My Religion

I've been stalling when it comes to this subject. Nothing is more long winded a topic for me than religion. It is necessary for me to consolidate a concise text version of what I believe. Even though I've begun I don't know how this is supposed to happen. I had a conversation with some fundamentalists, it had been a while. I am used to having a diverse group of friends and their beliefs. As a child I only knew Catholics. Maybe that is the place to begin. I need to tell you a little bit about where I come from so you can understand my journey to what I know now. This shit doesn't happen in a day. I'm an ever changing being, who often laughs at my prior self's silly ideas.

Being raised in a religion is nice for the reasons of tradition and community. Those are what appeals to anyone seeking religion. A safe place to find other people to help your community with and to talk to about your struggles. What's not to like? Ideology. That's what. Any time a community of learning tells you to stop asking questions, they should not be trusted. The institutions in a way are robbing us of our local communities where we live by segregating us in another manner. You can not belong to a religion and not adhere to their rules. That is the way it goes. And those of you who are sitting there saying, but I'm a Christian (even though you don't go to a building every weekend and pray) are wrong. You can believe in what is taught as the message of Christ and not believe he is the one and only prophet of peace and the one and only son of god. I don't think it was Jesus who said he is the only son of god.

What Jesus said and how we got here in our understanding of Jesus is a history, not a story. So let's operate under the assumption he was a real guy. He lived. He was an outcast. He loved those who society loathed and forgave those society had a habit of stoning to death. He was disgusted with those collecting taxes and those trying to profit off the Jewish religion. He was helping the Jews because that was the culture where he lived and was raised. They were so set on the rules of the the Torah (Old Testament, if you are Christian) that they would not accept any outsider, or gentile. They were so caught up on the rules that they had forgotten the one and only real focus of life which was to love.

I feel like Jesus was probably a guru of sorts, a prophet of peace, someone trying to bring hope to the outsiders. The prose of the Bible are so poetic. The art is timeless in all religious texts, as they are designed to be. But the New Testament of the Bible was written over 60 years after Jesus died. So I'm guessing his words aren't verbatim. Now let's take into consideration that they were they translated at least 5 times before they got to you. You aren't getting his entire message, you are prevented from knowing how he made his journey from child to wise man and that is the only part that matters. How can you too live in love instead of hate? The only guarantee from religious folk is to just take their word for it that god himself inspired every word of the bible. I'm certain god did.

What I believe people are really describing when they say god is probably exactly what causes artists to feel what we call inspiration. This world of men however is full of snake oil salesman and those who would promise enlightenment at a cost and never deliver just to make profit. Those men are so focused on money they could not possibly walk the path to enlightenment. Why do so many believe they know they way? The reason they are so successful is because they use words that are powerful and meaningful to others. They know that the Qur'an, The Torah, The New Testament, and the Bhagavad Gita have been around for centuries and have been used by very powerful men to control masses of people. We don't have to question the effectiveness of the art, is has been well tested. Especially not when we indoctrinate children from birth.

We do not live in a world where many cultures raise children to know everything and chose for themselves what their traditions will be. Whatever parents are, children are expected to be. Children are willing and eager participants in this system. What children want most is love and approval. We use the threat of hell to control children. We use the threat of Santa watching to control children. But even without those, we use the judgement and shame before god to control them. Shouldn't it be that children are taught to have conscience and compassion and not worry about anything but inner control. Our society is set up to limit people's intelligence so that they will want to fill the meaningless functions of the elite ruling class. Religion is an effective tool in teaching humans not to ask any further questions. Once you believe you have all the answers, or that there is somehow a limit to knowledge of the universe you will be much easier to control.

I don't believe hell is a place that exists. I don't discredit the words or art depicting evil. Perhaps hell is a state of torment on earth. I see many people, like yourself, trapped in their own personal hell of denial, and seclusion from the oneness of energy and science and shit.Why are we taught to believe it is sad that hell does not exist? Do you like the idea of people you know being eternally tormented? Why would an all powerful god want anyone to suffer? I would contend it is only ourselves who can doom us to suffering. It is only through understanding ourselves and our place in the world around us that we can know god.

Do you not realize that maybe when god says hell is disconnection from him for eternity, he is describing your very predicament? To be hateful and disconnected from nature and everything it encompasses. Why would god be the one who wants you to create distinctions between groups of people who do and don't deserve love? It is people on earth that place restrictions on the infinite energy of our reality.  

The God of religion is actually man made. In the days when those religion's wonders were written there wasn not this word "god". God was Yahweh, a word that could not be pronounced or read. Mohammad should never be depicted by man. Why? Because we can't. The entire point of trying to describe God is that it is that which can not be described or fully understood and communicated by man in his human body form. God may just be a metaphor for physics, for the energy that literally binds every thing to every other living thing and makes us all one. If we all exist from the matter of an exploding star, are we not that star in some way? 

The water we drink is the water that Jesus drank, and the water the dinosaurs drank. No new elements of hydrogen and oxygen are created, they continue on through the cycle. As I believe we are made of elements that continue on through the cycle. You don't have to believe in reincarnation to realize that if we were to be buried into the ground without embalming or a pine box, we would just crumble away and return to being earth. The earth nourishes the vegetables we grow in the ground and feed to mothers so that they have a healthy baby. We need to stop seeing religions as magic and start seeing these old texts for the beautiful artistic representation someone was trying to paint with language about the literal world of limitations in which we live. 

