An ex-Muslim friend of mine posted a chart that supposed to show what a person’s religion should be based on just s tiny handful of random criteria:
It’s meant to be laughed at. It’s just a meme, after all, posted by a guy with tongue fully in cheek at anything at all to be said about religion. Yet a lot of people responding to it found it uncannily accurate. It had, indeed, actually pinpointed their varying religions.
It amuses me that Atheism is included here when, in fact, it’s not a religion at all but rather the lack of one but that this lack of religion requires not believing in a god. I just don’t know how to take it is all.
I mean, how many gods do I worship? None really, because I believe we are all a part of the energy from whence we all come and hence are not separate from it. There’s no need to worship what we are so much as simply respect its existence. Yet I also believe in the existence of the many beings who have been called god(s) or claimed to be. I just don’t think they need or even deserve worshipping.
I’m not about to worship anything that demands blood sacrifices, sends souls to infinite torture in a hell it created for those who commit finite crimes, shortens human lifetimes, demands and exchange of actual independent thought for mere faith in whatever it wants to feed us, is jealous of others of its kind, etc. I have no use for such beings. But there is plenty of reason to believe these beings have existed in history or pre-history and that plenty of humans have either rewritten their doings and/or emulated them… and it’s NOT a good thing. It’s the stuff a lot of wars and suffering have been made of.
I know about the Elohim and Anunaki of old, the ancient alien imperialists who bio-engineered early hominids to make servants for themselves, smart enough to make technical decisions but dumb enough to not challenge their masters too much. There were many other species developed and destroyed before our kind finally came along.
Even so, it wasn’t all bad.
They had their agenda. We eventually had our own and I’m glad we got the chance. Natural evolution might have taken us so long that we not have had nearly so interesting a journey as the one they inadvertently sent us on.
We create robots and have made our own forays into cloning, hybridization, and even the creation of rudimentary life. We could, in fact, now do a lot of what they did. Would it make us gods if we did? I think not.
What is a “god” or “God?” Seems to me it is as inaccurately a word used as “atheist” is. Many (not all) religionists will tell you the “God” is the prime Creator and that “gods” are the elemental governors of such and “demi-gods” the hybrids between humans and gods, often culture heroes or avatars. And then the point to obviously physical fellow beings as the creators of all things.
No matter the level of their relative technical advancements at the time, I’m just not buying it.
But I digress. In fact, I suspect I may have lost my original direction with this.
Atheism is not a religion. It’s the lack thereof, the refusal to believe unprovable religious concepts merely on hearsay and also, inarguably, the lack of a belief in any kind of a god/God. Jury out on that one as it were.
But what am? I’m learning all the time. Like any self-respecting atheist, I refuse to be fettered or defined by random traits or choices of the confines of religion or its rules. Yet I believe in Prime Source/Creator and I know that we are all eternal. Souls are energy. All things are energy. Energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be reformed or refined.
Also, I like both bacon and humus. I even like them together, love black cats and find Wiccans appealing for their acceptance of magic but see no reason to adopt that religion or any other simply because I like something about it. Same for reincarnation. It feels true enough to me. I do not need to verify this via any particular religion; it’s just something I accept as natural.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: We’re Prime Source first, then souls, personalities, humans, genders, races, ethnicities, and then maybe a religion and national. MAYBE. But I don’t think any but the first four are strictly necessary. Just saying.
This chart was not made for anyone like me. Does it work for you?
Ampbreia's space 