I forgot how hard it can be to talk to people about God. And before I get into more of that, let me give a more general idea of what I mean. I mean spirituality, generally. I think of God as "God" because that's the name I know God by. I'm perfectly okay with different beliefs and different religions.
I think if people wanted to be more honest about spirituality, they would be far more open to the different experiences we each have in relation to how we come to know God. It does not make sense to me that people choose to be so closed-minded to other beliefs. At the same time, I understand that some of the "teachings" we receive will tell that "our god is the true god" and such. My problem with that is that it shouldn't block us from knowing other stories and understanding them. It shouldn't block us from finding the common ground between religions because it's obvious there is much of it.
I think this is the biggest issue with organized religion. I had mentioned this in a previous post about "Blaming God," that I can understand God being jealous (or angry) of people creating their own nonsense to worship. That makes sense to me. But I think people get the wrong idea about that idea of God being a jealous god. It seems to me that people don't realize this is specific to the creations of our own.
I can't help but believe and want to believe that there is so much more to God than just being a single entity. For example, even in the Christian words, God is a "holy trinity," the father, the son, and the holy ghost. I love that. I think it's cool and I never really understood it when I was younger. I struggled with understanding why or how one person could be three different things in the sense of this being both the father and the son. That is a bit odd but spiritually I think I understand it and I like it.
I had forgotten why I even started writing this. Years ago, I had my first discovery in a sense of what it was like to argue with people that simply not only don't want to understand your point of view but flat out refuse to. I'm not innocent of this. We're all stubborn in certain ways and thoughts. We know what we know and once we know it, it's hard to learn differently. Mostly because if you're like me, you need to see to believe. I think most of us are like that but we learn to become that way after having been through the process of believing what we were told and finding out we were lied to or mislead.
Betrayal is hard to deal with. There's a lot of pain inflicted. It's an emotional mind fuck. Not just on a personal level with who you believed, but the realization that so much of what you knew or thought for your whole life was a lie. There are plenty of things we can recognize as lies and bullshit. It's the truest deception that is most painful when revealed. And it's hard to let go of and get past, usually feeling impossible. There are certain things that only time can heal. And the horrible thing is that time can be incredibly long, it can take literally decades.
So, trying to talk about God with people is really hard. I mean non-believers specifically. And that is exactly who I want to talk to about spirituality. Not because I want to convince them, but because I find it really hard to understand the outright refusal and not wanting to know a wonderful thing. Another thing I had mentioned in my previous post about "Blaming God" is that I know for a fact that God exists. What I don't know is how exactly God works and how many there might actually be. I like to believe there are multiple gods with one supreme or whatever. I have what I think of as a sensible understanding of that.
I'm a fan of Greek mythology and the gods that represent different emotions and feelings. I like to think of it as all of them combined form into the ultimate God or whatever. Like Voltron, I guess, as well as the holy trinity.
So, generally speaking, I have no issue at all with different religions. It is possible that with certain organized religions, there would be a point where I would think it's ridiculous. Much like any organized group or system of any kind. That's how you get into cults and such as well. Manipulation by evil is when things get messy. Manipulation and evil should not convince people that something isn't real just because it has bad representation, but that is exactly what happens. Instead of recognizing manipulation for what it is, people will blame the target of that manipulation, organized religion is the biggest example I can think of.
Something a lot of people seem to forget, even Christians, is that part of the teachings is that we are the church. We as individuals carry the spirit of God with us if we choose to and if we choose to represent it properly. We do not need to be organized for God or gods to exist. Whether we gather or not, we didn't create god. This seems like such a stupid thing to have to say and maybe it's cuz I'm uneducated and don't know how to properly say it. I don't know how to say it better than that.
Plenty of non-believers would immediately insist, "of course God is man's creation. We made it up." But that's just nonsense to me. It's as nonsensical as the Big Bang Theory in which rocks collided in space and accidentally created life. Talk about made up. Holy crap how can anyone believe that? I remember one day I had thought, "well if I sweep up these dust balls and the dust balls collide they could make a living universe!" as a joke.
I can't help but believe that if so many religious types of people weren't complete assholes and judgmental pieces of crap that it would be easier to understand their points of view. This is another thing I am not innocent of. When it comes to spirituality, I'm not super quick to jump the gun of judging others. Things I tend to "judge" are just flat out stupidity and such. For example: racism and sexism. These are completely stupid to me and I do judge people for it. And of course, that's from my own perspective so I'm not always going to be right. Duh. I love learning.
So, the problem with learning... I don't remember when I first realized this, it might have been in my mid or late thirties, that even as we are educated from a very young age, we are taught in a way that is meant to close our minds to outside thought processes. We are taught that what we know will be right at all times. From my perspective, we grow up this way and because of how we are educated, no matter what we think about, it has to be "right." I don't know if the actual intention was to close our minds. We do learn certain systems that we can agree on and understand. The way we learn it means that anything else will automatically be wrong.
That's one thing I always think is funny and interesting about scientific theory specifically. Math seems pretty straight forward. We as a society don't constantly come up with new ways of how 2+2=4 or whatever. But science is a constant learning experience. That's why so many things in science and even medicine are referred to as "theory." But, as mentioned, the way we're educated ends up making people insist that these theories are fact even though they're constantly being updated and evolving because the "mysteries" of life are quite amazing.
So, one of the hardest things that I think we go through is struggling with the need to be "right." We may not even realize it, you know?
The main reason I started writing this is because I want to talk about God more. I want to and know I can find common ground with agnostics specifically. Atheists are insanely stubborn and I get that cuz I'm also stubborn. It's really hard to talk about God because of what organized religion has done. It's not all horrible but it seems like most of it is. It sucks. I had more thoughts that I wanted to write and more reasons as to why I wanted to write this but my beer buzz is super kicking in now. Maybe I'll come back and write a thing about why and how I became an alcoholic in 2020. I think that'd be obvious but I could share my own personal bullshit and all that ya know.
I'm sorry to end this now. It's kind of abrupt and I know there's so much more in relation to all the things I said here but I have to stop. My brain is mostly dead atm which I like and don't like.
I love God and I wish the world wasn't so shitty and stupid.
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