A Religious Question

August 1, 2022 Open Religion No Comments

When doing away with all conceptual things from your religious denomination, what would remain that you find crucial to yourself?

For the atheist reader: Give me a break, and let me talk about God in this text in a manner as poetic as you unknowingly talk about many things. If you fall over this, you fall over your own feet.

For the believing reader: ask someone else the religious question.

Ideally, ask the question to someone from another denomination/religion which fundamentally differs from yours. Ideally, nothing conceptual in the other’s religion accords with anything conceptual in yours. Thus, removing all this from the other’s side is compatible with your religion.

Thus, what remains of conceptual value on the other side is:

Nothing.

Therefore, is the other person’s religion legitimately worth nothing to you? Is yours legitimately worth nothing to the other person?

Or does something remain beneath the conceptual level that may be recognizable to you both?

You might seriously do this exercise. This is your serious search for God. Therefore, it is what God most of all wants you to do. He wants to be found by you, not neglected.

This is about nothing else but your religiosity.

Will you throw it out of the window?

Will you bury yourself in make-belief for want of religious comfort above the truth of God?

Will you stick your head in the sand in the middle of a desert with the sun ferociously shining?

Conceptual religions are exercises.

You can look at them as asking your bravery to not go with the easy flow but with your flow which is also His flow. You will never find God in an outbound direction but an inbound one.

In the inbound direction, you find other people instead of their projections on a manipulative screen.

In the inbound direction, you find God ― only there, in and through your inner universe ― way beyond mere ego. Because only with this inner universe as a tool can you start seriously looking elsewhere. The direction then doesn’t matter anymore, for you are in it, not it in you.

The best religions are excellent poetry.

A good religion supports you toward yourself, therefore, toward God. Many poems can do so ― one even better than another, depending on your situation. Also, there is no problem in seriously savoring several of them.

A good religion is an open gate, not a closed door that makes you stick to itself.

Thus, there cannot be any competition between good religions, let alone something like a war being fought over them.

A war between serious people from two good religions is impossible.

Moreover, interreligious dialogue between two good religions serves to find God in the other religion, thereby making war unthinkable. If it doesn’t do this, then interreligious dialogue is worth nothing.

Religion should be of the finest quality, attaining the above. Otherwise, it should go for the sake of religion ― Open Religion, eventually the only one that is genuinely Open to God, with nothing conceptually standing in the way.

Open Religion is the one worth fighting for ― no aggression, instead, daring to be vulnerable.