Religion

Had a good weekend out camping.  Helps the brain work.

Thought a little about religion when my wife mentioned an unusual dream she had.

Keywords / phrases to consider:

Jihad
Conversion
Repentance
Confession
Communion
Born Again
Evangelical
Spreading the good news.
Commandments
Laws
Scripture
Tenants

I want to throw all this shit out the window.

I really feel that even the religion that has formed my beliefs is full of shit.  What good do these things in reality provide for anything?  If you actually read the books of religions with a critical eye and mind, you will find they are full of things that are totally counter to what is taught by religions, and with no way to prove these things one way or another, they take advantage of the masses claiming "the devil" is saying these things.  Then there's the alternative religious movement of modern day, a sad knee jerk of conforming to non conformity, controlled by it's opposition of modern organized religion.

But there's also a reality I am learning.  What people make religion out to be and what it really should be are very different things.  Resisting religion because others make it shitty is just plain being controlled by them.  I've let other people destroy all aspects of good things I feel for what I believe.  Only person who can change that is me.

I don't think I can ever stop having a distaste for commercialized holidays...   or the sheeple of the world.  But I also can rise above that and live my life the right way regardless of them.

I sat to think about this today some while I replied to my son's teacher on some issues he was having at school.  We are talking about rewarding him if he's good, and I addressed to her my only concern:  how will he be perceived in class by others, being rewarded for being bad but improving whereas they were good to begin with.

It left me challenging every modern day teaching I've heard so far of the garden of eden and the prodigal son.  Read them both carefully and one is simply a warning of the life you can expect when you step away from ignorance, and the other that when you stray and come back, there is often more worth to you than someone who was complacent. Reality here shows me that it's actually MORE valuable to wander away and question, yet find yourself in a moral place than it is to follow mindlessly.  Yet if churches taught this, a> would their sheeple believe them?  b> would their sheeple have the balls to really think and act on these things?

In the end, I hope that my son's constant challenging of my and other's authority pays off in him growing as a person later.  Right now that matters far more to me than any esoteric debate on religion and control, and I think God would want us focusing on how we live our lives, not how we waste our time debating and controlling.