Wednesday, January 15, 2014

My thoughts about religion

First of all let me begin by saying that this is in no way a post to try and convince people of one thing or another, I respect everyone's beliefs and it is my firm belief that everyone should respect the beliefs of others, with that said, here are my thoughts about religion:

Religion is a personal thing, I will never understand the arguments around religious beliefs because no matter what your beliefs are, there is no way on earth that you can prove you are 100% correct.  Let me explain a bit further... If we are talking with an atheist (someone that does not believe in any higher being) they cannot give me a 100% certainty that there is no higher being that exists, yes they can say that science has not found anything that states that there is a God, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, but just because they have not found anything it does not mean it doesn't exist... All it means is that they have not yet found evidence and maybe they will not find any, maybe one day they will but there is always the possibility.

On the other hand if you are a firm believer of God, then you cannot possibly prove to me that God exists, there is no certain way of proving God's existence, and of course those who follow Christianity will say well the Bible is proof that God exists; well let me tell you something, while I respect the Christianity's beliefs that the Bible is a sacred book, it is in the end just a book and nothing more than a book that was written years and years and years ago and it was written by mere humans who stated that they talked to God and that God told them all of this...

Let me add to that, that a human being even when an almighty God is talking to them and telling them what to write, they can and will make a mistake, or they can change what is being told to them... And if I were to add even more... The Bible has been interpreted in way too many ways, to make me think that those were not words from an almighty perfect God, because if they were then we would not be able to interpret them in as many ways or more than we do with the law.  It is that simple...

Now I could go on and on about why religion is a personal thing and it should not be tried to be force fed to other people, or even have argue about it to the point of creating a fight between two people,  because no one will win, it is a waste of energy and time, yes I love having a good conversation about how other people believe and what they believe in, I mean I like to hear their stories and I have been lucky enough to find people that are open minded enough to have a philosophical conversation about it, that they will listen to my view and I will listen to them and then we just learn something more about the other person.  But not many people are like that, there are too many people that get so worked up about it that wars were created, and still are being created over it.

Why? I will never understand why, I really wish I could understand some of the human behavior that makes absolutely no sense to me! ohh and if you ask me if God exists, yes to me God does exist, he/she exists because I believe in him/her not because anything else, I can't prove it and I won't ever attempt to, if someone asks me why I believe that God exists well I will give them what some call testimony, but I don't expect anyone to believe me, my testimony could be something that I made up in my mind or just things that happened out of chance.  However what I can really say is that my faith rests on the fact that I know that I might be wrong and I choose to believe in something bigger, and I have my own way of practicing it.

If anyone asks me if I pray, I will answer no, I don't pray, why? because if I believe that there is a higher being that is watching over us, if this being only wants whatever is good for us then it does not matter how much I pray, I will be put in whatever path I need to be in order to get to the point where I need to be, and it will be the correct path, and even if I choose to go the other way, then it will probably take me a little longer to get to the right one but in the end I will be in the right one... Even if it is a path where I encounter sickness and a bit of suffering, even in those times when the darkness is bigger than anything else, if I believe that there is a higher being watching over me and making sure I do ok and go where I want and learn what I need to, and if that higher being is completely and absolutely in charge then it does not matter how much I pray, it won't change anything, so why pray?

I tell you what I do though, I listen, I go into my own world and I listen to what a lot might call your inner voice, others will call it intuition, others will say is God talking to you, others will say it's your guardian angels or a messenger of God, whatever it is though I listen to it, most times I can listen to it very clearly and I am able to go ahead and follow the path I am being told and I have to admit that when I do exactly as my inner voice tells me, all ends up well....

So to end this wonderful post, I will never understand people arguing over religion, I will never understand people swearing that the Bible is such a sacred book because in the end it is just a book, I will never understand people getting irritated by other people believing in things that they cannot prove and I will never understand why everyone believes that they have and that they are absolutely sure that their theory is the only correct one and that there is no space for any error for any other theory, just their own...

Thursday, January 2, 2014

Who is in control?

