Religion

With the run up to Christmas, known to Christians as advent, I've been thinking a lot about my religion and the fact that I don't believe everything in the Bible with just blind faith.

I know that many religious groups demand that you accept the Bible in totality, without question but I'm sorry that's just not possible because if you read the Bible from start to finish, it contradicts itself.  St Paul managed to contradict himself within one paragraph at one point.  Granted that was a bit about the rights of women and widows to remarry and St Paul always seems to go to pieces when ever someone mentions women.  Makes me wonder what he was afraid of.

So what do I believe?

I believe in the loving father, the Lord God Yahweh.  I believe in his son, my brother, Jesus Christ.  Before anyone starts phoning the men in white coats consider this - it says in several places that those who believe in God are sons and daughters of God.  Therefore, by the rules of language, Jesus, another son of God, is the brother of believers.

I believe that the soul is the immortal part of us, the part that goes on beyond the death of the body.  In short I believe the soul is the part that was created in God's own image, the energy that echoes the pure, wild energy that was there before the Big Bang and the creation of this universe.

I also believe that you don't have to be a Christian to go into Heaven.  I'm sorry but that is not the act of a loving father, that is the act of a fat old tyrant.

If God wanted us to be all the same he'd would have made us all black or all white or all sky blue pink with yellow dots.

That and it doesn't take a genius to work out that the finite cannot contain the infinite and the mortal cannot fully comprehended the immortal.  Think about it.  Could you bare to live through all the years from the rise of the Egyptian Empire to the rise of the British?  Humankind cannot do it and the only creatures we can image walking this earth through all those years are vampires.  Does that tell you something about how small our minds are.

So how can a human fully comprehend the fullness of God?  We can't.  So perhaps it's time we realised that when Christians say that 'God is this' and the Jews say 'God is that' and the Muslims say that 'Allah is this', we are like the three blind men all grasping different bits of the elephant.  The blind man who says that the elephant is like a rope is correct and the one who says the elephant is like a pillar is also correct and the ones who says that the elephant is like a fan is correct as well.  They are all right but they are all grabbing different parts of the elephant, which is why none of their descriptions match up.

Wouldn't you think the three blind men are stupid for going to war over the fact that they all describe the elephant differently?  Then how come we think it's alright to go to war over the different descriptions of God?

I believe that God is a loving father who doesn't care if each of his children calls him by a different name.  I believe that God doesn't care if you call him Father, Dad, Daddy, Dadda, Pappa, Pop or Abba (the Hebrew word for Daddy).  I also believe that he loves his children who don't know what to call him but spend their lives doing their best to make this world a better place when they leave it than when they arrived in it.  Because if you read the Bible that's all Jesus asked us to do - 'love one another as I have loved you'.

What is more I couldn't tell you where this belief comes from because it's not in the Bible.  All I can say is that I was attending a Bible study group that started on the whole 'Only Christians get into Heaven' reel and everything inside of me began screaming 'NO!'  Everything inside of me said that they were wrong.

What this force that tells me what I believe is, I don't know.  All I can say is that some where in either Isaiah or Jeremiah it says along the lines of:

"No more will they build God Schools.
No more will they tell each other
This is the Word of God or that is the Word of God.
For I will write my words upon their hearts
And they will listen to their hearts
And they will hear me."