1.   Bill said:

   November 27, 2008 @ 6:54 am

   Those are sweet sentiments, Colleen, and I agree with so much that you have to say about religion, to the point that I have seriously entertained the thought that I may be an atheist more than once in my life. But even before evidences were brought to my attention–including both the publicly documented and the purely personal types–that gave serious credibility to the idea of a conscious designer of the universe being personally involved and hands-on, being concealed for the sake of the freedom of created beings to accept or reject, yet willing to be unmistakably revealed to anyone willing to accept and believe in that kind love motivating and perfusing the very physics of our existence–even before that, I had problems with atheism, since as a guiding philosophy for society it doesn’t have such a great track record either, to put it mildly.
   And have you really abandoned all superstition? If you create your own reality, isn’t that a spiritual thing as well? I am sure many people who really *are* atheist would argue that they decidedly did *not* create their own reality, could not have created it, certainly would not have made it this way if they could, that conditions not only beyond their control but beyond human ability to perceive differently *without* spirituality have been imposed upon them.
   People will always be people, and knowledge and science still have yet to solve the issue that there are always people who have a hard time trusting anyone enough to stop finding ways to gain the advantage over others in ways that hurt and destroy, and impede progress–whether they use religion to do it, or use another stated goal, or science itself to justify what they do. Religion does this when in its doctrine it takes power and authority away from the Creator and puts it in human hands. In this way, it is true that the vast majority of *official* religion is really thinly-veiled atheism, a fantasy that allows people to try to reap the benefits of living in a social construct with ideals of selflessness while continuing, in heavily-moderated fashion, to still personally pursue the goal in actuality of gaining the advantage. This will of course cause the whole thing to frequently suffer breakdowns, to put it mildly.
   If a person truly trusts in their Creator, though, they will have no problem exhibiting the kind of selflessness that is what really improves society, because it isn’t even the improvement of society that is their true goal, but the true goal is to simply emulate their selfless Creator out of pure love that is always unmistakably exhibited as love toward others as well, whether it is of any earthly benefit to them or not. “If anyone among you seems to be religious, and bridles not his tongue, but deceives his own heart, this one’s religion is vain. Pure religion and undefiled is this: to visit the orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unspotted from seeking earthly gain.”

   In reading your path to atheism, I see a road not travelled. I hope that you will at least, in the interest of fairness, investigate this road less travelled, and it is this: take the compassion you learned in Buddhism, and reconsider it not as motivated by reincarnation and karma, but by the utter self-sacrifice of the Creator of everything, a sacrifice that also served to show the transience of it all, suffered and transcended to show the way to transcend as well and be reunited with that Creator who loves us enough to let us go should we so choose, but will do anything and everything *except* force us to believe in order to gain back our *real* love and trust.
   I know you have probably heard all this in Christianity, but go a step further and subtract all of the practices from the worship of gods and goddesses like you knew about in witchcraft, that were introduced into Christianity, and restore its original context. Notice I didn’t say subtract all similar *ideas*, because all religions have *ideas* that may be overlaid upon one another as similar, because they are all trying to satisfy the desire for something absolutely trustworthy transcending physical existence that crosses all cultures. The question is, when you focus on that absolute trustworthiness that transcends physical existence, and get rid of all the contaminations that come of human attempts to gain the physical advantage, what do you have?
   You may ask, “Why transcend physical existence? I’m satisfied with its limits”. I say, you never know if you’re satisfied with its limits until you have directly and fully-consciously confronted them. Even if a person were to somehow make peace with them oneself without some sort of self-deception or willful ignorance, there is absolutely nothing to guarantee that even a significant percentage of other people will participate in this worldview enough to make a decent life for even most of the people in the world, nothing to even give those in the hopeless situations inevitably created by the selfishness of even a few people hope that can allow them to enjoy life in spite of it all. As the saying goes, everyone has their price, and particularly if in their mind, this physical existence is all they have. And so much of the world, including the religious world, operates on this principle.

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