6 posts tagged “religion”

The further one grows spiritually, the more and more people one loves and
the fewer and fewer people one likes.
- Gale D. Webbe, clergyman and author (1909-2000)

It almost seems as if there is something missing from this quote, something additional that the person who captured the quote originally neglected to include.

But first let's consider the concept of spirituality. In this sense of the word, we generally agree that spirituality refers to the incorporeal, that which is not a material part of nature. Whether the supernatural part of spirituality could be pure energy or something entirely separate from our understanding of reality is debatable.

Mostly it's debatable because science tends to think of energy as something that may be harnessed to do work. Dark energy, a recently invented term to describe why the universe is apparently blowing apart faster than ever before, is accepted as energy because it's a force that is actually doing something. As God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to actually do anything (especially any kind of work), science disavows the supernatural as being pure energy.

Just because God or the supernatural can't be proven by science to do work does not mean that it doesn't exist, only that science cannot deal with it because it's beyond the realm and purview of science. Science works almost entirely within the proverbial "box" thinking. Anything that does not fall within the "walls" of the box does not exist and will not be considered seriously by science.

Spirituality, by its definition, includes something that is beyond matter and beyond the thinking box of science.

What does it mean, if a person has grown spiritually? It means something that people who insist upon living their lives within the box cannot understand. They can't even grasp the possibility or potential because--whether they realize it or not--they deny the possibility of existence beyond their box.

Imagine someone who has grown up living in one house. The person has never left that house, ever, in 35 years. All that person knows of the world is what he experiences in that house and what he sees out the windows. He comes to believe that what is inside the house is real, what he can see outside of the house may or may not be real (the way we think of movies), and what he may hear about what he cannot experience or see simply does not exist. It could not exist, he believes, because he has no way to comprehend existence beyond his experience and his senses.

Growing spiritually means experiencing beyond what box thinkers can conceive could be real. A person who has grown spiritually passes among people who have no grasp and who have had no inclination to understand or experience anything beyond the box walls of their lives. The spiritual person may love others in their life, recognizing them as part of the wholeness that is total existence. But he may find them hard to like because they are so simple, so limited, so ignorant.

A person who has grown so he or she has the ability to live in a spiritual existence will not dislike anyone. Yet they have no need to like others either. Does a grain of sand feel the need to like and be liked by other grains around it on a beach? The grain of sand, like the spiritual person, lives in a wholeness of everything, where sand, plants, animals, people and even the person himself is a component of the whole of existence.

We know that when plants and animals and people die, their bodies get recycled so the atoms that formed them become part of something else. We know that matter (stuff) can be changed into energy (such as by burning) and energy into matter (as proven by Einstein's famous equation). It's called the Law of Conservation. Nothing disappears, though it may change its form. What exists, continues to exist, whether as matter or as energy.

Box thinkers, non-spiritual people, believe the basic physics of this concept, but refuse to acknowledge its implications, its consequences for our lives and for all of existence through all of history. Is there nothing beyond matter and energy? If so, then there is nothing to you other than body cells and energy. That means nothing that is "you," no personality, no non-physical life, nothing that can form relationships with others. Could a cell of your body or potential energy within your gut form a relationship with other cells or other forms of energy within you or elsewhere? Most of us would say no, meaning that there is more to us than cells and energy.

Spiritual people live in two dimensions (or universes, if you will), one tangible and sentient, the other totally beyond the senses and understanding of box thinkers. Moreover, the latter is beyond the comprehension of themselves. Yet that lack of understanding, that intangibility, that failure to grasp is not frightening. It brings peace.

Spiritual people cannot help but love others, all others. They are not afraid of what they don't understand. After all, what they don't like or understand about the tangible world is only temporary, an existence in transition. What matters to them is real and does not change markedly. It's beyond understanding, outside the box.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for teachers and parents who want to help their children understand the realities of the world and realities beyond their understanding, but still within their ability to experience.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
- Bill Watterson, comic strip artist (1958- ), in his comic strip Calvin & Hobbes

If only...

Those who claim that organized religion is on the wane may be correct. A few key reasons come to mind.

