Here is the Introduction:
Introduction
First, this book is meant to be
an optimistic work. I hope you end up feeling it was a very positive
experience. The beginning of the text certainly will be construed as
negative though and heretical to many. My apologies in advance for
that. If you succeed wading through the first couple of sections,
there is the “pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” so to
speak. This text utilizes the “military boot camp” strategy that
has been used by textbooks for hundreds of years of breaking down
assumed current conventions (Parts One and Two) and building up a new
framework to learn from in Part Three.
You may be wondering why I am
writing this book. It's bound to be controversial, right? Am I some
sort of raging atheist who sues the government over crosses on public
land (see the Mount Soledad cross controversy on Wikipedia.com)? No.
In fact, I was raised a Christian. I was raised in the Church of
Religious Science and have roots in the Church of Christ, the
Methodist church, and, most recently, the Episcopal church. I still
believe Jesus is a great prophet (more on that later). I didn't
convert to Islam, Buddhism, Scientology (although I've some minor
dealings with them in the past) or anything like that and, on some
level, I even still consider myself a Christian (though that's kind
of silly, as we'll discuss later).
I don't plan on bashing your
religion. Religion has its good and bad points, just like everything
else in the universe. I plan on keeping the focus of the book fairly
narrow. My premise is simple: “What religions, if any, support a
true Universal God (an omnipresent, omnipotent, all-loving creator of
the universe)? If not, then what?”
So, back to the original
question: why am I writing this? There are a couple of reasons.
First, I've been increasingly
feeling like a hypocrite to my kids. Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy,
the Easter Bunny, the Stork...we lie to our kids a lot. Admittedly,
it’s to protect their innocence or in good-natured fun, but still,
we don't want our kids lying to us but we start lying to them as soon
as they start understanding things.
Second, I hope this book will
help people like me whose religion just isn't making sense to them
anymore. I started wondering about the Christian god after reading A
Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th
Century by Barbara
Tuchman when I was an adolescent. In that work, popes deposing
kings, the Inquisition, the Black Plague and more made me wonder if
God would do that. Then I delved into the Holy Bible more and found
a stunning amount of inconsistencies and contradictions throughout.
I suspect I'm not the only one. Maybe this treatise will provide
some answers.
And why am I writing this now?
Recently, a couple incidents happened to spur me to actually write
this instead of just leaving it swirling around my head as it has
done for the last 25 years.
The first incident occurred
when Christmas, 2011, came around and the whole “Jesus died for
your sins” thing appeared again. I always had trouble with that
idea (more on that later).
The second incident happened at
a recent dinner discussion that included a 16-year-old acquaintance
of ours. Somehow the discussion turned to religion and outer space.
At one point I asked, “So, if we found life on another planet,
Jesus died for their sins too?”
She quickly responded, “Of
course.”
That was one of the most insane
and inane comments I had ever heard. Now, keep in mind, this girl
was incredibly smart. The lowest grade she had ever received was a
97 as far as I had known but yet she was so brainwashed by organized
religion that it was obvious to her that Jesus died here on little ole Earth
for the sins of every sentient being of every habitable planet in the
universe.
This incident and hundreds of
others in the news every year lead me to believe now is the time for
this work, a work that might help bring religion (theosophy,
spirituality, etc.) into the 21st
century and allow some middle-ground between atheistic science and
fanatical religion.
No comments:
Post a Comment