Stop Clinging

I have been a tad cranky of late. I find that I am losing patience with those who try to remain anchored to the past. Thi is especially true regarding spiritual matters.

The Universe, God's Creation, is in a constant state of change. We humans change daily as we learn more and more. Yet, some, no, many, of us wish to remain tied to relics of beliefs.

Like it or not, we are not desert nomads herding sheep and fighting both empires seeking territory and neighbors we can't seem to get along with. We have gone too far and learned to much to continue those patterns of thought. No one in their right mind wants to live by Levitical law (by the way, that is all sharia law is).

Christians speak of 'The Blood of the Lamb' and the sacrificial atonement that Jesus brought. They don't understand that we now know that darn near every culture on Earth has practiced blood rights and scapegoating and it is fairly obvious that the desired results have never been found.

Christians speak of the Virgin Birth, yet we now know that the earliest Christians believed no such thing and that the entire concept is the result of a mistaken translation (the into Greek from the Hebrew word that really just means young girl). We also now that there was nor census at the time of Jesus' birth ( there was one earlier and each Jew was not required to go to the city of his birth) and no killing of babies by Herod. Oh, and Jesus was not from Nazareth because, at his time, there was no Nazareth (it shows up about the 2nd Century.

As far as older religions go, we have figured out, through historical and ancheological investigations, that they were, in ancient times, a mixed up mess, with each influencing and being absorbed by others.

India's Hinduism is a blend of the local Godess belief mixed with the Indo-aryan Vedic religions. Judaism imported beliefs from Egypt, Babylon and especially from Persia Zoroasterianism. Christianity stole from every indiginous belief system it came across, from the Greek neo-platonism to the Afro-Cuban systems of Voodoo.

The point is, we now know that all, and I mean all religions are a hodge-podge of beliefs, yet we continue to insist that ours, no matter where you are, is the right one. Add into that the fact that many beilefs have been shattered by scientific knowledge, and we have no basis for clinging so tightly to our religious beliefs (does any one still think that God stopped the Sun for Joshua. Oh, by the way, Jericho was rubble long before Joshua sounded the trumpet).

Now, we should not throw out these traditions completely. If we view them as mythology, they show deep truths about human psychology. And, especially in the Western Christian system ( which also contains elements from Greek, Roman, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers), we are given a profoundly human system of workable, ethical guidelines. But, we must, if man is to continue, stop all forms, repeat, all forms, of literal belief in any religious dogma.

 

Look Closely

I want you to try an experiment. Go outside and look at a leaf. It doesn't matter what kind. It can be from a tree, shrub, or grass. Just look at it closely.

Look at the structure, at the intricate design of the veins. Then, get a magnifying glass and look closer and see how even more intricate that design is than it appears to the naked eye. Then look at it through a microscope. (I know, few folks keep one around, but there are countless such pictures in books and on the internet) At every level, the leaf becomes more and more amazing, and, at the cell level, you become aware, that in those tiny specks, there is a whole world of activity.

Then, back away and think. We have a pretty good idea of what goes on in a cell, but only pretty good. We understand the chemistry that is occurring, and a lot of the physics at the mechanical level, but there is much we don't know about the electrical and quantum physics  happening in those cells.

Then, be aware, we have no idea absolutely no idea of the whys of the cells life. Why does this happen? It is obvious to any but the most idiotically hard headed materialists, that this delicate mechanism, is not the result of any sort of accident. Lightening did not strike a chemical rich gob of mud in the distant past and produce this. Science, while useful and important, cannot explain why and cannot understand, in full, what is going on. What's the answer?

God, you say? Okay, I agree, but stop a moment. If we cannot understand this relatively simple bit of Nature, what can we say about God. Hard headed religious believers, of which there are many, are just as foolish as hard headed scientific materialists.

God's Universe is a mystery; God is a greater mystery and all of that is wonderful, but, blessedly, it eliminates any possibilities of hard dogma. Allow God to be that grand mystery and the Universe becomes enchanted.

Get Rid of Moral Dogma

Morality should be summed up in a rule that seems to transcend cultures. Do unto others as you would have them do to you. Yep, the old Golden Rule. What else do we need?

Yet, most religions are crammed with rules for behavior. Some apply to ritual, some to personal behavior and all are mind numbing in their scope. The Western faiths, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, are all obsessed with governing ever aspect of our personal lives. Hinduism, and I will admit that my understanding is limited (please correct me if I am wrong, I welcome comments) in its formal structure has a vast array of rules governing caste behavior. Confucianism is primarily a religion based around rules of behavior. Buddhism and Taoism are looser, but they have their own difficulties, mostly the nearly incomprehensible Cosmic views.

As far as we know, the same problems arose in the old religions. The Greeks and Romans had very rigid moral beliefs, at least during their strongest periods and, if  we are reading their writings correctly, the Egyptians and Sumerians were equally strict.

It seems to be a human thing to want strict control of our behavior, whether it is enforced by the State or God seems not to matter. Since every culture has its own set of rules, I am wagering that God is not really involved. No, it is us people who are obsessed with uniformity and we do our Creator a great disservice when we lay it all at His/Her (I wish I could find some gender free pronoun to apply to the Creator; I guess It would work, but that sounds somehow disrespectful) feet.

So, let's try this for awhile. Apply the Golden Rule to your behavior, forgetting all the moral dogma we've had shoved at us for all these years. I will bet all I have, admittedly not a lot, that life will go better for us all.