To start, I don’t have a place where assistance can
be summoned from outside of one’s self. I’ve got no one to pray to and no
supernatural force from which strength can be pulled. This isn’t a problem because
I feel that everything a person needs can be found within. If I need
inspiration I can just look at all the accomplishments of humanity and know
that I am a part of that. If humans can go into space, I think I can deal with any of my troubles. We’re all chocked full of potential, and belief in
yourself is the best help a person can have. This system requires independence
and personal responsibility and those are good traits to encourage in my opinion. If you do need a little extra help, hopefully other people can supply what you need.
Speaking of other people, I lack the
community aspect that organized religions offer. I have no set place to go,
ceremonies to perform, or group to associate with. A joiner I am not,
so I don’t feel much of a loss. Individual and unique views are a good thing in
my opinions, and I come to most of my conclusions through self-reflection and
an ongoing quest to reduce my ignorance. Some may like to delegate these tasks out, but I like to keep it in house. Without a group it’s hard to develop an
“us vs them” mentality, which can help reduce conflicts. I do get a little
scandalized when I hear someone doesn’t believe in evolution or something
like that, but I try not to hold it against them. A generally subjectivist
philosophy helps here, since I believe there is no absolute right answer to any
question. A variety of different opinions is just more interesting.
I mean, it’s hard to have a good discussion about a topic in which everyone
agrees.
On a bit of a side not, I dislike how grand many places of worship are. When your building is funded by charity, I would think it best to keep the cost down. I understand that the point is to inspire awe and a sense of grand scale, but I think that is a job for the ideas and not the buildings. I also have this objection to government buildings.
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| This is why North Dakota has my favorite capital building |
Nobody is imbued with any special
status in my view. I have no priests, saints, martyrs, messiahs, castes,
saved, or damned. There is no supernatural metric I hold to by which people can
be judge as better or worse. Mental gifts of physical talents can separate
people and everyone has developed different skills, but these can be
surprisingly insubstantial. Money and social connections can also give
advantage, but in the end all of these things are so often borrowed and traded
that they aren’t that hard to come by. An individual’s past can also have
causal effects on their future, but these are by no means always rational.
Enlightenment is an idea I almost adopt, but it implies an endpoint which is
something I don’t have. Collecting knowledge and answering questions are goals
of mine, but this is a process that will always be ongoing. I can’t imagine
there will be a point where science finishes its journey. I also have a near
saint like regard for many great minds of the past, but this is limited. Isaac
Newton is an idol of mine and I have tremendous respect for his ideas, but I
also understand that he was kind of a jerk. People are always just people.
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| Smart guy, but he didn't always play well with others |
No book or writings can be used to
show or record my beliefs. You might think that these blog posts are meant to
collect and hold my feelings, but I view it as more of a brief expression of my
thoughts at one moment in time. Everything in here is subjective; both in the fact that I don’t expect everyone to agree and that I don’t even expect my own
opinions to remain the same. The point is to inspire thought, not to answer
questions. Making any idea solid seems like a mistake, because it might need to
be changed when more perspective is gained. You never know when the next
paradigm shift might happen and all that you believe gets thrown into a new light.
That
was enough self-indulgent introspection for now, so I’ll wrap things up. I’m
probably guilty of just using religion as a convenient catchall to cram a bunch
of my theories into one place, but it worked well enough (This all started as a parody of other religions call Peteism, where everything was done “for the love of Pete”, but I decided it
wasn't very funny). Each idea probably could have been explored
separately, but I’ll save that for my giant unreadable philosophical book that
I will hopefully never write.
