Monday, October 17, 2011

a counterproductive spiritual aid?

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If I had to guess (and were drinking beer at the same time), I think I would guess that what passes for religion in the world is based in uncertainty and doubt.

Farmers along the Nile were never certain when the source of their sustenance, the river itself, might flood their fields and leave them hungering. Death was a mystery whose hidden realms needed defining. Life came from the very sun that could fry a man to a crisp. What was strong yesterday became weak today and vice versa. And so on and so forth.

And uncertainty or doubt cried out for an explanation, a plan, a celestial hierarchy, a hole card that would dispel doubt and uncertainty.

But the odd thing about the explanations that religions -- the concoctions aimed at dispelling doubt -- contrived is that almost without exception they required belief. And belief by its very nature does not dispel doubt. It imposes doubt.

And if this is so -- as my beer pitcher tells me it is -- then what religion lays out is a system by which to impose still more doubt ... on top of the doubt that existed before religions attained liftoff.

Check it out. See if it's true. And if it is true, then reconsider the fervent beliefs that offer not so much relief and release as they do an even more uncertain world.

If belief merely aggravates what people sought to escape in the first place, how useful could it be?
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