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Originally Posted by pianoperformer  If God is real, how do you know what God is? How do you know if there is a true religion, or maybe there is none? Maybe it doesn't matter what you believe, in the end. But what if it does? What if, for example, the true God is the Christian God? How do you know, or how can you tell?
I'm taking a theology class (because it's required), and it has shown me that pure reason can't take you all the way, when it comes to theology. If there is a God, there's probably nothing anyone can do to prove it. It kind of reminds me of characters within a game learning about the properties of the game itself, but coming to the conclusion that there is no creator because they can't find him/her within the game.
I'm still undecided, but I'm faced with the question, "what if".
There are many religions out there. Even though people don't like to admit it, even the beliefs often discussed here are a sort of religion, even if it doesn't have a name, and isn't organized. One can't just select a religion and be satisfied; one has to be reasonably sure that it is true. |
My perspective on religion, god, and spirituality is that rather than making a journey of picking up beliefs we should make a journey of finding ways of emptying them. I see beliefs as filters for reality. Not only that, but they oftentimes reflexively engineer the logic we use, making reason suspect as well. For example, if we presume an external universe, we can't help but come to the logical conclusion that since it is "out there" we must be "in here". What if we're wrong?
Intuition can also be distorted by belief. If we believe our intuition is given by god, we have already distorted its reality. Beliefs are like the shadows of truth. Shadows are created when light is blocked. Both logic and intuition become clear when belief is dismantled. They might even become one. Or at least, I can say, that is what
appears to be true to me, the more beliefs I dismantle. Maybe I'm wrong of course. I haven't completely shed that which separates me, the observer, from thou, the observed.
The more filters we toss out the window, the more able we are to let the undistorted reality flow through. Of course, seeing one who does this, they will not appear to be belief-less, and perhaps they aren't, but they are opening their minds to new possibilities constantly. They become more emotionally "objective". They become less invested and less defensive about what others think of their perspective. When you care about knowing the truth more than what the truth ends up actually being, you are on the path.
So until we can get rid of belief entirely, we adopt the most expansive beliefs we can -- the beliefs that give us the most light (which I
believe is something intuitively felt by all to some degree or another). So people turn to the beliefs of the ages. Some of them are enlightening, some not so enlightening. But its a ladder to get you somewhere. Once you're there, you can get rid of the ladder that got you up there. The truth is like a mosaic, and the pieces are found in every corner of existence. It is our job to integrate that.
There are those that are able to feel more light upon their shoulders because the sky of their consciousness is relatively free from the clouds of belief. But they can't clear our clouds for us, they can only point out the clouds. Meanwhile, we mistake the clouds for sky and think the light we feel is all the light there is.