Wednesday, February 22, 2012

So you think you love God

It has been said "Death is a punishment for wrong doers."
If this is true, I must conclude plants, animals and the entire Universe are wrong doers too.
But stop and think for a moment, if it were not for death, Adam and Eve and we too would have nothing to eat. If it weren't for death, the Earth would be wall to wall people and we would be worse off than people on a subway at 5 p.m.
So I ask this. Would you still love God if death were just a natural part of life? Would you still love God if death is just the end and there were no life beyond death? Is your ability to love God limited by the idea that you will have an afterlife in Heaven? Is your love of God so shallow that it depends upon you constantly being rewarded for "being good?"
I would suggest that a love that is always bought and paid for isn't much of a love. It's no better than the love a man gets from a prostitute he has bought and paid for.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Freedom of Religion

If you have come here thinking I wish to bemoan President Obama's attack on religion as beemoaned by the Catholic Bishops and others on the Christian Right, you would be wrong.

As one who was baptised Catholic some 69 years ago and one who was educated in Catholic grade school and high school, I have some knowledge of how the Bishops and the Pope thinks.

First, there is nothing democratic about the Catholic Church. In its hayday, it functioned as a monarchy and often controlled the Kings and Queens of Europe. It wasn't so much that Rome fell as it was the Holy Roman Empire that met its demise.

The Catholic Church philosophy is really quite simple. It is a "my way or the higway" approach to everything. Another way of putting it is to say, "Believe us and obey us or you will suffer for eternity in Hell." That has been the Church's philosophy since the close of its crusades and its inquisitions.

Here in the USA, we have written into the Constitution the Freedom of Religion clause. This is good but it also implys Freedom from Religion. But do we really have freedom from religion when politicians seek to impose their religious views through secular law? This is what the Bishops seek along with many on the Christian right.

If you have been born and raised Catholic, you know the Church makes every effort to control your life when it comes to sex. Nothing so dominates Catholic religious teaching as does sex and for a very good reason. If you can control a person's sexual life, you can control their mind. You can control them when you see them and you can control them when you don't see them. You can make them feel guilty 24/7/365 and get them to go to Confession to save their immortal souls. They becom "faithfully obediant."

Christian churches in this country would behave like the Taliban if they could get away with it. They would impose their will on all religions and those without any religion through secual laws if they could get away with it.

As things now stand, they pretty much have their cake and eat it too. They have their rights but they are exempt from the obligations most citizens are obliged to follow. The most obvious example is freedom from paying taxes. Every religious property shifts their tax burden onto their neighbors tax burden. In the case of the Catholic Church, it was under the opinion that it need not report crimes committed by its priests to the police.

I have nothing against anyone practicing their religion so long as their practice does not require anyone else to abide by their rules.

Saturday, February 4, 2012

Science vs religion

E=MC2 explains everything. It's a lot like the definition of God who always was and always will be, the I am who am.
Neither the existence of God nor the non existence of God can be proven for a simple reason. God is not a thing. Only things can be proven to exist or not exist. Very difficult to prove a negative.
Religion is belief while science is knowledge, although scientific conclusions usually start out as a belief.
Belief is what we do when we don't know – and we need to remember thought is energy being emitted from gray matter, the brain.
To a greater extent than we like to admit, religion, just like science, compartmentalizes our thoughts. We think in terms of black and white, right and wrong, either/or. But returning to E=MC2, we see a constant bleeding of one into the other. The spiritual is but a form of the material. Neither the spiritual nor the material could exist without the other.
To steal from a song, "I've looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow, It's cloud illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds, at all"