.RANDOM RAMBLING ON RELIGION
. I don’t know that I chose Christianity as much as Christianity chose me. My Grandparents were avid church goers and so were my parents. So, in my early pre-teen years, going to church and getting saved felt like a foregone conclusion. I accepted this path as the “only way” to true salvation and entry into heaven upon death.
. When I was 13 years old, a childhood friend and I went bike riding in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and met a kid who asked to play with us. After playing for a few hours, we began to have a conversation about God. After an in depth conversation, we led our new friend in reciting the Sinner’s Prayer. The Sinner’s Prayer is a confessional acknowledgment of sin and the request for forgiveness by Jesus Christ. This is a seminal step in a longer formative process of becoming a Christian. After this prayer, I believed that I had earned my way into the kingdom of God because I recruited another soldier into the army of the Lord.
. Regardless of how problematic and flawed my own decision making and impulsive behaviors were, I grew up believing that getting people “saved” was not just my duty, but my obligation. This was often phrased as “gaining territory for the Kingdom.” I never really contemplated this language and its implications historically. Until now.
. At this point in my life, I have travelled to every continent except Antarctica and studied many of the local customs, practices and cultures. I’ve also interrogated the effect that organized religion has had on humanity and the institutional traumas that come as a result of systems that emphasize hierarchy over humanity. And while it has been incredibly scary to interrogate my own faith and practices for fear that everything I have based my belief system on is foundationally flawed, it has been a liberating exercise. While I no longer try to make sense of any faith that does not make sense, in many regards, I am indeed, “saved.”
. There’s a very popular quote that says, “man has made God in his own image” that I believe to be true. As I contemplate the very concept of the Creator of the Universe and a Creator that exists outside of the space and time continuum, I cannot fathom what it would take to understand and know such a vast concept, let alone being. Maybe such an infinite existence is too expansive for a finite human mind to truly grasp. So every limit that humans place on the Creator must be based on the limitations of human existence. And as we often do with one another, we place a box or framework of categorization around a concept so that our limited minds can have a consistent reference point.
. And so the human ego needs a God that it can understand in order to explain the concept of existence. But if God exists outside of our framework for understanding, then the very term “existence” does not truly provide a lens into how we came to be. Such limitations are why there has never been a human explanation for how the Creator came to “exist.” And so some religious exercises can simply be an exercise of the human ego. But the human ego is only a superficial layer of the human self. But getting closer to the Creator would seemingly be an exercise in removing the layers that exist between humanity and the Creator. Simply stated, getting closer to the Creator should be a practice in removing ego. Removing ego is not a practice in “Kingdom building” or “gaining territory,” as these are exercises of the human ego.
The ego, as an understanding of personal identity, does not seemingly exist in death. And so, it would appear logical that we exist in our truest form, in death. Or, we exist in our truest form outside of our human existence. Which might make the case for the belief that humanity is simply a phase in our collective existence, where the goal is to kill ego so that we can get closer to the Creator.
This does not sound much like preaching or teaching to one another. This sounds more like listening and helping one another listen to each other. This does not sound like religion. This does not sound like anything that I know exists. Such limitations are why there has never been a human explanation for how the Creator came to “exist.”
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