On what religion is the Church of Integrity based?

No, the Church of Integrity is not based on Christianity. However we are proud to say that many of our teachings come from Christianity and other religions. In this post we'll look into what religions influence the Church of Integrity.

First we want to make it absolutely clear that the Church of Integrity is a new religion. The founders however were raised up as Christians and thus the Church of Integrity contains a lot of teachings from Christianity, simply because Christianity contains ethical teachings that are considered universal truth. Examples are that you should not kill a man and you should treat others like you want them to treat you. The ethical teachings from the church are still being announced on this blog and in fact then they are always being revised and new teachings being added because a church needs to stay up to date and specifically talk about what concerns people at that time. Thus we'll start with many good examples from Christianity and we hope to expand our horizon to other religions and sources.

It is easy to compare the Church of Integrity with many religions because we share a common foundation in our ethical teachings. However the church is very different in the sense that we do not claim that God or some divine being is a fundamental part of our world view. God might exist but there is nothing that directly points to his existence. Another thing that distinguishes us from other religions is that we want to use science to explain the world. This does not mean that science in itself is part of the church. Science is a separate entity governed by it's own rules. It makes for a good relationship though in our opinion since we can give moral observations on what science does without being too attached or having to resort to quoting some divine being which generally just makes scientists angry. Buddhism is close to the Church of Integrity in the sense that they don't either focus on some supreme being. Both religions focus on being a way of life for their followers. There the similarities end though. Buddhism has ancient myths and teachings and their world view is not based on science etc.

Christianity, Islam and other religions are part of our cultural heritage. In the Church of Integrity we want to take the cultural heritage of the world and learn from it. We want to extract the moral lessons that we can call universal truth and we want to be challenged and think about moral cases that are not as obvious. Thus we claim that the Church is in some sense based on all previous and future religions.

When the church was founded then the main influence was as claimed above Christianity. The word church in our name simply refers to the community part of our religion which we consider to be very important. After the founding and the founding statement we've found an officially recognized religion that shares many similar traits with the church. We will post about this religion soon and explain how those two are similar and how they are different.