PONDERING LIFE AND RELIGION

Life is not hard to figure out. The answer we are all looking for is, we mostly don’t know. Going even further, we probably are not capable of knowing, even if we were shown.

We all do agree that life has occurred in the universe, at least on one planet, Earth. But, how did this happen and why?   When we are really honest, in our heart of hearts, we simply don’t know.

Not knowing something, however, is contrary to our human nature. We feel compelled to have answers for everything, primarily so we can control them in case they are potentially dangerous to us. That’s right, that evolutionary urge to survive trumps all motives, when push comes to shove.

Even though we may all agree that the universe and life do exist and were created in one way or another, from that point on, our various decisions on what reality actually is could not be more diverse. Each of us sees only what we prefer to see or what we’ve been taught to see.

 Religions emerge from our human efforts to define the indefinable. Even though religions are totally man-made institutions their existence is important. We need assemblies where we can gather together with others of like mind and share our spiritual understandings. As we learn what works and doesn’t work in life, religious teachings can give us guidance and suggestions that tend to make us less selfish and more sensitive to the needs of others. That’s a good thing.

When religions teach that we should deal with each other from the perspective of unconditional love, they are at their best and this is what is important in understanding life.  Most religions do this at some point in their teachings and they usually do it very well. These efforts deserve our participation and support. We should participate in religious assemblies that speak to our personal spiritual insights and convictions.

The problems, however, are with dogma. When religions create creeds demanding allegiance to magical histories or events, God ordained rituals, or the sacred handling of religious icons, or divinely inspired scriptures or anointed church leaders, they are attempting to capture and limit truth to specific words, objects, and actions. You cannot limit what is beyond your capacity to understand.

Let’s just agree that God is the ultimate love, truth and power of our existence and leave it at that.  We can make it more detailed and even write down our fundamental statements of belief as we search and learn, but we need always keep these open for revision. Otherwise, we, too, will simply create our own unrelenting verbal dogma and have progressed nowhere.

As I said earlier, life is not so hard to figure out as long as you realize there is little that we know and much we'll never know. Except, love does appear to be an important part of whatever the ultimate answers are. So, let’s stay with that and learn from there.