piasharn | Religious Ramblings

Holy shit. (And, yes, the pun is fully intended.)

What a bloody mess. I decided that I wasn't going to even get into the topic on the message board since I didn't see the post until there were already 60+ replies. Besides, by this point the whole thing has just gotten ugly. However, there were a few interesting points raised...

First of all, there is the concept mentioned by the topic starter that you can only be Saved by accepting Jesus. Of course, my first thought is that it must have sucked to be one of the people who lived before him. Heck, it took how many centuries for Christianity to spread throughout the world? God must be some jerk for making millions of people go to Hell just because he decided to wait a while before allowing the Messiah to be born.

Her attitude also gets to me a bit, since she continues to go on about how her beliefs are the only right ones and so on. The whole thing strikes me as being full of Pride and Arrogance, and I know that the former is considered to be a Big Sin. Besides, only God is supposed to judge people. As humans, we are fallible and flawed. "Let he who has no sin amoung you cast the first stone..."

People always talk about finding Jesus and how he is the Way. However, I don't think Jesus ever meant for people to pray to him. There is an old saying that states, "The poet points the way to the moon, but once you've found the moon, you don't need the poet anymore."

Jesus only intended himself to be the poet, pointing the way to God. He came to help us find God, not become one himself. Finding Jesus isn't the answer. You need to use Jesus to help you find God. (Unless you're me, in which case you say "Screw Religion" and set off on your own.)

(It makes me wonder about those people who look down on Catholics because they supposedly worship Mary. Mary is simply another tool to finding God. In all honesty, her status in the Church was one of the aspects of Catholisism that I liked the best. So much of the Bible and Christianity as a whole is highly misogynist. Seeing a woman elevated to a Goddess-like status was a breath of fresh air.)

Besides, saying that there is only one way to find deity strikes me as horribly closed-minded. I think it was Thomas Merton who compared religions to different paths going up a single mountain. From the base of the mountain, all the paths look vastly disimilar. Hell, even the mountain can look different! But the further up the path you go, the more you discover that they all converge at a single point: diety.

(Diety is too big to fit in one religion, if you ask me.)

And attempting to say that the Bible can be taken literally is nothing more than a pile of shit. I'm not bashing the book, really. Honestly, though, if the Bible is literally true, then you have to believe that the Earth is flat, that the land floats on top of the waters and that the heavens are actually a dome above us. Oh, and the Earth is the center of the universe and the sun revolves around us. Don't even get me started on all the contradictions in there.

I really wonder about People sometimes. Believing in something because you feel it is right is not necessarily a bad thing. Most of us do this. However, just take a look around... the world is full of knowledge. Heck, it would take more than one lifetime to learn all there is to know on the physical world alone, much less the metaphysical. (It makes me want to cry often... not being able to know and understand the hows and whys of everything.) Knowing this, how can anyone rest comfortably on their current knowledge? How can one simply shut off their mind and not accept that they could be wrong?

And why is making a mistake such a bad thing? Falling is not a sin, only falling and refusing to get up and try again. We're going to fuck some things up. It's one of those inevitable aspects of Life. Yeah, it sucks. I don't like it either, but we just have to grin and bear it.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I want to pass along this. Did you see the movie Stigmata? (If not, I'd highly recommend it.) You may remember that it dealt with a gospel that the Vatican refused to acknowledge. This site contains translations to some of those scriptures. I found the one dealing with Creation to be particularily interesting, as it defined God as feminine and told that Eve was created before Adam. All in all, it makes for some fascinating late-night reading.