Freedom of choice

It can be said that, of all iterations, the Catholic Church is the one denomination that makes sense in its position on personal freedoms.
After all, many church fathers were well known philosophers. Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, and many, many more.
The Church's stand on freedom of choice is simple: if you choose to do wrong, knowingly, you are held to the consequences, both in life and by God. If you knowingly sinned, you cannot (or should not) participate in the Eucharist until you've asked forgiveness, paid your penance.
If we strip away the rituals, what we have is: choosing to do wrong and the consequences. The rest is, in my mind, an ancient tattoo of guilt.
When we turn away from organized religion, some think that there is no longer any morality available to themselves.
Without the church, how can we live a good life?
The answer is simple: we must know what is right and wrong. We learn this through basic, every day living. We make good choices and bad ones. Both have their own consequences. If we continue to learn from both and head ever closer to making better decisions, we are living morally.
It can be said that there are those incapable of being moral without God.
But this is simply not true. The false structure of religion suggests that there is more going on than meets the eye, but in actuality it is just a mirror of everyday life.
The decisions you make are yours alone. If you can focus on that, and realize then, that if you make bad choices, knowingly, the consequences are yours alone.
Don't fall into the trap of trying to be moral because of Heaven or because you want to be 'closer to God'. Make good choices because you want to be a better person. Find support structures in your life that can provide feedback, like friends and family, and then go out with a happy heart.
Religion becomes a burden to the soul, by preventing us from understanding what role we play in our own lives as we exercise the freedom to choose.

A note about purpose

I do not condone attacking people for their religious beliefs. I act on a principle that let's me be content to believe what I believe and let others do the same.
However, when confronted by believers who wish to convert or just correct, then we must be strong.
So, don't use my writings as an excuse to evangelize atheism or unbelief or whatever. My purpose here is to help find freedom from the belief in organized religion.

Breaking down the pillars of ontologies.

Almost every conversation I have ever had with my friends regarding faith has come up sharply on two points of belief: The Bible is the infallible Word Of God, like it or not, and we must stick with it; and/or God works in mysterious ways, so we must just accept things that don't make sense as Him being smarter and in more control than we can understand.

When it has come to the point of saying The Bible is infallible, there are plenty of sound arguments for why it is not infallible, even if we can stretch and say it is the story of God, and therefore we can say it may be the word of God.

Suffice it to say that much of what is in the Bible's Old Testament is historical, even though it is a shaded or tinted history based on a people's belief in an all-powerful God. We can look at the Old Testament and see that it is really just a mythology written down. If we strip all the supernatural parts, it's a beautifully collected history of the Israelite peoples.

The New Testament, also a history, is rather more slanted toward the story of Jesus and is more intent, in the first four books, on getting us to believe in the divinity of Jesus than anything else.

In the epistles, where Paul begins his evangelical mission to the Gentiles, we begin to see a change in the reality of the Jesus story and the beginning of a new religion. Several other apostles do the same and finally, it is all capped on the end with a revelation about how the world will end.

The Bible as it is today is a study in translation. Imagine if we could read The Bible in its original renderings or we could place ourselves with the many writers. I think that we would see many things differently. But my point here is simply to say we do not have any proof that the Bible is infallible except that the Bible says so itself.

The other reason sets us up with an excuse why we believe things that fall outside of the workings of The Bible: it's a mystery.

Both of these dependencies are often and should be subject to questioning. Usually the questioners are outside the faith. Even if they are from inside the faith, the questions are all answered with the same ontological argument.

But it is not enough to question these two positions. We have to know how to bring down the foundations. First and foremost we need to be willing to ask the questions.

I cannot think of a more difficult thing as a former believer, than facing a person with a logical and rational argument against my position. It is considered to be right on the edge of sinfulness to ask too many questions yourself. The whole point of faith is to believe in things without direct evidence. And while believing is powerful, belief without evidence is unusually precarious.

Secondly, we need to be willing to challenge claims made about the Word of God based on the same scrutiny that we would challenge any other book making similar claims.

