I was brought up with the religion without much sense of the meaning behind it. Which I think is common for a lot of people.

As a 4 year old you’re told this fact of ‘don’t run into traffic because a car will hit you and you’ll die’ on an equal footing to ‘don’t tear toilet paper on a Saturday because the invisible man in the sky will get angry at you’. Without the nuance or context that the former is universally considered to be true whereas the latter is believed by a tiny minority.

one is believed by a tiny minority.

that doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

As I build up my own beliefs from scratch (after destroying everything that was there of the old ones for a while) I’m coming to some of the same places as the religion did…

I’m not saying the invisible man one is wrong, but for me personally the explanation does not match what I believe the origins of those stories are

Meaning

I don’t believe the angry invisible man thing literally, which is more or less how it was presented

But we’re trying to reason about things which—why should they be within the realms of logic and reasoning?

Whatever the ‘god’ that the religions are trying to describe, what’s near universal is that it’s a notion that is in a system outside of the rational physical one. It’s metaphysical, or spiritual. And that’s what gets lost.

Meaning

As I build up from scratch… there is a physical world (or at least my perception of it)… but science can’t explain that perception. The awareness or consciousness or subjective experience. It doesn’t purport to. It can explain that the brain neurons are firing in various ways, but it can’t explain how it is that I am able to experience that. There will always be a system beyond the realms of science. Because otherwise science itself couldn’t exist.

And so… for the purpose of communication with others about our subjective experiences, we decide to create a word, a label, a signpost for that deeper metaphysical space. And the label we picked a long time ago is ‘god’.

And when we become identified with our thoughts and emotions in a way where we forget our own experience and are transported away from the present moment and into the world of things and ego, and that causes suffering, we talk about that as losing god.

Makes sense so far

And then we create these ideas of heaven and earth/hell, meaning present awareness and suffering non-awareness.

And then we create a system of morality, that which is good or bad, in order to keep our society functioning, and we do those things because they are the way of god. They are what we collectively feel to be right or wrong.

And we write fables to illustrate why these things are good or bad

Did god write these stories?

Yes, or no, depending on what you mean by the question.

When I’m in a flow state (like when I’m writing these words, which to my knowledge have never been written before), is that the word of man or the word of god? What on earth (or heaven) is the difference :-)

And we write poems to express our gratitude for the universe. We write love letters to god. To help us remember the greater intelligence beyond the logical science one.

None of this is farfetched or unreasonable.

But ego returns, and now people identify with the unidentifiable—we stretch and distort the god label we invented to suit our means.

And organised religion arises

And the stories get taken as literal

And now something that should have been quite beautiful becomes destructive. Hell on earth.

So as I start to recreate from scratch, from first principles, I start to appreciate the religious texts from a new perspective. A non-literal one.

Am I wrong?

Maybe.

But it’s all just words.

We’re trying to distill a vast non-reason-able concept into a finite search space of words. There will always be compression loss. That’s inevitable. The only question is does it feel right. Does it feel true to myself.

What about ‘does it do good in society?’. As in—what if someone felt it were true to murder a lot of others. Shouldn’t that factor in? Well… I would hope that it feels true to the person that they wouldn’t want to do that. That they factor other people’s rights into what feels true to them. But if they don’t… then god help us all. What can you do?

But ultimately I think we should remember that the ideas are not literal. They are ideas. They can help people. There must be something beyond science. We can use words to describe it, but we need to be exceptionally careful not to start believing the words and losing the experience.