinity is contained within. Within those parentheses there may be nothing, or there may be room for every book ever written, including the Bible, Koran, whatever your choice of writing may be. In my definition, every book ever written can fall into those parentheses. Stephen King's "The Dark Tower" is just as much a book of God - as "The Bible" - to me anyways, because from my perspective, no one book has the answer. I am not going to buy into something just because a book says it - and if any one book claims to be the answer, by nature I am going to question it. That is not to say that book may have some answers, but as a thinking person, I am going to decide for myself that it is my answer. If one of the 10 Commandments gets changed to:
"Thou shall jump over the nearest cliff"
I am going to have some concerns there. A lot of the 10 Commandments need to be questioned from my point of view. "Honor thy mother and father" - well - I'm sorry - if they deserve to be honored, I've got no problem with it - but if they do something that (theoretically anyways) knocks them off the honor platform, I am not going to give them a free pass just because they are my parents and the book says I should. If my parents were to insult me, molest me, or assault me - should I still honor them anyways, or should I call the police and have them arrested? I could see this commandment getting people into trouble. I also don't buy the Bible's notion that only a man and a woman can be married - I have no problem with homosexuals having the same rights we do and some outdated book of over 2,000 years isn't going to sway me. A lot has changed in 2,000 years and looking back at a book from that age, some of it comes across as outdated and primitive. I am not planning on sacrificing any animals tonight for example, or sending up any "burnt offerings" to please the demanding dude up in the sky looking down on me.
Again - no disrespect to anyone who believes the Bible is 100% the answer - if that is what you want to believe - I can respect you as long as you can respect me, and even if you can't. I just have decided I like thinking for myself, rather than having a book spell it all out for me. A lot of my criticism with religion is that it is used as a crutch. God is asked to do a lot for us and then God may serve as an emotional toilet for us to dump all of our crap into. Of course all of this has been pointed out in an excellent and not too well known book that my buddy John gave me called God Laughs and Plays which he sent me after reading my "Dumb All Over" rant. If I am a sex addict for example, and I decide I am "living in sin" and that I will go from this extreme to only engaging in the act under the holy vows of marriage because this "pleases God" - it seems to me I am placing an awfully heavy burden upon God instead of taking the time to go into therapy or an AA group and understand for myself what has driven me to go these extremes to begin with. I would think swinging from one extreme to the other would have a pendulum effect, with one extreme waiting to follow the other.
The same thought method applies to life after death. I happen to side with believing that it does exist, but I can't know that. It is nice to have that assurance that we will live on - because a book tells us we do, and that as long as we follow the exact instructions of that book, that we will go to Heaven, not only have eternal life but that we will have the eternal life that allows us to be pretty happy on top of death. I don't know of anyone not going through a depression or terminal illness that really wants to die, and I would think most of us are pretty frightened of that. So organized religion plays on our fear by assuring us that as long as we send our cash or donation to their way of thinking, that we can be assured that we will live on. If I had 24 hours to die, I would imagine I would have a good chance of being converted to the religion of choice of the guy who came to see me in my prison cell if he was convincing enough. Are we going to choose to live our lives out of fear and the notion of appeasing that fear, or again - deciding for ourselves what is right? Death scares me too - but part of my faith is believing that whatever is going to happen is the way death, God/dess, or nature intends it - and that is about as much of an answer as I am ever going to have. It may not answer my questions, but it is the best I can do - kind of the way science is.
Personally - I believe in something powerful. I can't walk and drive through some of the most amazing landscaping and wonders of nature without feeling inspired and feeling a sense of wonder. My own book - the empty book - explains it about as well as anything can - because I find the more I try to explain it, the further away I get from it. Why for example do so many "bad" things happen in the world - well I don't know. I know I have been pretty lucky in comparison to those starving to death or suffering hell in a concentraction camp. Why it happens to some, and not to others - I can't explain. Nobody deserves those things - at least I believe that. I can't live my life believing that we are all chemicals and particles, the way some atheists can - because I do believe that we are spirit as well. An atheist is taking just as much of a leap of faith in saying there is no God, as a religious person who says there is - because on either side of the equation, you are making a decision based on faith that something this powerful does or does not exist. Science can't prove it either way, other than to say that no scientific tools have proven God does exist. I choose to believe that we have some element of spirt, or God/dess within us all - and that is far as I will go. I can't try to explain something that can't be explained, and I cannot prove it either. On faith I believe it is there and in believing that, my life is richer, but my faith cannot assure me exactly what will happen in my dying moments. I will probably be pretty scared - but maybe in the face of that fear some faith will kick in and I will be calm as well. I at least hope so. Buddhist writer of "Tibetan Book of Living and Dying" states that our biggest test is how we face our death, and that we must spend our life preparing for that moment.
If I take a little from all religions I have come across and studied - the One God concept of Judeo-Christianity, the meditative and introspective aspect of Buddhism, the harm none concept of Wicca-Paganism, combined with the questioning and evidence gathering nature of science - somewhere in all of that is an answer. My writings here are just as much the writings of God as the Bible to me - in that I see us all as individuals cells of something God-like, and once it is written - whatever it is that is written - it becomes part of the infinite "Helping Friendly Book" to speak.
A whole other realm woften ties into religion - morals and ethics. I have my own beliefs what is right and wrong. I don't think that a lot of good comes out of taking a human life for example, but a cow might call me a big hypocrite for eating one of their dead brethren the other night - and who am I to say what is right to me is right for everyone? Maybe we do kill each other out of some biological instinct to limit our population. I am not planning on doing it any time soon, or at all - because I have decided it is not going to help me or others. Again - the 10 Commandments provide a lot of order for us, but what is right and wrong makes a lot more sense if we come up with it on our own, instead of believing in it because some book tells us to. Whatever you may agree or disagree with here is your decision, but I wouldn't tell you to believe it just because I wrote it. As the shirt says "God is too big to fit inside one religion". My own view on religion comes down to three words - think for yourself. Don't believe it because it is written, believe it because it makes sense to you. And of course...
Believe it if you need it if you don't just pass it on.
posted by Zook at 5:46 AM
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