The history of the Bible as we know it is fascinating. It does contain commands and decrees but so do many books. What we must decide and what many believers fail to do is whether we want to allow those commands and decrees to outweigh what we know about the history of the book itself.

If we decide that we want to believe, for example, that it is okay to stone adulteresses or homosexuals, then we need to follow all of the commands and decrees. We cannot "cherry pick". If the Bible is the infallible word of God then we must obey every command and decree. Otherwise we fall into a terrible logical problem. If we actively choose not to believe one command because we cannot, say, legally stone people, then we are failing God and any other attempt to prove infallibility is without purpose.

If, on the other hand, we can strip away the Holy Author's power and see that it is really just a book, then perhaps we can see it for what it really is: a stumbling block to freedom.

As we move forward the goal will be to unlearn things we've held onto, and to learn how to ask the kinds of questions which challenge the ontological arguments used by believers to stay in chains.

As you go into the day, remember that you alone have the ability to decide. Focus on those around you. Don't fear to feel exactly what you're feeling. It's okay to be you.
And it is the province of no other person to tell you what you can or cannot believe.

Walking in awe.

When I was little, I liked to lay in the grass and watch the clouds. Their magnificent size escaped me in place of their ability to assume the shapes of things I knew.

It wasn't until I was eleven and on a plane heading to California that I realized how enormous the clouds really were. How wonderful to be propelled higher, and look at them from above.

Now, as an adult, I see clouds for what they are. Water vapor in the atmosphere. For some years, the mundane things were simply back drop. I'd lost my ability to appreciate them as I once had.

One day, as we were driving out west into the mountains of North Carolina to look at a school for our son, I noticed the shadow of a cloud on the side of a huge mountain. It was the profile of a wolf. I glanced up at the cloud and saw a cloud, but the sun's light shining down on top of that cloud made the exact profile of a huge wolf.

My imagination was set on fire.

But who had conjured the wolf? Had the sun? Was it the handiwork of someone beyond my sight? Was it a message? I should have taken a picture as evidence to my sight, but my phone was charging.

Now, after a long time, I realize that it was my imagination, as Smokey Robinson sings, running away with me. There was no wolf. It was a trick of the light, a trick of my position and perspective. I hadn't seen a message from above but an optical illusion.

That's worrying. I had fallen for an illusion created by my own mind. In a sense, I had wanted to see a wolf. Perhaps it was my subconscious, or a delusion . The really worrying part was how readily my mind accepted what I saw. And also, how quickly it wanted to make what I saw a message from an unseen power.

Now, I say unseen power. What I mean is that, if I were superstitious, I may have taken it to mean any number of things. What it really meant was nothing at all.

Now, I can look up in the sky, be blown away by the beauty of it, be blown away by how my mind sees a giraffe or goose or George Washington, and I can say "Wow! Look how that cloud looks like ______." My friend can say, " Washington? More like a Frigidaire." I will be happy either way.

The change here is that I have accepted that the mind is capable of deceiving even itself. It wants to see messages where there are none. It wants to be contacted.

Now, some people will not discern.
They will say that the wolf or whatever they see in the clouds is God telling them something. They will say God wants them to save the wolves or something. They will allow themselves to be completely cowed by their own mind. And they will be so convinced that you will not be able to speak reason to them. This needing a larger message from above is so important to them they cannot let it go. It obsesses them.

So it goes. There are those who are so enthralled by this sort of thinking that it eats away at their ability so see the clouds and the forest and the mountain for what they are. And what they are are phenomena worthy of awe and wonder for their own right and not seen as messages from above.

This blog and its purpose are my writings which will try to do two things: break us away from the messages of illusion and get us to focus on the larger picture. It is designed to find awe and wonder in the world, not clouded by a desire to be contacted directly by unseen powers. In its writings I hope to help my readers, where our awe really needs to be applied.

And in the end, what I hope to accomplish is the realization that we can find wholeness within ourselves and be free to think for ourselves without fearing that we are in any way doing something wrong.

And hopefully, we can find freedom.