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.
Monday, May 7, 2007
More on God
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9 comments:
this site is amazing. been looking for something like this for years. you know what would be interesting: take the seven deadly sins and the ten commandments, and all that, and dissect them, understanding them purely ethically.
i'm linking to you if that's alright...
Thanks for the comment Leila. I'm glad you liked our message. It's a great idea to cover the ten commandments and the seven deadly sins. We have a couple of posts already lined up that will deal with diversity, unconditional belief, atheism and talk about whether this is a proper religion but after that we'd love to do a series of posts about those issues. Thank you so much for the great idea.
I'm still reading you... I must say I have a very bad knowledge of religion, but I like the way you're analysing things.
I like the path you're taking anyway.
Just curious, what lead you to write this blog ? Sorry if the answer is in the post... I have to catch up !
Excellent question Zhu. Thanks for commenting.
I have actually not posted why I decided to make this blog and post my views. I'll attempt to make a proper post about it in a couple of days in a post that will be related to Atheism. My background is Christianity but like many atheists then I wasn't perfectly happy with my religion so felt a new approach was needed. I have had this idea behind the Church of Integrity in my mind for quite some time now and I just wanted to share it with more people because as I posted before then I believe that religion is to some extent just a good idea.
I'm still posting about the foundations of the religion but soon I'll start posting about more practical matters and case studies. My mind is sort of exploding with posts I want to make so I apologize for how little there seems to be on here for the time being. I promise to get it all out of my head in due time.
Thanks for replying. I'm curious to see where you're going... Like many European, I have a pretty low opinion on religions right now, although I do respect everybody's beliefs. Funny isn't it ! I guess growing up in one of the craddle of religion does that to people...
When I first came to Canada, I was surprised to see so many religions represented here, some extremist, some much more liberal than I though religion could be.
Interesting position. Myself, I believe in God and good and evil. That was a developed belief by living in this world. I think there is proof of both. I don't have a strict take on the old testament and only follow the new. The old seems more political and connected to cultural survival than the word of God but as Jesus refers to it as the real deal I find myself conflicted. Whatever the case since Jesus was the embodiement of God and not connected to any traditional religion in his teachings that is the way period in my book. No other figure in history has the same recognition and connection to God as Jesus. No one claims it either only Jesus. And if everyone could achieve what Jesus wanted we would all be living in heaven on earth. That's the simple pure truth of it.
Thanks for the second comment Zhu. Like you then I for some time doubted religion and really was simply confused about what to think and belief. For example I belief science is really important and I feel that many religions fundamentally can't go well with science. Also I felt there wasn't enough appreciation for diversity in some of the religions around. In the next couple of days I'll post about diversity, atheism and perhaps what inspired the Church of Integrity so I hope that will answer some questions. If you are wondering about where I'm going with this blog in more practical terms then no I don't plan on making money from this or anything. My believe as stated before is that religion is a good idea and although I want to formalize the religion and have it accepted in as many countries as possible then I want it to be run as efficiently as possible and then donate whatever stands behind to charity. I repeat, this religion (as opposed to some others) is not supposed to be some money making machine or be used for political gains, that would be contrary to everything we want to teach.
Thanks for the comment Purple Crayon Brain. In some sense then we also believe in good and evil in the sense that we claim there are some universal truths, like you should not kill another person etc. However we also claim that the world is not that simple, that most of the time we have to make a decision on what to do based on those universal truths. Despite todays post then we absolutely don't want to claim that any religion strictly follows the old testament. We realize that most Christians follow the new one. Also we don't think that Jesus necessarily existed. What we do think is that stories about Jesus in the Bible are wonderful and as many people as possible should read them and learn the great moral lessons that can be learned from them. In that sense we embrace other religions.
Wow - very interesting
Thank you for the comment Fat Free Milk.
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