Nature was here before us and will remain after. I'm sorry if all you believe is awful singular simplified quotes from the bible. There is more. To get the message of the "word of god", there is more. It takes understanding science and everything we have collectively shared through unity of people throughout the ages. God is man made because it is a word to describe something that doesn't have meaning to our five senses otherwise. Nature is trees, rocks, dirt, and shit. Literally. It exists. God is that which we can not see, hear, touch, taste, or smell, something beyond that. We could use the word feel, but does that really help you understand what I mean. It is inadequate. The only hope is to string enough words together to create depth of meaning. English is the language of logic, science, and technology. Formal English is not a language of emotion and passion. One of the many reason I will not remove "curse" words from my vocabulary no matter how many times I have been prompted. I need the language of emotion and passion to survive.

I try not to feel sorry for people. I try to relate. Let's get back to me at 16. I started to disconnect from my religion when it started telling me to behave in a hateful way. I have known gay people my entire life. There are way worse kinds of people, like bigots, rapists, and violence perpetrators, we should be worried about than people who want to get married in a single loving committed relationship. Also at 16 I understood that there was definitely something wrong about protesting a women's clinic. I understood women enough to know any women getting an abortion had thoroughly thought it through. If she needed advice from anyone she should let her family and doctors help her make that decision, if she doesn't just make it herself. But it definitely wasn't helping poverty, or domestic abuse (the things that primarily cause a women to chose abortion) to shame women during one of their most painful life experiences.

There is no savior coming here. If someone came today claiming to be Jesus, and not just another prophet of peace and a follower of a faith, we wouldn't believe him, we would call him crazy. When people come preaching the same message of love and acceptance of Jesus we don't accept them unless they are "one of us". How would you know Jesus was here? We don't get to return to the same bodies ever, whether there is reincarnation or not. We leave our earthly bodies. Maybe more prophets of peace will come like Buddha or Martin Luther King Jr. But Jesus the man will not return, his one life is over. Now he is energy converted into something else. Because science tells us it never disappears. It has been so long that there is great controversy over what he even looked like at the time. How would you know...

Jesus isn't coming for you. You will die someday. I guarantee it. I'm not ignoring The Bible, the religious text of my youth. They are just irrelevant in my reality. I have read it. There is no use addressing any book let alone the bible line by line and dissecting it. That is why people write books and not poems, books and not sentences, or paragraphs. Their message is too big to be contained in simple words that have already been used so they need to put lots of words together to paint an entire picture. I have read many books containing artist's representations of life and the balance between good and evil. I prefer Tolkien to the Bible when it comes to epic stories that describe that daily struggle that you could call god and the devil. The battle between good and evil is the one thing we can agree on. We all can feel the yin and the yang. The eb and the flow, the give and the take, the good and the bad. We live in a world of duality, but if you wanna talk god, it is neither this nor that, it just is. 

Christ is dead. He was a man. If you believe in magic, he came back to life and resurrected three days after he died. Usually those who believe in the miracles of the Bible are the same who would disbelieve the magic of the universe. But you must come to understand you are taking the inspired, artistic, "Word of God" entirely literally. You are in choosing only one heritage and only one mythology to connect to and thus unintentionally separating yourself from the oneness that is everything. The rest of life on this planet. By choosing religion you are saying humans are the only living thing that matters. Without the ancient knowledge of everything humans pass from one to another, we are just another animal in the cycle. Our knowledge, our consciousness is that thing we are searching for, the god we are talking to in our mind when we pray alone. 

It's such a shame what religion does to pervert spirituality. You aren't nice when you tell other people they are going to hell for not fearing your god. That is the opposite of nice. You aren't saving anyone and bringing them to a life of wholeness and beauty by teaching them division and intolerance. Which is what the American Christian has been taught in their religion. If hell was a metaphor. Hell is supposed to be just the absence of god. Aloneness maybe. Isolation. Many Americans are hateful and isolated. Maybe this is hell for them. 

I don't know the answers to the universe. I can't promise you that I will teach you everything. All anyone can do is promise to share with others what they know. We share through art. Writing, music, painting, and even memes are of real value. Humans are only worth what they are together. Humans only accomplish things together. We can only come to great improvements in our knowledge with strong intelligent communities with the resources for sharing and expanding. Knowledge is only that which I have learned through an experience. We can gain knowledge through our own experiences but without all the art and science that came before us we will always start at square one. We gain most of our knowledge through other people's experiences. We take for granted thousands of years of recorded human knowledge passing hands or minds, generation through generation. 

Only people who profit most from the current system, and has someone paid to run every aspect of their lives, should support these institutions that keep us from realizing that there are more people suffering than succeeding. The energy that abounds us is limitless. The globe is suffering at the hands of a few and there is no true faith accurately describing what needs to be done to heal us and the planet. Churches are historically tax exempt. Churches are used for profit and for transfer of power among the ruling class. In America wealthy men use churches and religion as an excuse for a tax break to keep more of their money and power. It is good to appear altruistic, so every powerful man donates to his religion. But when you donate to your religion that has major social and political sway, it is primarily to benefit yourself and not the poorest of our society. 

I am not trying to convince anyone not to listen to the message of Jesus, Siddhartha, or Mohammad. I am saying that you shouldn't limit yourself ever. In any way. You deserve to know all the answers we have come up with. You deserve to have the opportunity to contribute some of your experiences and knowledge for future generations. There should be no limits in life. Especially not when it comes to understanding yourself, your history, and your own spirituality. 

God never told you to hate. God never told you to judge other humans. It was man that taught you those behaviors. Only through looking inward can you live the path that will leave you most fulfilled and closest to what you are seeking in the path of god. Anyone telling you money is required for enlightenment can not be trusted to get you there. All that is necessary to live the complete and connected life you long for is, you. Your thoughts are tangible. Your essence is powerful. You are connected to everything around you. Trust yourself, your wisdom is ancient.

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