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I find it unnerving that the concept of God is, for many of us, inseparable from organized religion. It's like there is some copyright on God...For someone that was never raised around a specific religion, like myself, I find it second nature to formulate my own ideas about the matter, yet find myself struggling with accepting why not many else do. Unnerving. And yet, so very appropriate."
Lei, I always found it particularly bemusing why so few of us do. I've settled on the conclusion that it's either ignorance or a conscious choice to avoid the questions that so often weaken the foundations of belief.
Personally I'm more interested in exactly who Jesus was and what he did and said than in whether he liked to smoke the stickiest of the icky.
Being able to see for myself the true nature and powers of the supposed messiah would be a significant spiritual experience that would probably shift my views on a lot of things. There are only two problems with this:
1) If I(we) knew for a fact that, and I'm only using the christian faith as an example here, god or one of his aspects existed and exhibited godly powers, then faith would no longer be a part of the equation. Would this then mean a shift of spiritual focus to something else, with the universal acceptance of monotheism?
2) There's no real evidence that what we can perceive with our very limited human senses is a reliable source of information.
Given those two caveats, I tend to wonder if there's any real choice in belief systems. It would seem existentialism is the only one of which we can be somewhat certain. Even that, however, is based on the assumption of some merit to our sytems of analytics. Having had that thought, I immediately change my mind and begin to wonder if nihilism isn't the answer.
It seems to me that it's easier, in a lot of ways, and perhaps more advantageous to simply stick to what you believe in. Nonetheless, I'd still like to "know" the answers.
