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Time to Relax; What the hell was I thinking! |
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Okay, now that I finally look back on some of this stuff, I'm starting to wonder if I was on something at the time I wrote all that crap, then again I know I wasn't, and that makes it all the worse. Sure, some of the stuff I get a kick out of, like that Satanism thing. I thought that was pretty good. And the 2nd entry was kinda fun too. But some a the rest is just bleh, so let's just move on from that. For now, I think I'll spin a little yarn of my own on God and what I think about him, or her, or it, what have you.
To start off with, I'd like to state that I do believe in God, or rather in some sort of eternal being who, out of boredom, created the universe in all its boggling glory. Up until now I actually had no idea why this guy, and I only use the masculine here because we're all so familar with it to begin with, not because I believe God to be a dude, would have done that though. Why go through the trouble, though I doubt it was any trouble at all for him, to make all of this? The only reason I've been told so far is just 'cause he loves us so much. Well, why's he do that then? Just an OK guy, is that it? I don't really think so. I need something more than just love to answer my question. Here enters a book I've been reading up on at the library during my oh so many breaks, well, when I'm not studying up on Jon Stewart's America The Book, that is.
S'called Conversations with God, though I can't remember the author at this point. Now, if you're thinking, what the hell? Talking with God? What's this guy on? But for the purposes of this little discussion, the actual truthfulness concerning whether the author is really having a convo with the big guy is irrelevant. I'm only taking some of the material that he discussed in the book. And that is his reason for God's creation of all of us. What the book claims is that true knowledge may only be achieved through experience. I'll take a little parable from it. So there's this little candle in heaven where everything's all bright. He's never known of anything except light, and so he cannot fully understand himself or be happy. So he asks God about it, and God sends him off to another place where no light exists, but instead there is only darkness. After being transported there, the candle finally understands the light he shows because now he knows of darkness as well. You cannot know of one without knowing the other as well. You cannot understandably say someone is tall without knowing what it means to be short as well.
Now, let's apply this thought to God. Before any of this existed, only God did, and so God couldn't fully understand himself because he was the only thing he knew of. There was nothing else around opposite of him that he could look at and say, hey, I'm different from that, and thereby know truly of himself and be happy. So to accomplish this, he went and created everything around so that he could understand both it and himself, and so that we could do the same. Now this might seem a little hard to understand, and I'm not pretty sure if its infalible logically or anything like that, but I haven't address this subject much before, nor have I read all of the book or any of the others that have been written. So this will have to suffice for now.
OK! So now we've got a God and we've got a universe with people and plants and animals and everything a little boy could want. But what about the stuff that isn't of this realm? The afterlife and such? Well here's when I have a few problems with my home religion of Roman Catholocism. According to it, along with the rest of Christianity, you do good deeds and such, you get a ticket to heaven. Boom, that easy. Then again, might not be. According to some, you've got a buncha technicalities in there, like baptism and that the only way to heaven is through Jesus and giving oneself to Him. Now this all seems a little unrealistic to me, not to mention unfair and just plain stupid? Say I'm born in Africa and never once hear a word about Jesus or anything about Christianity, but I still lead a good, clean life according to the religion's standards. Now, just because of the circumstances surrounding my life, I'm not going to get my reward in heaven? I don't think so. And that's assuming that the Christian life is the way to live. Let's get to that!
OK, so if we go along with Christianity for now, not only do we have a God and a people, but we've got rules too. They're simply enough. You follow 'em, you're good to go, you don't, you burn. But let's think about this. If God wanted us to follow a set of rules He made up, why doesn't he just make us? I was under the impression that He gave us free will, so that we get to choose what the hell we want to do. So he's gonna go and let us have a choice only to then tell us we better chose only the things He wants us to? Seems unneccesary and dumb to me. If this were the way things go, wouldn't that mean God's pretty much just testing us like school children? Sure, we can make the argument that we should follow His rules because its for our own good here on earth. True. Well, for some part. Killing and stealing and such doesn't really do much good for a society. But as for the more particular rules, let's say homosexuality, or sex outside of marriage, they're not that bad, are they? They surely can't be detrimental to our race. So it all doesn't check out exactly that way. But what if we tried something else instead?
What if there were no rules, if we had free will and were encouraged to make our own choices and make our own rules? We've all heard the expression that we shoudn't judge others 'til we judged ourselves. Well shouldn't we be the only ones who can judge ourselves? Not someone else instead? Then we should be able to decide our own fate, just as we make our own choices each day of our lives. The point of creating us was for God to know himself, so then shouldn't the points of our lives be for us to know ourselves? And the only way we can do that is through experience, the experience of making choices. Maybe that's all God wants from us, for us to get to know ourselves.
If that were true, we wouldn't need a hell, and as for anyone who still did fail somehow, all wouldn't be lost. Shouldn't the last thing God want to do is get rid of us because he didn't like what we made ourselves into? But then he shouldn't have let us choose if he wouldn't like it afterwards anyway. What he would want is for all of us to be happy like him in that we know who we truly are. One may feel sad and abandoned because of the state of his or her life, but its the only way to true knowledge and happiness. Just as well, people may enjoy life as much as they want to, they only have to decide whether or not they will. It's all up to them. And that makes life great.
Rowan Raeneus · Sun Sep 04, 2005 @ 09:42pm · 0 Comments |
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