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A word of Caution: What you encounter here will shake your faith. If you’re comfortable with your belief system and your understanding of god, this is NOT where you want to be. I mean this with the utmost urgency. It’s not my intention to rob anyone of religion if religion is helpful to them. We’re all at different stages in the journey. I believe this wholeheartedly, so please heed this warning. This blog is for people who are questioning their faith or have already left it behind. Period.
So... You’re Christian and a believer, but your rational mind finds flaws in the bible or the faith itself.
I know what you’re going through. I had to learn how to put the bible down and find god in the real world instead of in ancient writings. I had to come to the understanding that religion and god are not the same thing and don’t just automatically go together.
We're taught that God and religion are like chocolate and milk; but they’re actually chocolate and aluminum foil.
It will help you to know that:
Everything the world thinks it knows about god comes from religion, but religion is manmade and knows nothing about god. Which means we’ve all grown up believing god is a certain way, when in fact we’ve never actually been shown how to find out what god is really like.
And it's critical to note that science can’t help us here, because science is restricted to material things while god is non-material. The best science can do is tell us it doesn’t know about god one way or the other. This makes science perfectly agnostic and of no use here at all.
The only way to learn truth about god is to take off our religion-colored glasses and begin to study god through the universe god designed. This is The. Only. Way.
As you go through the process of deconstruction you’ll find yourself turning to your religious understanding of god again and again. That's natural. It takes time and practice to wean ourselves off those assumptions.
For example, if I ask you to bring up a mental image of a holy person, it’s pretty likely you’ll see a priest or someone in a hooded robe, perhaps even with a halo. It might shock you to hear that you could also think of a sex symbol, a business person or day laborer, an actor or whomever. Holiness is a matter of inner connectedness to higher levels of awareness, not clothing (or lack of it) or any occupation. From an enlightenment perspective, such things are completely irrelevant.
We all know that people in the ‘holiest’ professions are capable of massive crimes. If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the Catholic priest scandals that rocked the 2Ks. Being a priest doesn't make a person holy. Being enlightened makes a person holy. Priesthood is just another career and says very little about a person’s character. Are there holy sex workers? Perhaps. Are there unholy priests? We know there are.
Our religion-colored glasses taint everything we encounter, and more often than not they convince us of a god who displays absolutely none of the equanimity, egalitarianism and discretion of actual god. We can know this by looking at nature critically.
The OT god (YHWH) is intensely egotistical, but true god does everything possible to remain anonymous and unnoticed. We have no indication of who invented existence; we have no signature or sign of ownership; we have no name or image of The Designer. We have nothing but the design itself. God doesn't care if we know about him/her/it. In fact, it’s conspicuously obvious that god prefers we don’t.
There’s a clear reason for this if we spend some time pondering it. Click to page 2 (no opt in required).
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