First, religion is supposed to benefit the individual believer, yet it more often benefits the leaders of the various segments within each religion. Religion benefits the leaders more than the individual followers.

Second, historically as well as at the present time clerics have been widely known to be among the worst violators of the sins their religions speak against in commandments.

Third, the massive expansion of media coverage of violations of the law among religious leaders among religious leaders has made following some of them like belonging to an organized crime family.

We must be suspicious of any religious leader who claims that what we do on earth is supposed to be solely to please God. While most of us want to be cooperative and follow religious and moral rules, we must question what kind of God had to create humans to be his servants and slaves. Does this sound like the beautiful and beneficent God our clerics tell us about?

Why did God give us free choice so that we could violate what he wanted of us? Isn't that like a master-slave relationship where the master gives the slaves free reign to do what they want, then punishes them with eternal damnation if they do anything other than what they have been commanded to do? That doesn't even make sense.

Clerics have over the centuries attributed every bit of misfortune to breaking of God's commandments, resulting in everything from fires and floods to AIDS, bankruptcies and divorce. Enough people believe this nonsense that the rumour mill keeps churning behind the scenes even when the real causes and sources for natural disasters and personal misfortune can be proven.

It's God's way of paying people back for their sins, say some. But isn't that what the hell they threaten us with is for? Either we should be punished here on earth so that we can all go to heaven cleansed or we should have free reign here and pay for our sins eternally after we die. If we get punished both here on earth and in hell, isn't that double jeopardy?

If the strongly religious people truly believe that their God is all-powerful and will punish sinners accordingly after they die, why do the self-righteous want to punish people here on earth? Are they concerned that God might miss a sinner? Or do they have God-envy?

Let's look at the self-designated upright pillars of society in a different light. If we examine their behaviour carefully, ignoring their message while focussing on what they do, they are really closet bigots. In fact, the self-righteous may be the most prejudiced people we have in our communities. They ignore that part of their holy book that says "Judge not that ye be not judged." They tend to be the most judgmental people we have in our societies. Yet prejudice, they claim, is a sin. One for which they personally have no intention of paying any penalty.

On the surface, every religion is designed to help guide an individual through a complex and confusing life. In practice, most organized religions are tax collecting agencies who want to control the behaviour of their taxpayers so that they will give more.

If God is ashamed of anyone in our society, he could find no better objectives than the highly religious.

Every religion has good at its core. Every religion goes corrupt over time. Every religion has people who profit from donations and who know how to maximize them for their own benefit. Every religion has people whose prime objective is to bend the minds of the followers to do their will.

That's what religions do. Not what they say they do, which is quite different, often quite the opposite.

Attendance at religious services is declining in most parts of the world where people are well educated. Not because the core of religion is at fault--because it isn't--but because educated people understand fraud and choose to avoid it.

This doesn't mean that belief in any doctrine is disappearing. I suspect the opposite. I think that we have more people who believe in what the core of the religion they were born into teaches while attendance at places of worship declines. Of course there will always be places where charismatic speakers can charm large audiences. We also have advertising that sells product well and politicians who can get themselves elected by making all kinds of promises they have no intention of fulfilling once elected. It's hype. It works. It brings in money.

I find it ironic that I have never met an atheist who is anything other than a good person who tries to do his or her best for their family and their community. What they don't believe in is the false gods that organized religions use to manipulate the minds of their followers. Most haven't yet figured out how to find the real God.

The more self-righteous among us rail against false gods. Maybe they should look into a mirror.

Where are those lightning bolts when we need them?

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can tell truth from fiction, what is worthy from what is deceptive, what is real from what is devised by the greedy for their fraudulent purposes.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

Strange as it seems, no amount of learning can cure stupidity, and higher education positively fortifies it.
- Stephen Vizinczey, Hungarian-born Canadian writer (b. 1933)

One dictionary defines stupidity as "a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience."

Why would anyone with a higher education be stupid, possibly stupider than someone with less education?

