Recently I've been picking the brain of a friend of mine who is Sikh about his religion. I'm intrigued with learning about different religions.
I have a love/hate relationship with religion. One one hand, I'm fairly sure that groups of people tend to get tangled in rules and laws and interpretations until they miss the entire point of their own religion and this causes war and fear and hate. On the other hand, I think it's a good thing to figure out what we believe, and it is lovely to find a group of like-minded people with whom to celebrate life.
There is nothing wrong with building in some reminders of what we believe, because knowing what is right and acting accordingly seem to be separate things. But when we cease questioning our own beliefs, we abdicate a huge responsibility to actually connect with God. It's a paradox, eh?
If we take the big three Abrahamic religions as an example, we can easily see how they have evolved. Abraham had this crazy idea that there was one god, not a bunch of gods. Those nutty, stubborn Jews stood up to well established Egyptians, wandered in the dessert, and overcame all sorts of things. Moses was given supreme laws from God. Actually, the Jews came up with many, many, many laws about how to live. Many of them make sense to me, some do not. Neither Moses nor God asked for my opinion.
Jesus came and was recognized by some Jews as the messiah they'd been awaiting. He taught some very simple truths which were recorded by followers into gospels. He said to love one another, to have faith that this isn't all there is, more is possible than you have been led to believe. In fact, he even invited non-Jews to listen to what he had to say, which was pretty ding dang radical. But some people (who remain Jews) chose to continue to wait and others (who became Christians) built a whole religion around Jesus. And things began to get confusing.
The Jews split off into various groups depending on which teachings and laws they thought were the most important.
The Christians, who had originally agreed that there were just too dang many rules and they should concentrate on "Love one another," started adding rules about hierarchy of the church, who gets in and who stays out, when people should kneel and when they should stand and pretty soon, people lost sight of the forest for the trees. So they protested! Those protesters said that they were going to interpret the Bible for themselves and that they were going to go straight to the source for forgiveness and stuff like that. Well, that's cool. But it wasn't long before Protestants and Catholics wanted to start killing each other over who was right and who was wrong.
Gospels were accepted and rejected by groups of people who probably believed they knew what was best, but were quite human and had some personal agendas. Some things were emphasized by some groups and minimized by others. And always the rules and the laws got complicateder and complicateder.
Then Mohammed came and was given insight. He believed in the very same God that Abraham and Moses and Jesus believed. He believed Jesus was right on track and that his mother, Mary, had a very special connection with God And then the rules and the laws and the interpretations. OY! And pretty soon, in terms of the age of the Earth, we've got Muslims, Jews, and Christians all worshiping the same God, declaring themselves peaceful and wanting to murder each other.
It's enough to turn people completely off religion! And many have turned right off it. Many have become so full of anger about religion and hypocrisy that they are full of hate. I don't even pretend to be someone who knows everything on TV, but I know that hate gets us into trouble.
So I like to dig into things myself. I like finding out what other people believe and what structure they accept or create in order to remind themselves to do what is right and connect with God. And what I find is that at the very core, people usually believe pretty much the same things. Feel free to debate with me, because that's how I learn best.
We tend to believe
- There is something bigger than ourselves
- We can learn a lot from people who've figured things out
- We should love
- We should choose well
I guess I think that religion has it's place and that place is to teach us to love. In psychology, when we're trying to figure out if someone is hallucinating or actually hearing God speak to him, we often ask what they hear God saying. If God is telling them to crash a car filled with explosives into a hospital, as a psychologist, I'd be pretty sure that this was a mental illness.
Along the same lines, I'd think if your religion tells you to hate and/or kill people who believe differently or dress differently or love differently; maybe you'd better find a new religion. Because don't we all really know we're supposed to love one another? I mean c'mon. . . don't we all really know that?
