Thank you Jack, I agree. Speculating about Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil is an obsurd and pointless act. We can't know or come to understand god in a rational way, but that is not to say that the truth is irrational. You label it as a mystery and say it can't be solved, so you unfortunitly are out of the running. Some said long ago the same things about the nature of light, weather, the stars, the shape of the earth, our origins and so on, and attributed it all to God. When people did final come up with answers they were heretics. I'm sure I don't need to go into details on those stories.
But then you again go on to make grand speculations about god as beyond all limitions and has infinity knowledge, which is a bold a statment as any. This is not to say we shouldn't ponder God's exstience and our own, we must. But to cloud these ponderings with the conclusions of other people, and to assume that everything is already figured out and we just have to fall in line is the end of lucid speculation.
Buddhists reflect on the divine by clearing their minds of all speculation and thought. Christians very early on stamped out the practice of meditation as a christian practice because, well why would anyone need the church if one could find spiritual enlightenment on their own? In zen they contemplate over paradoxes as they realize the divine is beyond the rational, which is to say not irrational (who needs zen when you have zen?). What's above the rational and irrational. Certianly something that needs to be pondered (without conclusions or beliefs).
So along these lines the experincing of the spirit of self cannot be described in words with any sort of accuracy, so it is described in the language of symbol and analogue (ie. in the Christian sense, the figure of Christ, the cross, the trinity...). Imagine trying to describe the experience of music to someone who's never heard sound, one must speak completely through the use of analogues (hard, soft, jerky, thrashy, groove, mellow...). So through the use of analogues and symbols, the message of Jesus is defined. But like the man who pointed in awe to the moon for the people to see, the people mistakened the divine for the finger, the symbol, the thing that points to the divine. The word, the symbol is not the thing, it is dead. Yet somehow, somewhere along the line the symbols became the holy/divine thing, and we are left with our immoral, sinful selves.
Christianity (like the Jewish and Islamic faiths and unlike Buddhism and Taoism) have divided life into the holy and unholy, good/evil, and thus turned the spirit into an intellectual matter (what's good and what's evil?). This single act is the very cause of so called evil (conflict) and which puts the spirit outside the self.
Everything and Everyone is God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Religion must go beyond the rational without becoming irrational.
One must have compassion for the smallest child to the largest child murderer to the rock between your feet.
That emptiness we feel, that makes us run to god, run to the church, to our ideas of atheism or satanism and all the other isms, that is what we need to build a relationship with, the emptiness. By accepting a myriad of myths and mythical beings into the pysche is meerly to run away from our true essence, the nothingness, and to run away from truth/god/'what is'.
"God is an idea depending on the climate, the enviroment, and the tradition in which you have been brought up.
The question of whether or not there is a God or truth or reality, or whatever you like to call it, can never be answered by books, by priests, philosophers or saviours. Nobody and nothing can answer the question but you yourself and that is why you must know yourself." |
. This seems to be getting alittle hostile. I lost my faith because I saw that it was just a blanket excuse for an ideology that can't be accepted on it's own merit.