Sunday, December 28, 2014

Dogma Versus Opinion

Religion as a series ideas, dogmas, rules that reside in our heads cause wars.  Why?  Well, if I let you have your religious ideas and I have mine, then religion morphs into opinion.  You say it is more about faith?  No one wants to have faith in an opinion.  So their "faith" has to have a good dose of certainty.  The way to have certainty is not on the level of opinion.  It is on the level of I am right, so you must be wrong.  To feel better about my being right, I need to get rid of you or convert you.  Christians could not live alongside Jews so we got rid of them, drove them off, punished them or tried to force convert them.  Few people, for whom religion is about beliefs in dogma, want to go through all their religion requires, unless they believe with some certainty that they are right.  How do you know that Jesus rose from the dead or not?  You study both sides and then decide.  You call it faith.  Those who disagree call it opinion, and then you fight.  On the other hand those who have deep personal experiences of the Holy Presence, The Light, The Peace, they don't war.  Contemplatives do not fight with one another.  They know. Experience knows.  This is why I don't teach catechism.

2 comments:

  1. Would you not fight for social justice or for the life of an unborn child?

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  2. I would take the side of the unborn and try to give reasons or things to think about in my view. I would not use law.

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