Never been one to let the carrier drop

Okay, so, I can’t help but think it significant that the first time I had a authentic spiritual experience in a church, *they were speaking another language*.

I just don’t think I’m cut out to be mainstream religious. I can’t make myself believe that if some sort of diety needed or wanted something from me, said diety wouldn’t just directly contact me. And a lot of mainstream religions have ideas that vary from “That sounds insane” to “I can’t believe that” when I hear them.

I *wanted* to be mainstream religious, when I was young, because it was obvious that that would please my parents. I think I would have been okay if I hadn’t been such a voracious reader. I read the bible. Big mistake.

But looking back on it, a lot of the ideas seem to be just plain nuts even if you don’t. Either that, or we have different definitions of things. For example, if you want someone to change, and only want good things for them if they fit your desires and expectations, that’s not love. It’s especially not unconditional love if you are going to torture them or allow them to be tortured if they don’t play along.

On the other paw, I’ve come to a understanding of the message of Christianity I can live with. The idea is that you put yourself in hell, by configuring your mind the wrong way – that given that we are all immortal creatures locked in a system that we can never exit from, complete freedom had to include all kinds of torturous and unfortunate experiences. And, of course, infinity is going to contain every possible experience you could have, from the very best to the very worst. Sometimes in the same week.

So, in general my experience of the Bible is the words of Jesus are the sanest in the book. I wish he’d gone a lot further than he did, but I think that his message is sound, empathetic, and good for the most part until he starts going on this whole ego trip of “No one comes to the father but through me”. However, we don’t really have any *clue* what Jesus might have said or not said. We’re dealing with text that’s been edited, translated, bent for political reasons, etc, time and time again. But we can still sort of see the *spirit* of what he meant shining through in the clearly warm, nonjudgemental, empathetic nature of his words.

Anyway, the assumption here is that if you emulate Jesus in your treatment of yourself and your neighbors and the like you can get yourself out of hell, if you have put yourself in hell through inadvisably configuring your mind. And of course Christians promote a lot of ideas that I also believe in, like that we are connected by things we can’t see as well as that we can and we are immortals. On the other hand, they also believe a lot of things that are just plain nuts. See elsewhere in this blog for my commentary on that, I’m not going to rehash old topics.

JL pointed out the idea that maybe we shouldn’t be shoving our beliefs down each other’s throats, and I’m going to second that. However, I am still wrestling with what I want to believe and when and why, so I still tend to write about all this in the hopes that through all the static, noise, and randomness some real signal will appear. I don’t think that attempting to believe CHristianity is what broke my mind (I think that had already happened by then) but I am certain it didn’t help the situation. However, had I not been so literal, and looked at the spirit in which the people who believe it gather, I’m not thinking it would have damaged me nearly so badly. I get too hung up on words a lot of the time, especially for someone who can hallucinate text, and I think often the message isn’t really in the words.

I also wonder, knowing that I can hallucinate text, if I have *any* clue what’s actually in the Bible or not. Just another of those unknowability things. However, God, if I have one and you’re taking requests, a lot more utopia, please?

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2015 at 5:32 am and is filed under Spiritual/Religious. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.