Read My Lips - the blog

You'd better not pout*

I seem to have started of a bit of conversation in the comments on my Could it have been said any better? post. It was not my actual intent to do so, but then again, I have always questioned almost anything done in the name of religion, unless they are good deeds, and still, I disagree with why such are done in the name of religion.

I am not the most ardent student of the world's religions. It is not that I do not want to be, but like most other subjects in which I find interest, time limits how much ardency I can apply to any single interest. I did, however, recently buy a series of books Great Religion of Modern Man published in 1961 about religion. There are six books: Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism. I have only begun reading these books, having gotten halfway through the first book: Judaism.

Such book seemed the logical place to begin, as three of the remaining five religions have beliefs based upon occurrences during the lives of Jewish ancestors. What such book has divulged thus far is that I had already possessed adequate knowledge to understand most things dealing with the Jewish religion.

I am going to extrapolate such inference to conclude that I understand enough of all these religions to discuss what I believe to be the fallacy of religion:

All religions seem to correlate acts to what occurs after you leave this plane of existence. Often couched in terms of what acts open the path to the next plane or such plane that will be your destination. In essence, they define, within such religion what is good and what is evil. What is disturbing is when one religion defines its members as good and members of all others as evil.

Could we count the wars and the people who died in the name of eradicating the heathens? What bizarre things some religions believe: That the deaths of ones enemy pleases the deity you worship; That it is OK when you fail as long as you ask the deity's forgiveness; and That faith is the deity brings good fortune. I am sure there are so many, many more, but these were the ones that immediately come to mind.

Whenever I am asked about my religion, I always state: I am the pastor and sole member of the Church of Goodness for Goodness' Sake. I choose not to do my best to be a good person in obedience to some unknown deity or for sake of afterlife salvation. This is my only known existence, and I choose to deal with this one in the best way that I can. I do what is right because it is right; I do good things for the sake of making this existence more pleasurable for myself and my fellow man.

If there really is a soul, it is energy of some form. When your body dies, that energy may go somewhere. It has always been my belief that a good person exudes positive energy and a bad person exudes negative energy. Upon death, the energy goes where energy goes. Negative energy is absorbed into the ground and positive energy floats way out into space and joins that giant nebula of combined consciousness that continually watches the development of our species. Is that Heaven and Hell? I doubt my Bible thumbing, Hell and Brimfire Missionary Baptist preaching great-grandfather would agree with my opinion. What he would never understand is that a big part of him in actually deep within my religious base.

*Extra points for anyone who can explain why I used the title I did for this post.

Posted by Tiger at July 26, 2003 03:21 PM