Religious liberty and hatred

[Eric the Green]

(07-07-2016, 11:37 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-07-2016, 03:23 PM)taramarie Wrote: and that is the scary thing about some religions. It teaches people that if they do not continue to believe they will be damned for all eternity. Telling that to kids. That is some messed up sh*t.

That's close to where I parted with a lot of the main line Christian denominations.  The central point for me though is that the laws to be followed aren't made overly clear.  Every denomination has different opinions of what God wants.  Yet, if you don't follow the laws you get tortured eternally?  If so, that's not a god that I'm going to worship.  

I still call myself a devout agnostic.  Agnostic, rather than atheist.  There is an awful lot in the Jewish / Christian / Muslim tradition that can be admired, respected and even lived if the old Agricultural Age autocratic terrorist world view gets edited out.  While I try to put Newton and Jefferson ahead of Jesus, that doesn't mean there isn't a lot to respect in Jesus.

On another thread recently I talked about how Stalin, Saddam, Assad and ISIS fit a basic Agricultural Aage pattern where the only way to get peace and plenty is for a really strong leader to terrorize everyone into doing what the leader says.  Many older interpretations of how God works fit this.  God is the ultimate strong man.  If you don't do what he says you will be tortured for eternity.  The demons are kept at arm's length for plausible deniability, but God is at the center of the coercion by terror schtick.

I am quite willing to believe that Jesus's message got corrupted somewhere along the line, that the modern big bureaucratic denomination haven't got the message right.  I still hypothesize occasionally about how exactly an all powerful all knowing and all merciful being can exist.

But there are enough paradoxes and mysteries involved that I've given up on solving them.  There are reasonable enough reasons to be moral as a secular person, no God required.  If one of God's attributes is mercy, I'm hoping honest secular Golden Rule living will be enough, that He won't go crazy nuts because I've eaten pork, or eaten any sort of meat on Friday, or eaten at all during daylight during Ramadan, or whatever other rules exist that seem more reminiscent of Man's folly than God's alleged wisdom.

(In parting, I'll mention a minor spell check silly.  I misspelled denominations and got demonizations instead.  Do spell checkers do Freudian slips?)

Like the typo I caught myself where I typed gin instead of gun. Falls right into your trap.

You still left off the s from denominations.

I probably have it figured out, but it still gives me troubles occasionally. Whatever such God exists, for starters, is not separate from me. I am one with God. Starting there, a lot of the nonsense goes away, knocking down all the authoritarian stuff in one stroke, without leaving me in secular land that ultimately has no life and denies my consciousness. Obviously too, the stories told by one religion or another are not relevant except perhaps as symbolic myths about our journey in life. Still, I am also an individual, although not separate, and clearly I make mistakes, even though I am one with the Perfect One that is all. So, no words can really get it right. Only the inner-knowing.