Even More on God

In our previous posts Does God Exist? and More on God we discussed how believing in God can help some people and how the Church of Integrity embraces both those that believe in him and those that don't. This post will clarify that statement.

When children get scared then it comforts them to have a teddy bear or something of that sort. Adults can also get scared because life is not easy. Adults don't have teddy bears though so instead they seek comfort in an imaginary friend called God. It is indeed a personal god that is generally supposed to be the image of all which is good in this world. We at the Church of Integrity believe that this is something natural and all attempts to somehow outlaw God will be bound to fail.

Instead of viewing this believe in God as being a bad thing then we cant to emphasize the good that comes out of believing in God, given certain conditions. The most important condition is that people must understand that they alone are responsible for their actions. It's no good saying that God told you to do something or you read some book that God supposedly wrote. Unconditional belief is bad in our opinion so it's important that you question the world and make your own decisions.

Another condition is that we believe that when we are having problems or when life seems hard then we should try to talk to other people before falling back on God. It's amazing how people all over the world are experiencing similar problems in life. Talking to someone else and relating with other peoples problems can help tremendously. Vice versa then if you know that someone is having problems then chat with them and try to help them get back to the straight path.

The last condition is that you should not promote your God to other people. Of course you can discuss God and how it helps thinking about him and such but keep in mind that this God is your personal God, he's unique to you and the God that other people have might not be similar to yours.

The most important lesson about God in the Church of Integrity is that we should try to live without God because we alone are responsible for making our decisions. Having a God figure can cloud our judgment. However it is completely natural to fall back on a God idea when things are not going well, just try first to get help from fellow church members or any humans for that matter.

Atheism

In a previous post we talked about on what religion the Church of Integrity is based. The church is not only inspired by the religions mentioned in that post but also on Atheism. We gave a short hint about this relation whe we added the Atheist Blogroll. In this post we'll go more in depth into how atheism influenced us.

The atheist movement is on a rise. We believe there are many different reasons why people become atheists. Many are frustrated with how religion seems to bash and pervert science as some religious groups have done with the theory of evolution. In the Church of Integrity we of course base our world view on science so you shouldn't end up with any frustrations like that here. Others are frustrated with fundamentalism which we want to avoid at all costs. Yet others have fundamental issues with many religions because they require unconditional belief. We don't require unconditional belief, in fact we encourage people to question the world around them. Yet others are tired of how some religious groups try to mix up religion and politics. We want to separate the two. One can find many more issues that turn people to atheism, like the existence of a supreme being which we addressed in our posts "Does God Exist?" and "More on God". We can't cover everything here but feel free to suggest more reasons and we'll cover them here on the blog.

Now it might seem to you that we are an atheistic movement. Strictly speaking then we are not because after all we claim to be a religion. We claim that the atheistic movement is strong because of these various shortcomings of current religions as mentioned above. We think that many of the people that join the atheistic movement do so out of frustration and that the group that calls themselves atheists is very diverse. For example the Church of Integrity does not share a common path with the atheists that want to get rid of religion. We hope to be a shelter for those that are frustrated with current religions, feel they are somehow against their better knowledge but still want to be part of a bigger community and have some guidance in how to lead their life. Note we say guidance, ultimately people have to make their own decisions on how to lead their lifves.

It's easy to claim that we are a sell out somehow and we are just trying to get people by picking popular subjects. It is hard for us to defend ourselves against such claims but we point out that we have no economic or otherwise benefit of "stealing" people like that. The founders of the church simply went through many of the frustrations as mentioned above but yet didn't feel they shared a common path with the most aggressive atheists. We wanted to build a religion that is more of a way of life like Buddhism. The gain of taking part in such a religion is the community, having someone you can come to when things are not going good. We all need a shoulder to lean on. Sure, friends and family can definitely help so one could argue that religion is not necessary but we claim that we can do an even better job than friends and family and furthermore then not everyone is so lucky to have friends and family to lean on.

Unconditional Belief

Many religions promote unconditional belief. You have to belief what the religion says. The Church of Integrity does not impose anything like that on you. On the contrary we encourage people to explore the world and learn.

It's in human nature to learn, to take nothing for granted and try discover the world on your own. Just look at children and see how they explore the world around them. Unconditional belief can be useful though in some sense. If we continue with the children then parents generally put rules that they must follow and often without understanding why. They must have unconditional belief in the rules set by their parents.

In ancient times then religion was very big and important in the power hierarchy. Priests were often the most powerful men around. Using religion to hold people at bay and making them follow certain rules probably worked very well for them. Today we face a different world. Religion is not part of the power structure. The Church of Integrity actually wants to keep religion and the power structure separated. Hence there is no reason for us to impose on you rules that you must follow because if you break important rules then the government or the ruling body will take care of it, not us. Also we don't feel it necessary to treat our followers as children.

Believing is despite all of this a big part in todays world. If we take science as an example then there is no way that some one person can verify all the scientific results that have been set forth. Most of us choose to belief that they are true though because we have faith in the scientific method, the scientists and the fact that peers have accepted the results and the explanations. This sort of belief is different from the unconditional belief that we don't want in the Church of Integrity. The difference lies in that with the scientific results and what we teach at the Church of Integrity then you can choose not to believe it and there are no serious consequences from the church or science. However if you for example don't belief that God created the universe in 7 days then already you have started to undermine the Bible and hence your Christian faith. Can you for example be considered a good Christian if you don't believe that? Will you then go to Hell? We don't claim to know but we hope this highlights the difference. Using logic and reason to observe the world around you and doubting everything is what our current society runs on despite other religions and we encourage that.

