Wednesday 28 February 2007

My Favorite Religion.

I am a hugely sceptical man when it comes to religions, complete bullshit is how I would describe the teachings of everything from the christian to the muslim faiths. While I respect other peoples rights to believe in whatever fantasy they wish I believe the world would be a much better place without any of them.

Of course there is one religion on which I place a fair amount of respect.

Buddhism.

This religion focuses not on the devine but the self, it teaches inner focus and self control. It does not even mention heaven and hell, miracles or any of that bullshit. Of course mans incessant need for teh dive has spawned offshoots, the well known buddha was born of a lotus blossom has been mistaken by many westernised buddhists as a sign of a divine buddha. However most (Sane) people have remembered how poetic people can be and would like to remind everyone that lotus blosom, flower, rose etc have been regular names to compliment women. Rose is more western, where rosey cheeks have been the fasion for many years, jsut as in the past pale faces where revered along the eastern countries (Hence lotus blossom).

Buddhism is a religion which trains people to think, critically about the world, to ignore outside influences, and to focus the mind on one thing. It also provides guidence on meditation, similar to focused thinking but clearing the mind completely. These two are truely interlinked as one helps train the other, and with the state of mind provided by this some of the greatest philosophers, though relatively unknown have come from the buddhist faith.

What interests me is did any other religions start like this. Christianity, jewish and muslim faiths are very hard to disect, despite being the largest the are also basically the same religion, each twisted by its base countries to help their rulers control their populace.

The Jewish human christ, the Christian Divine christ and the Muslim Mohammed are but smoe of the differences in the scriptures. So what should I compare these to?

Paganism is out, its from paganism that these religions spawned

Wikka? was created in the early 1900's by a convicted sex offender, he created the wikka religion ina way that brainwashed hundreds of women with promises of power and magic andto performing deviant sex acts with and for him. There are now thousands of young girls, mostly 12-16 who claim to practice this, little knowing its history and following books made to make money from them.

Infact one of the most promising religions is that of the Hindus, very smiilar to buddhism in principles of yoga and meditation but the hindo religion reffers to three (As far as im aware) dieties. Vishnu, Shiva and Brahmā, which are described more as entities of the same god. In that respect it is one of the few branches of religion where people choose which to follow, and yet there is no competition between them. However, during the start of the religion however it is well noted that there was no God related to Hinduism, this school of thought was called Samkhya. Along with many indian religions the concept of Re-incarnation is central to Hinduism, quite a clever move, since in christianity heaven is far away and imagined, yet on earth you see daily people with a better life. Reincarnation offers you that life if your a good person on this one.

Hindus seem to me to be the best religious group to highlight the crossover from philosophical beliefs to religious.

Of course this does not cover how the Jewish>Christian>Muslim faith came about, since the Christianity and the Muslim faith sprung from a mix of pagan and Jewish religion, but Judaism itself is the first roots of a Monotheistic faiths ever recorded. It is hard to decipher where Judaism became a religion, it is in my opinion spawned from the Laws that where created when the Israelites fled from Egypt during the exodus, A time when their people would have been much in turmoil and in need of fresh hope.

I must make it very clear right now, in my opinion any belief in a Deity or religion is formed because of a persons lack of control in life, a religion is the base of the ignorant to feel the chains of oppression they encounter in everyday reality are insignificant, and that it is the divine powers that control everything equally that will make the final judgement. The religions are usually formed by men wanting to control a populace and spotting this weakness, it is human nature to take advantage of weakness in others, and religious doctrine distributed to the masses is no different.

I believe the human race does require some form of moral code, some kind of power to stop the known evils man can commit. However I don't think religion is the answer in our progressing world, Buddhism is an enlightened faith, one that relies on faith in ones self, once everyone opens their mind to the repercussions of their actions upon the world, and the actions this will bring back upon themselves I believe a lot of the human races problems will disintegrate.

Karma is a fantastic way of describing things, though a little too paranormal for me. While I do not believe in any guiding force, balancing everything out equally I do believe that people who lead good lives and influence the world in a positive way will always lead the happier lives. The world has suffered from many wars, much violence and abundance of hate. Wouldn't things be so much easier if the people doing this for themselves stood back, just for a few minutes and thought why?

If everyone stood back and thought, would I want this to happen to me?

One thing is for certain, the religions in the world are dieing, people are discarding god, but also discarding the morals provided. A new kind of religion needs to appear, not one based on divinity or deities, one based on people, morals and peace. Competition of course has to exist, but competition currently has left behind morals, if people slow down because of moral implications somebody else rushes ahead. The only way it would work is if everyone switched at once.

I believe there is another way.

A way that the world can be brought back into shape, where religion can be discarded and people can value a karma like system.

Maybe one day.

1 comment:

Lenoxus said...

Well put. Being an atheist myself and sometime-admirer of Buddhism, there are still a few issues I have with karma. The main one is that it implies that there is no real need for people to work toward justice, because everything will always balance to what it should be no matter what. Another problem is that it adds what should be an unnecessary self-focused motivation to acts of kindness, which should be done for their own sake.