One last thing
Sheer’s minimal acceptable rules for religion
1) Any religion that claims that it is the One True Way, and followers of all other religions are going to hell: Automatic disqualification.
2) Any religion that claims war is desirable: Automatic disqualification
3) Negative points for:
i) Suggesting sex is evil, sinful, or bad.
ii) Suggesting sexist, racist, genderist, age-ist, or sexual-orientation-ist beliefs or thoughts
iii) Encouraging hatred, division,
4) Bonus points for
i) Short source code.
ii) Not claiming something that may be false-to-fact i.e. God having the right to judge me. He may have the ability – but might does not make right.
iii) Forgiveness, openmindedness, sharing, caring, love, peace, freedom, beauty, respect, unity, in general attributes that I consider positive
iv) Finding a way to operate that doesn’t require donations or enforcing tithing in the source code or whatever.
v) Encouraging divirsity, cross training, hybrid vigor
vi) OPen and accepting to the shell-shocked
Suggestions? Hmm. We have: Unitarians. They seem on the surface to be pretty safe: they’re all about little dogma and short source code. We have Bhuddists. I’m not sure this qualifies as a religion – it may be more a life philosiphy. However, it fits the hole I’m trying to fill, which is: operating system. I think. Whatever it is that religion is and does.
We might have: Some extremely liberal christian sects.
April 12th, 2006 at 3:33 am
As a Pagan myself, I think many of the Pagan belief systems would fit the criteria, but then again I might be wrong on that score in some cases, since for most of them, I am commenting from assumptions, which isn’t the smartest thing to do sometimes.
MY belief system certainly fits the criteria 🙂
April 12th, 2006 at 1:04 pm
yes…I find it highly ironic that pretty much all religions preach acceptance and being non-judgmental, and then in the same sentence say that if you don’t renounce your “sinful ways and lifestyle” you won’t get into the Kingdom of Heaven. So, it’s okay to be gay…as long as you don’t practice. It’s okay to have sex…as long as it’s for procreation. blahblahblah. I believe in a higher power that might be beyond all science and self knowledge, and maybe even an after life of some sort. I don’t have to be religious to be strong in my views.
April 13th, 2006 at 9:11 am
Could it be that God’s rule that sex should be reserved for married couples was to save us grief, helping us be happier?
April 13th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
UU is about finding your own path… Using UU as an OS is akin to building your own OS… they provide source code from may diffrent OSes, community support system, and crap… if your looking for a prebuilt OS… Since I’m guessing your looking for an OS for the tools you can use… and you’ve decided that the tools your going to use require certian features, it may be best to find an OS that is pretty much there… I’m sure there are plenty of liberal christian churches in the seattle area… the cheeziest way to find them is find churches that are accepting, do marrages, etc of gay/lesbian couples, have gay/lesbian minister…. etc…
If you go with christianity… remember that you are saved by grace alone. What I find so amazing about Christianity is they completly miss the most popular verse in the bible! All you need to do, is belive and you are saved.
————— John 3:16-18
16″For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. 17For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. 18Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
April 17th, 2006 at 1:14 am
I was going to say much the same thing
except that my (neo-pagan would be the closest widely-understood way to describe it) belief system doesn’t exactly have short source code
unless one wishes to claim that “Find Deity. Talk at length” is the entirety of the source code 😛
April 17th, 2006 at 1:20 am
bleh. Not awake enough to fully do this justice, but if I don’t say this now I’ll totally forget…
One of my issues with liberal christianity is that it *still* says that all non-christians are condemned
This doesn’t bother me personally (I’d have to believe that I was condemned, which would require believing in the bible, which I don’t) but I find it to be a troubling meme.
The usual argument (in Conservative Christian circles) is that one is saved by grace, but that a truly saved person will show the ‘fruits of the spirit’ and thus hate sin and not do it, though there’s still a certain amount of randomness to that — plenty of CCs don’t show generousity (to choose something that Jesus really spent time on) to the poor, yet this is not considered proof of their lack of salvation, whereas a person who professes belief in Jesus but is actively gay is considered unsaved because they aren’t showing the fruits of the spirit.
April 17th, 2006 at 3:24 am
See rule 1. I expect God to be better than me. That’s my basic qualification for being God. I certainly can’t write 3 gigs of binary that will turn into a self-reproducing self-aware lifeform, much less build entire universes. Okay, maybe I could given unlimited time… 😉
I think that God is likely still getting better.. still growing. I think of the O.T. as kind of like CP/M and the N.T. as kind of like MS-DOS. We’re still waiting for Windows, and it’s going to be one amazing relevation if and when it gets here.
April 17th, 2006 at 3:25 am
I guess my basic point is that any Christian that says God doesn’t look after non-christians is missing the boat and violating requirement #1, above. This means that I need a extrordinarily liberal Christian sect, because they have to be willing to start out with accepting that a high percentage of the bible is not signal, but noise.
April 17th, 2006 at 9:59 am
The bible as it is currently known was created as a tool of social control. The books were cherry picked, lots ended up on the cutting room floor, so to speak. Emperor Constantine was responsible for a fair bit of this, but the blame can be spread around. If you decide to go with any of the religions of the book read some good history on it.
Possibly one of the worst things about the current beliefs of most Christian sects is that due to the human beliefs, if God himself told them about the above they’d reject his words as from Satan. If you can find a group that accepts the reality of the bible (that it’s been cherry picked) that’s probably a good litmus test.
I wish I still had the rational agnostic stuff that I wrote up, but it’s all gone to the bit bucket in the sky. It seems like it’s just about what you’re looking for. It started with why Pascal was wrong and went from there, but I’m not inclined to rewrite it. I don’t know if I even could, at this point in my life. It was predicated on the assumption of the possibility of lack of (paranormal/deities/however one wishes to lable that) and I don’t have that anymore. Though I’m still of the opinion that, for those who do not have direct contact with deities, agnosticism is a very reasonable belief, getting *my* head there is increasingly difficult.
So for basic source code, I suppose I would have to recommend Buddhism. C’s particular sect fails your ‘one true way’ rule (one of my criticisms of it. C does not think much of my labeling of SGI as the ‘Fundamentalist, Evangelical Buddhists’ but it’s an accurate description. They are, however, rather harmless and would continue to be so even if they had power, I think) but most would not.
I also recommend regular meditation, no matter which route you go. It’s good for ya 😉
April 20th, 2006 at 8:23 am
Check out Gnosticism… (esp. the books “the church” left out)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism
With Gnostic movies like Stigmata and DaVinci code… and the recent reconstruction of the Gospel of Judas… Gnosticism is making a come back of sorts..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Judas
April 20th, 2006 at 10:03 am
BTW, C says that I’m wrong about SGI thinking it’s the one true way. I told him to come over here and do his sales pitch for you (they *are* evangelistic, in the literal sense of the word) but it might be a bit as his father just died.