Christianity, Religon / Spirituality

The following is a response I made in another site to somebody supposedly Christian justifying gay bashing by using old testament bible verses, and all the usual smoke and mirror subjectiveness of any close minded Christian's arguments about why they don't need to have an open mind. It ended up turning into quite the explanation of how I came to be who I am, and it, very effectively, I think, examines and provides guidelines for those too intelligent to believe blindly and faithfully that the Bible is the stone cold answer to everything, and leaves us with no questions. People of any intelligence must have nagging doubts when they follow organized religions, and its a matter of how well they can repress or fool themselves as to how well they do with being faithful to it. Here is my take on all of that shit:



"Shoudn't you then put your faith in Jesus' words about being loveing and accepting to all people, to lead by actions and not words, love they neighbor as thyself, and that we should rest assured that God loves all his children inifinitely and immeasurably?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ "Judege not, lest ye' be judged," ring any bells? .........................................................................
........................... "Do unto others you would have them do unto you?" come across as something that may be found in the Bible? ''''''''''''&
#039;'''''''''''&#
039;'''''''''''�
39;'''''''''''
9;' Let he who is without sin cast the first stone? That may be in there somewhere. Seriously, the way you bible thumpers cherry pick your phrasing so that the Bible, somehow universally known for preaching good will and fair treatment can be used in individual pieces to breed, justify, and teach hatred to their children is disgusting, and degrading and doing a disservice to all the good Christ tried to teach.

================================================== You claim its God's word to disown, not accept, and hate because of old testament mumbo jumbo STRICTLY WASHED FROM RELEVANCE by the New Testament, yet conveniently used when you need it (eye for an eye justifying pro-death penalty stances for example)to explain why its unmentionable as a question of your own character that you are prjeudiced or biased or racist or a bigot or misogynist.

00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 The irony is this, and I can speak from having been just this person I described up until I was 17, when a decade of repressing a distinctly growing nagging doubt about the utter truth to my somewhat strict Lutheran uprbringing blew up and I had to face the fact that I could no longer, at least personally, identify myself with the Christian religion. It was official. I had lost my faith in a book I thought had all the answers and it was amazing. I grew up in one night, became who I am in a single evening of massive internal conflicts being resolved in a chain reaction. I had always feared God, and going to hell, so I feared addressing my doubts for fear I'd stop believing and be punished. But when I truly realized I had stopped believing, I wasn't scared of punsihement any more, and it was as if I'd been cured of cancer. Best thing that ever happened to me. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^



Because of this life event for myself, I know disctinctly that all Christians who justify hatred or don't prevent it and speak out against it from fellow Christians are not doing it as a gallant stand of principal and upholding God's (self proclaimed archaic and obsolete Old Testament) proclamations, but rather because of your overpowering FEAR that your own faith really isn't as strong as you might think, and that if a single line of text from the Bible being fallible were to be accidentally proven to you beyond a shadow of a doubt, the whole castle might come a-tumbling down and your entire self identity would get a massive facelift, but the outcome is not known to you therefore scary. Hence the fear of doubt in your faith is equal to the fear of your whole personality and life exploding into something completely different, possibly taking your whole personality with it. Better to preach hate and stay blind, rather then find out that sometimes losing faith in a specific book can actually cause ones faith in God to grow exponentially, because suddenly your concerns about what God actually exists as treating people unequally, and being vengeful or spiteful or jealous.... All that shit is suddenly open to debate with your spirituality now entering uncharted territory, and this is when you realize that God does *not* require that we force belief in impossible acts for us to enter heaven, he DOES love gay and straight people equally, he DOES accept everyone who sought to live life right because it was the right thing to do and help people because it was right, and had compassion for all creatures that suffer because it is right..... Realizing your soul in the next life will under no circumstance be fitted with an eternal punishment for something any human could only be expected to truly believe so far is like a million billion tons of bricks being lifted off your chest. Fear of wrath from God disappears, allowing curiousity, respect, and thinking for yourself without guilt, for the first time in your life to take hold.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ When you lose your faith in religion because of intelligent and logical doubts that finally blossom into analysis and death of your faith as you understand it doesn't turn you into a godless atheist heathen who only lives to torment the faithful, but rather a person allowed to explore all that life has to offer with a blank slate and not through the tinted goggles of a deceptive and psychologically damaging upbringing of forced belief and church ritual with subjective quasi-satisfying answers to all life's questions. Losing one's faith is so unreal, in that it is generally the rebirth of a much better you, and much renewed faith in humanity, in possibility, and in spirituality. But this is something a person cannot know until their faith is lost against their will, because nobody ever wants to lose it if it was once real and strong and was the guiding force behind the set of rules to which you'd truly based your decisions in life on. .................................................. Bible thumping cherry picked references will need to be put aside in any debate over faith with me. I was raised prepared for these debates, because I agonized through the same inner struggle every intelligent, logically minded, creative, curious, inquisitive Christian human being struggles with every day. Most don't really even realize that its effecting their life, and usually for the worse. I didn't even know I'd been losing my faith for a long time, and it had been bothering me but I'd been repressing it until the night I lost it. I was able to look back and see the progression. Its a feeling I wish, as a human being who wants nothing more then the best for other misguided human beings, that every person of faith eventually gets to go through. Its everything you think you have now, but felt vibrantly and truly and happily, unashamed of your churchs ascribed teachings of hate and punishment and hell."

