*** WARNING, RAMBLE ALERT *** Some serious questions Ive been asking piecemeal to several very serious and wonderful people. In my life Ive made (continue to) so many changes and choices, I find it hard to understand some things that are held on to so tightly by others. These are serious questions with a serious desire to know how people will actually answer them. Trouble is, I dont seem to be able to ask the questions without a great deal of hostility brewing up. I have left ALL proper nouns uncapped on purpose so as to not give any precedence to one over another. Please, if you feel a need to be hostile towards these questions, ask yourself why. You can still bombast me, just try to figure out why you actually feel a need to. ------ Help me to understand.... I have a few questions to any son or daughter of abraham (1). I do understand you all think you are different, but you all have common roots and all seem to feel your way is the right way. Im just trying to wind my way through some serious questions here. Do you see your deity as the same being as the person who worships in the same place as you? (Dont just blurt out yes, think instead of a person of different gender and separated by 20 years of age that you dont hang out with?) Is your deity the same deity as the person who is a follower of the same group that you follow from a different locality? (baptist from Tennessee as opposed to California, hebrew from New York as opposed to one in Israel?) Does your deity require the same ritual and ceremonies as it does of other groups? (genital mutilation [circumcision] symbolic cannibalism [eat this bread, my body...] symbolic death & birth [is sprinkling enough? who can perform?]) Does your deity convince you that you are not a part of this world and that you have the right to bend its resources for your good and the good of those who believe as you do? Do the others count? Is life on earth made for suffering? Are you banking on an idyllic afterlife? Is your deity really the same as all the others in your subgroup? If so, why all the differences in your approach? Does this deity tell your groups different things? Why is that? (Say if you are a fundamentalist evangelical, is your deity the same deity as a mormon? or if you are morman, how about the lutheran deity? A roman catholic deity as opposed to one of the orthodoxies?) Is your deity the same deity as: pick a branch that is different form yours judaic, islamic, xian? (If you follow a paulist xian model, is your deity the same as the shite practitioners? if you are a modern judaic practitioner, is elohim the same as allah or jesus?) Are all people equal in the eyes of your deity? Or does the deity have preferential positions for a specific gender, family group, hair style or skin pigmentation? Who has authority and how do they actually obtain it? Can just anybody start a subgroup or a whole new organization with their own set of unique dogma? Do you have a personal relationship with a deity that is not tangible? How does this relationship express itself? Do you converse with this deity silently, out loud, both? Do you follow the counsel your receive from your deity? Is this counsel the same as you would give yourself if you had thought of it? How does this counsel manifest itself? Would you be willing to give money or resources in compliance with your deities desires? Would you be willing to dedicate your underage children to the service of your deity? Would you be willing to die for your deity if asked? Would you be willing to kill? If it was someone else having a conversation and following the advice of their deity, and it was not your deity, how would you feel about that persons sanity or trustworthiness? Would you trust them to drive your car? Watch your kids? Control your local government? What if someone began to question their traditions and skeptically look at the world with different eyes, weigh the evidence and realize that their faith is misplaced, would you criticize them and call them weak unless they came to believe the same way as you do? Tons of questions and very few willing to honestly answer. I would actually enjoy having a conversation along these lines with anyone who could do so without becoming weird. ----- (1). Sons and daughters of abraham are for this purpose anyone who adheres or follows islam, judaism or any of the xian subgroups: roman catholicism, one of constatines groups [eastern, oriental, greek orthodox...] or any of the zillion offshoots of paulist thought to include all protestant, morman and 7th day folk.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 23:07:24 +0000
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