Education--at least the education systems I am familiar with in many parts of the world--functions on a model that strongly promotes and supports conformity. Conformity, by definition, means following someone else's point of view of the world. Usually this takes the form of following the point of view of the power establishment, those who control power in a country, a state/province or a community.

Agree with the establishment and you "fit in." That means not only enjoying the benefits of agreeing with and supporting the ruling establishment and authority, but accepting its faults and warts without grumbling. And sometimes its illegal behaviour.

Poor people, for example, have trouble accepting the point of view of the establishment. Some slipped into poverty especially because they would not or could not conform to the belief system of the establishment. The establishment believes (sometimes even states publicly) that the poor are lazy, thus allowing themselves to be exempt from addressing the core of their problems.

People with severe health problems also have trouble supporting the establishment because they believe the people in power should do more to help them, especially to treat them according to the Golden Rule, the way the ruling people themselves would like to be treated in similar circumstances.

The people in power are never either poor or suffering from severe health problems. You never see someone with oxygen support or on a ventilator in a seat of a legislative assembly. These days you may see someone in a wheelchair, but those people, like the women who hold elected office, have fought their way through a morass and tangle of red tape to get there.

In some countries and elected legislative bodies, by law there must be a set minimum number or minimum percentage of seats for female representatives. I am not aware of any legislative body that has a minimum of requirement of representatives from among the poor or those with permanent health problems.

Ironically, social assistance for the poor--in whatever form that help may take--requires a huge portion of the budget for most governments. Health care, whether it comes from government coffers, as in Canada, or private health care or private health care companies with government assistance, demands a huge percentage of funds available for public use. In Canada, which has public health care, the budget for "free" health coverage requires over half the provincial budget totals.

Those who use the greatest portion of public funds have the least representation in legislative bodies. The people in power think this is a grand way of doing business. They, of course, are neither poor nor of ill health on a permanent basis. Consequently, the poor remain poor and those with permanent health problems seldom recover. That is, they remain permanently unhealthy even if good health care would cure their problems.

Does this mean that legislators suffer from "a poor ability to understand or to profit from experience?"

Anyone who hasn't been asleep for most of their life knows that corporations have great influence over governments. The bigger the corporations, the greater their contributions to political parties and elections and the greater their influence over decision making.So within government bureaucracies, conformity is not just the norm, it's the rule. Sometimes it's even the law.

Corporations themselves have bureaucracies run by a few people in power at the top. They like conformity because they have policies (both written and "informal") they want followed to the letter. In a sense, corporations are like the military, only without the uniforms (unless you call "suits" a uniform, which they may not be but they prove conformity), the foot stomping and the salutes.

The military, the ultimate in enforced conformity, requires underlings to obey even orders that don't make sense or that may contravene the laws of the land. That's enforced stupidity because those in lower ranks seldom get opportunities to think for themselves.

Religion enforces conformity, at least in the sense that what is said publicly must agree with the policies of those in higher authority. Those who don't want to conform either leave the faith, are banished or excommunicated. In a few cases, killed.

Most people who have passed through high school have learned that the wisest strategy for a paper or project is to give the teacher back what he or she wants. Be innovative, but only with certain parameters. In university and postgraduate school, the strictures tighten so that those who do not give the professors what they want in the form they want it may not pass or may not receive sufficient marks to move on to a higher level.

I disagree with Vizinczey's statement to the extent that I maintain all organizations in societies create stupidity, not just fortify it. They make thinking for yourself an anti-social act.

It has been said that having everyone thinking for themselves would result in chaos, in anarchy. This is not true. Even anarchists think alike. As to human chaos, that is highly unlikely because our nature as social beings would forced us to consider all possibilities for policies and procedures before making decisions. Our social nature would compel us to choose leaders.

Chaos? No. It would shift the present power mongers from their perches and place those who have the ability to organize and lead without fear and intimidation into positions where they could act in the best interests of the public that elected them.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who can think for themselves without sinking into the abyss of banality, conformity and stupidity.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand.
- Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth President of the United States (1856-1924)

I don't stand in any queue to praise the life advice of a US president. However, Wilson's words have meaning deeper than the obvious, which is inspiration given to pump up an audience for a speech.

