Religion

As of late, my interest in religion has been at a high level. Just about every time I have gone online in the past year, I have read some article or another on some religion or another. Religions have always interested me, and for most of my teenage years (about age 12-17), I searched for a religion to call my own. I found so many beliefs and dogma that struck a chord with me, however, no matter how hard I tried, I could not find it in myself to believe in any one religion over another. This both frustrated me to heck and piqued my interest even more. When the DaVinci Code book came out, it reawakened my search for personal meaning in all of the religious jargon. I read website after website, book after book. I lost myself in the world of the early Christians, Jews, Muslims, Pagans, and so on. I read about mysticism, spiritualism, and agnostism. More recently I have been expressing to people my interest in possibly majoring in religious studies/theology. This has incurred many questions regarding my own beliefs, which I have had to answer as concisely as possible, but this has left me feeling like I haven't fully explained myself, either.

In the past, to put my beliefs in the most simple of terms, I have told people I have no religion.
This later developed into me explaining that I am agnostic. If I were to truly label myself, I suppose I must clarify that I am an agnostic omnist. For those of you too lazy to google those two terms, it means: 1) I believe it is impossible to prove or disprove the existence of a deity/deities; and 2) I find truth and believe in the dogma and beliefs of all religions. That is putting it shortly. In more depth along the lines of agnostism, I not only believe there is no proof for or against the existence of any deity, but also the very nature of an omnipotent, omnipresent being is such that it is impossible for humans to even comprehend its existence. To use a cheap analogy, a single cell (if it had thought and senses) cannot comprehend the characteristics, let alone the intentions, of a living organism. I do believe in a unifying presence of sorts... the chances of the world turning out the way it does are just so infinitely small that the sheer number of coincidences are preposterous. Not fate, per se, and not necessarily a deity or deities of some sort, but just, well, something. I know humans tend to search for something higher than themselves in order to make sense of the world, but logic points towards the fact that there is always something higher than any given thing.

Now, back to how the analogy ties in: if there is some sort of omnipresent being, there is no possible way for humans to define it... it would have to be beyond our comprehension. As of yet, humans can barely conceive of huge numbers of objects, let alone everything. We simply cannot truthfully comprehend infinity, and therefore cannot define what omnipresent is, other than "being everywhere/everything". I think that any attempt of humans to define what that omnipresent being is, what its intentions are, and how it effects the world, falls under three categories: sheer folly, need of the security and order such a being might mean, and entertaining fantasy.

This is where my omnism ties in. Although it is impossible for humans to define "God" and all other incarnations of the omnipresent/omnipotent, we still strive to do so. Sometimes we do so clumsily, other times with a profound sophistication. In all my readings on the various religions and beliefs, I think I have found something redeeming and/or truthful in all of them (yes, even Satanic cults). Religion is a human institution put in place to give some sort of order to the beliefs and morals people hold. Humans define religion, humans interpret it. That does not mean that religion is unhelpful or even harmful; it simply means that we have to keep it in perspective. Throughout the ages, people have always tended towards forgetting the fact that dogma is manmade. I think that as religion is an attempt to describe the workings of the world and to define the supernatural, there is some truth in all of it. All the religions are quite equally different interpretations of one another... they all seek to do the same thing, essentially, just in different ways.

To put all this rant into one short sentence, I believe in the statement "We Are One".... many religions, many interpretations, of one truth. But yeah, so I may burn in hell for all that, but it's the closest I've ever come to feeling at peace with my beliefs.