My Religion Part Three: And It Was Good

 There are a few things that I don’t have covered with my quasi-religion. Most of them have to do with my antisocial tendencies, and subjective beliefs. Let's take a look shall we.

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. 

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.

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.