I woke up today with a weird thought, you are not in control....
At first I was like what? of course I am, I am in control of my life, the decisions I make, I am the one that decides where I am going to go next and what I am going to do next... Then I kept thinking how much of a lie that is, because while I am able to make my own decisions, while I am able to say hey I am going to go left rather than going right, I cannot possibly control the outcome of my decisions, yes I can do whatever I want but in the end I am not really in control of the outcome.
Some people will say that God is in control, this force that they believe in, the almighty and powerful, the one that sees it all, whether or not that being exists is up for debate among many people, most will argue that he exists because there is a book that specifically tells stories of his existence, a book that speak his words and what he intended for us to do.  It is a weak argument to state that a being of that nature exists only because a book says so... yeah the book is too many years old but that just means that someone somewhere along the lines made sure that it was passed on and kept in a way that part of it (because what the churches have in that book is not all of it) was saved enough to move masses of people in one direction, to give people something to believe in.
Personally I don't know if God exists or not, I don't know if it is a God or Goddess, I don't know if it is just a plain ball of energy or just a spirit, I choose to believe though that there is something greater, and this something greater is not good or bad, but has the capability of guiding us towards whatever it is that deep inside we truly want, that which we don't tell anybody, that which we don't even realize that we want.  And within that thought I am fully aware that it might be a fallacy, that there might be absolutely nothing else out there guiding us, that this is all we are and that there is nothing greater than us.  Most people won't consider those thoughts, they are afraid because one book says to them that this supreme being does exist and therefore they are to follow the spirit's words, so a lot do, they read the words and they go on their life pretending that they are doing everything exactly the way it was intended, reading the Bible every night and going to church every Sunday.  I don't read the Bible, I don't believe those words come straight from this higher being, I think they came from a group of men trying to explain their existence, trying to figure out what is right and what is wrong, a book of stories that started the rules of society, rules that have the power to change because society as a whole changes every year, with every new discovery, with every new generation we all grow and change our views even in a small amount, no matter who you are.
But back to who is in control... If there is a supreme being that watches us all and that knows what is best for us and guides us into that path, that same being cannot make us go to that path, we can see all the signs, we can go through all the motions, we can do exactly what we are told, that being can come down and say if you go right you will encounter chaos so please go left and we can still choose to go right instead of left so the being is not truly in control just as much as we are not, because yes we can also say we are going to go left and follow the path that is given to us but when we go left someone else decided that they were not going to go through the path they were given and suddenly they cause chaos in our path.
Because of all the variants in life, because we are truly not alone even when we think we are, we are not in control of anything, we have power over absolutely nothing, I know some people will look at this and think hey you know what that is the most negative way of seeing life, that just takes away from the things you want, if we are not in control then what is the point to keep going? Wanting to be in control of everything is where the negativity come from, why? because it's a fallacy, we are not in control, and when we believe we are and things don't go our way then we get upset and we get stressed out.  A good example of that is time, the idea that we can control time merely by measuring it, so we wake up at a certain time everyday because we have to be at work or school or start our day by a certain time so then we give ourselves every day a list of things we have to do and every day we say this is what I will accomplish today, I am in control and I can do it.  But then it so happens that even though the day before everything seemed fine and everything was going according to plan your kid wakes up and he/she is sick, suddenly the to-do-list has one more thing that needs to be added to it, either you have to take care of your child during the day which might also mean you have to take them to the doctor and so the whole list changes, things are added that will take time away from the day and others will just not get accomplished, why? because on your way to the doctor there was an accident and you got stuck in traffic, then the doctor woke up late, because even though the doctor does not have any children of their own, they cannot control the fact that even though they wanted to get to work on time and attend to their patients in a timely manner, their power went out in the middle of the night and their alarm clock did not go off because it was reset and now it had the wrong time.
We are in control of nothing except our own thoughts.  There is a quote by Rene Descartes: "Except for our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power." I guess that is where I am getting at, we can try all we want, we can tell ourselves all we want that we have the power to make things happen the exact way we want them to happen, the fallacy with that thought is that there are a lot of other factors in play, we don't live in a world where we are the only ones that exist, there is not just other human beings but there are also other living things that can affect our lives, whether it is in a very small way or in a big way; to add to that we have other forces, natural forces that come into play and can change anything we do in a matter of seconds.
So are we really in control? No, we are not and the sooner we accept this, the more aware of it we become, the less stressful our lives will be, because if we are not really in control of anything then when things don't go our way, it is not our fault, it is not anyone's fault, it's just the way things are, and there is no reason to stress over it, there is no reason to get upset, only a reason to smile and then keep on going because the next step you take might not go the way you want it, but it might turn out to be the best thing that happened.