First of all, this simplistic explanation of the meaning of life or the purpose of life seems nothing more than a hollow platitude. Where does he even get this idea?

I propose that Wilson knew his history. He could see the progress of humankind over the centuries and millennia.

Looking back at the quality of life in what Christians call the Old Testament of the Bible, it was brutal. Slavery was common. Any nation that was more powerful than its neighbour would likely attack that neighbour, enslave the men, kill the children and take the women as extra wives so they could reproduce more children for the conquering nation.

The average lifespan was slightly below 30 years. Those who didn't die in childbirth or from disease would die in battle or in a massacre. The Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) was full of violence, sacrifice and brutal death. It was tribal in the most primitive sense of the word.

By the first century CE, the time of Jesus of Nazareth, little had improved. In those times, the Jews and their neighbours were all members of tribes and all tribes had grudges against the others, feared the others and (usually at least once in a generation) conducted battles against them.

The Romans, trying to bring peace to troubled lands, treated their Middle East territories as being populated by expendable, primitive, low-life people who they treated with far less dignity than Saddam Hussein treated the Kurds. Crucifixion was a daily event where several people could be hung by the side of a road together. Except the Romans recognized the skills of the Jewish artisans whom they employed to create beautiful works of art for Rome. The artisans were prolific, but few in number.

In the time period of Jesus, historically the most peace-loving person who ever lived, violence was a way of life. The teachings of Jesus about peace made him an anomaly.

During Europe's Dark Ages, most people were, effectively, slaves to their protector, the lord of the area. While Italy experienced the Renaissance, Britain was still primitive and brutal, as exemplified by Henry VIII who killed two wives and got rid of the others by various and nefarious means. How his daughters fought each other for dominance after Henry's death, killing by the dozens in the process, give further evidence of the ethos of the times.

Today we actually count the number of soldiers who die in battle, give them formal and dignified funerals and give some financial compensation to their widows and families.

Despite the brutal acts of murder (in Rwanda, with machetes, for example) and genocide today, the world is actually a more peaceful place than it has ever been before in history. Someone was responsible for that. Many someones. Over long periods of time.

What Woodrow Wilson asked his people to do was to continue that long tradition toward making the world a better place to live. He asked them to do what they could, no matter how little it seemed to them. Every effort counts.

When we look at how horrid the world is today, we must put it into perspective. People live longer than ever before, stay healthier than ever before, have a decent chance to find happiness that their predecessors never had and we have an opportunity to move the markers along to a better world. Few before us have had such an opportunity.

Let's rise to the challenge and do our parts to make the whole world a better place to live, not just our own homes and communities. All we need to begin is the right attitude.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a guidebook for parents and teachers who want to grow children who will take responsibility for the future of our planet so that it will be better under their watch.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

The highest level of prayer is not prayer for anything. It is a deep and profound silence, in which we allow ourselves to be still and know him. In that silence, we are changed. We are calmed. We are illumined.
- Marianne Williamson, inspirational author and speaker (b. 1952)

In my experience, prayer is a mystery for most people. Many know why they pray and their objectives for doing so, but don't know what to expect in return.

A good friend, a Christian with fundamentalist beliefs, claims that we should pray for things, whether these be things we want to receive or events we want to happen. Thinking back over the many years I have known him, he may be right. He seems to have received what he asked for.

I don't ask for anything when I pray. I pray, as Marianne Williamson does, in deep and profound silence. I don't talk, I listen.

Listening may be the most underrated human skill. As I don't read quickly, having an information processing impairment in my brain, I learn as much as I can by listening to others who know.

People like to be listened to. If I seem to be absorbing what they say and continue to pay attention as they speak, they think I'm a good guy, someone worth knowing.

People ask such penetrating questions as Does God Really exist? What can God do for me? Why am I here? What is my mission in life? How can there be a God when such bad things happen in the world?

They ask. They Ask. They ask. But they don't listen for answers.

