Those Little Things...

So I managed to get two lights to come on in my car this morning, which means it will be going into the shop again, I will be a little bit poorer. Ignorance may be bliss, but it seems to be damn expensive :-p

This could lead into a large diatribe on the complete lack of options in America for transport in a vast majority of places, but I think that horse has been beaten by others far better than I to the point that it more resembles glue or pet food at this point.

Instead I will venture into the religious debate that goes on in my head, and has been asked about a few times since mentioning it. The problems with going into a subject such as this are many fold, mainly attributing to people shutting down when hearing a differing viewpoint, or not caring to listen to anything that could potentially be evangellical at all. So I will try to keep this as neutral as possible (which is actually my primary viewpoint), and use an explanation of my background and wehre I'm comming from to at least lend it some credibility.

I was raised Catholic (which is like a version of Christianity that is very established and has a vast ammount of structure and history to go along with it, for those of you that don't know) and went to Catholic schools until college. Meaning while some people went to religion classes on the weekends, I went every day of school. Every day. I read the book, I read their books, and even there I had vastly differing viewpoints put upon me from people who were very comfortable with their position on religion.

I was also raised with the other half of my family being practically fundamentalist Christian. To put it simply, fundamentalisim boiled down to (at least in my eyes, which is why I give the backgrounds) this book/teaching (be it the bible, quran, torah, sutras, analects etc...) is absloute truth, and I don't even have to think about moral decisions cause God already told me what I need to know. Oddly enough, from people in the same church here, I would also get vastly different approaches from people with the same comfort level.

I believe Hellen Keller once said something to the effect of "people don't like to think, because when you do, you very often draw conclusions". Given the ammount of thinking I do on virtually everything I'm exposed to, I'm bound to draw some kind of conclusions on these experiences.

Having only read two of the books (the analects, or at least the mencius, which is a derivitive, and the bible, which actually is inadvertantly the torah and part of the quran as well as I understand it) I can only look at it from those perspectives. I often found myself at odds with some of the rules on one side, and unerring attributions of the other. My personal favorite was a sunday school class with the "bible is exact truth" group, where we read the story of Noah and the ark (I'm going to assume everyone knows this one). I asked why the lions didn't eat the zebras and what not during this 40 days confined on a boat. The answer was that God must have shut their mouths and made them docile. I could buy that, after all dieties are pretty potent in that way. It was the follow up question of "well what did they do with all the poop?" that got me promptly ignored for the remainder of the class and time that year with that same guy.

This illustrates what I find to be the biggest problem with religion in general. The religious people in the world do a very hefty job at outlining what all this stuff means, and what we should be doing. This means that there are a significant majority of people in this world that have devoted thier hearts and minds to something they haven't even given much thought to. That scares me in more ways then I care to think about most days.

However there is hope, even within the establishment. I heard a Catholic Priest yesterday that had a very, what I consider to be enlightened and pragmatic view on how a message is communicated. The basis of it was that people look arround them and come up with some kind of analogy of what they should be doing and present that to God (as faith, religious writings, etc...). God then influences them in that subtle way only a diety can to refine it (or in some cases correct it). However it only comes through due refelection.

Basically it says that you can't ever, ever stop thinking about it. And when I say it I don't mean religious dogma, or ceremony, but the basic right versus wrong debate that goes along with most every decision made in our lives. There is no black and white governance for most decisions in anyone's life, much less for all of it.

Prayer (or its relative equivelant) seems so misconstured by today's society that its in some cases laughable. I found personally that just a quiet meditation (in this case during tai chi or qi gong) was pretty much the equavilant. A time to quiet your mind and think clearly on all those issues that your mind will present to you. Just like in a conversation with a person, you don't always have to be talking to be part of the conversation. Listening is an important and often neglected part of a person's religion, regardless of what that religion may be. Many Buddihists would just sit and think for hours on a question (google for koan to see an example), only to get frustrated on its obscurity or absurdity. In this frustration, they would then try again, and once they wore themselves out the answer they were looking for would just float into their minds. For those involved in any atheletics out there, you know what I'm talking about, that part where you stop thinking about what you are doing (due to fatigue or focus either one) and all of the sudden your body and mind come together to do what it knows its supposed to do. The brain can do this as well, give it a try sometime... even in a religious context.

And now the most contervercial part of this little writing. The dieties themselves. God is one of the most difficult to understand concepts in human history. It also happens to be one of the most prevelant and strong concepts in human history. Everyone has an idea, or, in some cases, a direct active rejection, but everyone has heard or dealt with it in some active reasoning capacity. Pretty impressive when you think about it. Everyone in their lives has to deal with this question.

Now for my contreversy... they're all the same.

Go ahead, let that one soak for a bit. Build up all those arguments in your head, tumble them arround for a bit, then when your brain is ready to try and soak up some more, read on. Go ahead, I'll wait :-p

The idea that all these things were different, and all these people could have come up with the same idea seems pretty mericulous to me. When it boils right down to it, every major religion in the world today has one common rule. The golden rule (do unto others as you would have done to you). I myself prefer the Bill and Ted rendition of "Be excellent to each other", but that's just semantics.

People arround the world have built up stories and myths (for lack of a better term, don't get it confused with Aesop's fables or anything) to generate rules and a reason for living and living correctly (e.g. golden rule). I was always amazed that they all were more similar than they realized, and all came to the same conclusion. This is what led me to believe that they were all the same. If you think about it, even facets of the myths themselves are the same. In every case, there was some reason for a diety to create the earth, then everything on it. The diety is then present to help the people out. There is some kind of competing diety to lure the people into doing bad things. It's pretty much universal.

More specific you say? Consider this. The Holy Spirit or God depending on your viewpoint from the Christian/Jewish side, Allah, the Dao, and Enlightenment (these are just the ones i'm more familiar with) are all acheiving the same goals. They just have different semantics, and come from different contexts. More you say? Confucious, Jesus, Mohemmed (sp?), The Budda, all human envoys of God. And recognized as such. The Jews and Muslims recognize Jesus as a Prophet (in varous capacities), and when asked about a bible passage regarding Jesus, an known "enlightned" Buddist replied "that was an enlightened man."

It is my belief (yes yes, I have actually stated one of my beliefs) that God presented all these people to the world. It was the intention to present this golden rule in a way that everyone would understand and relate to. It was to apply to everyone, and even if I'm totally wrong, and they aren't related in any way, they all came to the same conclusions (which paints an ammusing picture of that classic painting of dogs playing poker, just think of it as all the dieties arround the table instead talking about what they were going to do after they had already agreed on the basic message to implement it).

So I guess to clarify, they may not all be the same, but it really doesn't matter. People since the dawn of people have gotten a sense of right and wrong, and have been applying it, or willfully ignoring it. This will not change. The idea that this or that diety is better than any other seems silly to me, and the result of not enough attention being paid to the cultures and world outside your place. As the world interacts more and more, more of these issues will present themselves, and hopefully more commonality will be found and expressed.

This is not a war to be fought by the masses, and not power to be won or lost by the respective leaders. Although it will be that for both cases, hopefully not to the point that something irrevocable will be done. It is a chance for all those things to come together like they were originally intended. I like to picture that card game again, where all the participants are smiling over a game well played, all the chips are in the middle, and everybody has folded.

I encourage comments on this if nothing else than to provide more explanation where anyone may have gotten confused, or for me to clarify something that may be too obscure.

Are you thinking the same thing I am Pinky? I think so Brain, but wouldn't the black hole take all the cheetos?