I'll preface this solely with a warning; Its not light reading, and if you are to truly understand what I at least want to convey, make sure you prepare for the need for reading comprehension skills on overdrive. I didn't intend to type this as grammatically pretentious as it might (incorrectly) come across as. Its just how it happened, and rereading it, I'm surprised as hell that it is as utterly coherent as it is, *if*, and I can hardly do this with my own writing, *if* you can continually digest every sentence and keep a contiuing idea of what my overall big picture looks like when these words are summarized by you back into what I hope is a similar recreation of my views and emotions. Thanks.



"I don't so much believe in god as I believe that the entire universe and all it encompasses, including time itself, is essentially a sentient form of perfection beyond our undrstanding, or beyond even worth our attempts at making sense of the hows and whys that go with that. This entity, which brought itself into existence via a growing self awareness of all that was *supposed* to exist but didn't in whatever dimensional plane, or lack thereof, was taking up the nothingness prior to the big bang. Effectively the obviously multidimensional omnipresent emotion that is infinite love itself, (currently the same source-pool from which all our love is drawn and used while we're on Earth only to return as we die,) needed to breathe life into itself in a way where the energy that defined the emotion at the time could experience itself in a way more appreciable. That brings us to us, meaning humans. The entire universe exists in order to show itself, through us, what it exactly is. Each of us is a piece of perfection, a piece of God, experiencing all it has made physically manifest thorugh all of us every day. It feels everything at once through all of us at once, but also, we as individual entities part of a larger whole are experiencing our own individual lives for ourselves, and this is just as much an experience for God to relish, when we live enlightened lives, as the all encompassing piece of the greater human framework is to "God". Our individual pieces are waiting to return to the "God-ether" that is at one time simultaneously a part of every single atom in the universe, and the space in between. If we aren't living individual lives, we're experiencing every human triumph and influencing events in order to reach whatever desired outcome has already happened a zillion years into the future, but yet, outside the framework of time has at once already happened, is happening, and will happen forever and ever.



Every new life is taken from the same pool of cosmic ether, probably not as exact reincarnations but rather a melting pot of traits and characterisitcs needed to guide evolution through our DNA proliferation. Once we are reincarnate enough times to finally "get it." Each human being is a chance for a different facet of "God" to experience itself and the gamut of emotions, pain and pleasure capable of existing when energy is slowed down enough to form matter. Religions have long destroyed the opportunity for most people to make their own determinations on the origin of the universe, however. So, I say, thank God (us) for two things: The ever present question every person has about our purpose here, and psychedelic drugs such as mushrooms, peyote, and LSD, which are most definitely the keystones to unlocking our entire history back to the beginning of time, recorded in our DNA by us, as a way of ensuring each person is capable of self enlightenment. Every human on Earth, given the right circumstance and people and trip guide, is capable of a rebirth of ego based not on skepticism and myth but on feelings of direct interaction and contact with the much larger Alpha-Omega perfect, infinite macro-version of ourselves, which is everything that is not us as individuals.



Once our journey is completed, as we die, if we have not reached the point of enlightenment, understanding what we've been given, and ahven't realized the level of appreciation we need to have for being given the opportunity to live as individuals and participate in such a mind boggling cosmic truth; if the life did not have the desired outcome, the sould is slated for a remix in the ether which will be reborn into new people. The enlightened soul will stay out of that pool, however, and eventually, but trial and error, people will have been through lives where they didn't "get it" so many times, there will be an increasingly large number of individuals becoming enlightened each cycle until whatver brings this whole thing to a halt occurs. However many times our essential "soul" has to repeat itself here, we eventually stay integrated back with the ultimate omnipresent "idea" that is our reason for existence in the first place.

I think that the creation of time as the 4th dimension is particularly genius, in that without it, all existence would be experienced at once, and there would be no beginning and end, and all would be felt at the same time. You need to look ath the universe like an a near infinite football which is growing larger by the second, but out into what we have no capability of comprehension. Time is only existent within the constructs of our universe. It is not a dimension, concept, or factor at all in whatever is outside.

So, why I think the creation of time is the Magnum Opus of our sentient divine consciousness is as follows: You might say that all that was *needed* for us to be brought into existence from nothingness awash with energy in an indescribable form, was the addition of the 4 dimensions to what was already there to begin with: Energy, (still converting nothingness to our universe as it gets larger,) which is what everything is made of, all matter, all life, all thought, is energy congealed in a myriad of forms by the effects the spatial dimensions of time has on it. That energy, still unconverted while our universe engulfs something else we cannot even dream about understanding, currently entails what will eventually be the entire finite sum of all existence in the known universe occuring eternally and concurrently with itself outside of time. When the laws of our universe, particularly of Time and space, are applied they this energy the ability to take form, which is what we are, as is all matter, via the evolutionary process (for life,) or an eternity of inanimacy if something is a mineral, as opposed to an animal or vegetable. In my next blog, I'll impart my theories on exactly HOW the concept of time and space allied to energy actually form solid matter in our universe.