The Bible says that God created humankind in his own image. It would be more accurate to say that humankind created their God in their own image. What's more, their God seldom does what they tell him to do. Which is why he disappoints so many people.

If God is an ethereal being, comprised of neither matter nor energy, how might we expect that God could communicate with us? Could he communicate in words, as some say? Don't we claim that people who hear voices in their heads have psychiatric disorders? Or is it only a mental problem when the voices don't come from God?

It makes sense that God can only communicate with us in a manner that is different from the way our fellow humans converse with us. If he communicated with us in the same way as other people, he would surely be a man-made God. That doesn't make sense, unless you are a religious leader who wants others to follow him because he communes directly with the deity. There's a lot of that going around.

It makes sense to me that if we want to know what God has in mind for us, we should place ourselves in a context that is natural, not in a structure built by men. And we should open our minds to what the natural environment offers to us.

When I do that, flushing the effects of human creations from my mind, I can breathe in such energy that I can't explain it. The same breath in my home or a store or church is nothing more than a deep breath. When the context and environment are right, I become more than an individual person with each breath. I become part of a universal whole where I see everything tied together with unseen and unexplainable bonds. Everything in a unity.

I also feel love unlike anything I have experienced elsewhere. So abundant is that love within me that I feel it necessary to share it with others. As I must communicate with others differently than I do with God, I offer it to those who want to share with me. I offer love with words, but also with smiles and touch. A simple touch, such as shaking hands or touching a shoulder or arm while speaking. Sometimes a hug is what's needed.

Does it work? Do I make a difference by sharing my love with others? I can only say that only those who are hardened of heart leave my presence without feeling better than when we met.

That seems like reason enough as a purpose in life.

I do more. I share with you, whom I cannot see. I leave it to you to accept my offering and to learn how to accept the love on your own.

Look for it in deep and profound silence. Listen. It may take a while for you to learn how to hear. When you do, breathe in deeply. Do it again and again, as you will want to. It will be exciting, exhilarating.

Then share your abundance with those who need what they don't have.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book about how to share the important lessons of life with children so they may lead full and happy lives as adults.
Learn more at http://billallin.com

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his
creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who
is but a reflection of human frailty.
-Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

In my search for God over the past several decades I have concluded that evidence exists all over our planet that the deity people have tried to teach me about is a fraud.

I have also concluded that people who believe in their God do so fervently. Even those who have doubts will firm their beliefs up quickly if someone presents a formidable argument that God is a myth invented by needy people and hucksters who want to make money off gullible believers. Nothing confirms the belief in God by doubters more than finding someone who bad mouths the God they aren't sure about.

Two problems present themselves forcibly to my mind that suggest that God--the God of religions, whichever one that may be-- is nothing more than a convenient invention. First is that those who most strenuously preach the rules of their religion--those who dictate what is sin and what is not--tend to be sinners against their own rules when the facade is torn away. The hypocrisy of the legislators of sin being devout sinners under the skin repels me.

The second problem I have with the concepts of God that many people hold is the contradiction and hypocrisy of the believers. The hypocrisy part is similar to the legislators of sin being sinners themselves, only this latter example involves the practitioners of the religion rather than it leaders. They simply don't follow the rules they supposedly subscribe to.

Contradictions abound in the monotheistic religions. God is a vengeful God, but he wants us to be peaceful. God is a peaceful God until he wants his followers to go to war and to die if necessary to defend the faith. Defend it from what is never spoken, never asked, never answered, because faith cannot be killed unless every last believer is annihilated.

Some say that God punishes sinners for every sinful act they commit. The same believers will claim that their own particular sins are forgiven because Jesus (or some other prophet) died that their sins may be forgiven. Convenient.

Some actually believe (and can quote Revelations as evidence) that they can sin abundantly for their whole lives, then repent and be saved on their deathbeds and still be admitted into heaven.

Even the concept of heaven is absurdly contradictory. To Christians heaven is a place of eternal bliss, usually only available to devout and pure Christians, and sometimes their beloved pets. The Christian heaven is as boring as I could imagine, surely a kind of hell itself where every bit of intellectual strength I have gained throughout my life will be lost through atrophy because the inmates have nothing to think about.