Diversity

We believe that all humans were created equal. Thus you should treat people with due respect no matter their gender, race, appearance etc. This does not mean that we want a uniform population. People are different and in some sense not created equal. Some people are better at sports than others etc. People also look differently, for example have different skin colour. We should celebrate those differences. We should not be scared when we see someone different, on the contrary, we should be excited because we might learn something new about the world from the person. Discrimination is not the right thing to do.

It is healthy to travel and get to know people from other countries or a different background than yourself. It helps expand your horizon and helps you do the right thing. In the future we hope to set up a forum in connection with the blog. The forum would be a good place for you to chat with people from other countries in a cheap way (much cheaper than actually having to travel!). Don't get me wrong, traveling is great but this would be a great alternative because not everyone is fortunate enough to be able to travel all over the world.

More on God

In our post Does God Exist we emphasized on the good aspects of believing in God. We don't even mention a strict God like the one shown in the Old Testament of the Bible. The reason is that we believe that positive thinking can help people. Thus we focus on the good, cheerful aspects of the God notion rather than trying to scare people. Of course there will come a time in every persons life where he or she can't help it but be pessimistic but that's where the community comes in. We want to try help people to be optimistic about life and think positive.

It is amazing how this notion of God or supreme beings comes up in most religions. Maybe science will one day be able to shed light on that. Perhaps our universal truths take that form, that is, maybe it stems from our notion of right and wrong and God can be viewed as some personification of that. An alternative is to interpret the randomness that created Big Bang as God. There are so many possibilities. We find this fascinating.

Enough about God. After reading our last two posts you might think that God is a central figure in our religion but that is far from the truth. As we said in the last post then we don't want to spend too much time on God since we don't know if he exists or not and we would have no way of knowing what he wanted if he existed. We embrace those that not believe in God equally with those that believe in him. If you follow our way of life, which is to do the right thing, then you can proudly call yourself a follower. Remember that it is in human nature to be skeptical so doubting or not believing in the existence of God should not be frowned upon by any religion in our opinion.

Does God exist?

It is very understandable that people needed the notion of God in ancient times. They were not as safe as we are now since there was no police and their whole existence depended on getting enough food from the crops. Today we can get food whenever we want and the government can tap your phone, look at you through countless security cameras so the only real threat you might feel comes from your own government! Thus it's understandable if people do not feel they need a God.

Some quote Pascal as proof that we should believe in God for if God doesn't exist then it doesn't matter what we do but if he exists then depending on whether we are "good" or "bad" then we go to Heaven or Hell. This argument is fundamentally flawed. How do you know what "good" behavior is? This God, is he the God of Christians or someone elses God? Even if God existed then you do not know what he expects from you so in case he exists then you are in a similar situation as if he didn't exist. Why should we focus on some God when we can't even know what he wants? In the Church of Integrity we rather want to focus on being good human beings by doing what is right. If God exists then we believe that doing the right thing is your best bet anyways to get into Heaven.

A supreme being is not consistent with our worldview. Indeed it is possible from a scientific standpoint that there exists a supreme being that holds all the strings but it's a bad theory in the sense that we have no way of checking it's validity or finding out with experiments whether it's wrong. Again, why waste time on something you'll never know whether exists?

With all that said then it is clear that the Church of Integrity will not focus on the existence of God. He might or might not exist. Our focus will be on doing the right thing.

We don't object though to you praying to God or believing in him. Despite all the technological advancements then we human beings often feel helpless for example when nature strikes against us, when we lose dear friends or when we get this feeling of being so insignificant in the world that it wouldn't matter if we were around or not. In those situation it can actually psychologically help you to pray to God or talk to him. How can we oppose such a good thing? The bottom line is that God is something very personal and is something you must choose. We'll talk about him once in a while but mainly then he'll be your personal God.

Note that in this post we've only been talking about God in terms of our religion. Since we say that God might or might not exist then we'll not be claiming that the God of Christianity or Islam does not exist. Furthermore we believe that one go too far in both directions, that is in believing in God or denouncing him. We will not pick on other religions because they have supreme beings and we hope they'll show us the same courtasey. People can abuse religion so instead of fighting against the existence of God then we feel people should rather focus on fighting against fundamentalism.

The Purpose of Life

Questions like, "What is the purpose of life?", "Why are we here" etc are classical. Some claim that man invented religion to try to answer those questions so we feel it is appropriate here at the Church of Integrity that we at least attempt to address them.

Why are we here? We claim it's a result of Big Bang and evolution. That answer is perhaps oversimplified but you can learn more about the development of the Universe from Big Bang by looking up those terms on the internet. Still that answer doesn't fulfill our need for knowledge because it begs the question, "Why did Big Bang happen". To that we have no answer. We hope that science will lead us to an answer. Is it possible that God or some supreme being caused Big Bang. Totally, but it is very hard to put a supreme being into a scientific theory so we will not be endorsing that view. [See more on this in the comments below.]

What is the purpose of life? To help mankind survive. This statement seems rather dull compared to other religions where the goal is to lead a good life, help others and what not. The reason we give this answer is that it seems in nature that survival instincts are very strong. Animals evolve to try survive better etc. We also claim that this statement is much stronger than it seems at first glance. To survive then we need to follow the universal truths that we've talked about before because they are somehow inherent to our evolution and survival. As a consequence of that statement then it falls under our purpose in life to be good, to help others, to treat others like we want them to treat us and all those good things. The main difference between our statement and that of other religion is the motivation, they get their good message directly from some supreme being, we deduce our from the survival instinct (or in some sense from science).

After reading this you might feel that humankind is just a bunch of animals. Well, yes, we might be. We want to emphasize that life is mysterious, even to scientists. We do not understand it completely. Thus life is something we should cherish and perhaps we do that by trying to survive. How did life come to be? We don't know. Again it might be created by some supreme being but there is no conclusive evidence for that. We don't want to rule it out though.