The Muslim heaven must be populated by an uncountable number of prostitutes because Muslim suicide bombers are promised 72 of them each when they reach the Pearly Gates. Female bombers, by the way, are greeted by male prostitutes. Islam is not consistent about whether these prostitutes are created by Allah just in time for the arrival of a new bomber or whether they were once occupants of terra firma.

Judaism spends so little time on the concept of heaven that many Jews are not clear about what heaven is. Jews are supposed to focus on being good on earth and leave important stuff like the afterlife to God. This would seem to work except for the fact that Jewish intellectuals and students spend countless hours debating how to interpret the words of their holy books. How can everyone follow what is debated so ferociously?

The point here, as stated in Einstein's quote, is that people have invented their respective God with human characteristics. Step back from that a moment and consider the absurdity. Believers agree that God is perfect, but present evidence in holy books that God has as many failures and foibles as any foolish human.

Atheists have disavowed anything to do with God or the religions that invented God. Yet it's not God they don't believe exists, but the contradictory, hypocritical and nonsensical God that devout believers believe in. What atheists don't believe exists is the God that religions have invented.

Interestingly, my personal experience and that of many others I have spoken to on the subject suggests that atheists tend to live more wholesome and beneficial lives than religionists who believe the atheists are sinners.

Every religion has some good in it. Every devout believer also has some good. The evidence for these conclusions is easy to see if we remove our prejudicial spectacles.

What most people who claim to believe in God seem to miss is the evidence for God that exists all around them. That kind of evidence would stand up in a court of law if the challenge were to show evidence beyond doubt.

Now you would like me to deliver that evidence into your waiting hands.

Open your eyes. Open your ears. Resensitize your taste, touch and smell.

Begin to pay real attention to real events that can't be proven by science but for which an abundance of evidence exists. Some of it in book form. Just look for it. Believing or concluding anything from a position of ignorance doesn't make sense.

Learn about life, especially in its finest detail. The more you learn about life, especially how systems relate to each other within one larger system (a human body, a plant or anything in the physical world) the more you must ask yourself if this all could have happened by accident.

Godless evolutionists claim that everything that happens can be explained by laws of nature. Not a single one of them will attempt to explain why those laws exist or how they happen to fit together so immaculately well. There is no more reason for natural laws to exist than for matter and energy to exist. Natural laws don't prove anything, they only explain phenomena.

Every single thing that we know exists continues to exist even when it transforms. That is, energy can become mass or can change to another form of energy, but it never disappears. Your body will transform when it dies. No physical part of it will disappear, ever.

Are you thinking about this? Do you have a personality? Can anything you know about the physics of the human body explain either the ability to think rationally or the existence of personality? Only by stretching reality into the realm of mythology or fantasy.

One natural law is conservation. Just as mass and energy can never disappear (nor can dark matter or dark energy, so far as anyone knows), so too the personality that became you cannot disappear just because your body wears out and transforms.

No one can even say for certain that your thoughts happen within your brain, though some electrical activity certainly happens there when you think. Electricity travels around the outside of an electrical wire, not through it. Nature has an energy travelling beside (outside of) mass, not inside of it.

Is it impossible to imagine that the personality that is you exists beyond the limits of your skin and clothing? Have you not felt sometimes that someone was staring at you from behind. Can you not sometimes feel the presence of someone in a room? Have you ever expected someone to call you, then the phone rings and that person speaks? Nothing in natural law can explain those phenomena that most people have experienced.

It's hard to imagine that your personality may be defined 100 percent within the confines of your body, and its activity can be accounted for by the actions of your muscles, nerves and brain.

If you want to find God, don't look in a book or listen to someone tell you their version of God. You can find God yourself. Just don't look to someone who stands to make a profit by convincing you of something to explain God to you. That's a conflict of interest.

Look and learn. The more you learn, the more God will reveal himself to you.

Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, a book for adults to learn how they came to have the personalities they have and to help parents and teachers teach children what they need to develop fully in all ways.
Learn more at http://billallin.com