No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

I can't believe so many people have commented! Sarcasm? YES! Leave your thoughts people. Leave em!

I can buy that there are grains of truth in all religions. I do reject the notion that all religions are fundamenally the same; they are not. But insofar as no religion is completely awful, I can agree.

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

How can you be sure that not one religion has all the truth? How can you know that? And on what bases can you know that?

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

All religions were appropriate and beneficial for the cultures they developed in. As we cannot predict exactly what form our societies will take in the future, it is a good idea to have a variety of traditions to draw from as we move forward, but also not to be afraid to make modifications, additions and mixtures to suit the changing challenges we face. At the moment, our differing cultures are converging as we become a more global society, but if we deveop off planet communities in the future, I think it is safe to say we will get diverging cultural groups again, as when humanity first spread out of Africa.

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

All religions formed from one another. Just added more people to it and changed the name...

*puffs*



Man this is some good ganja your smoking there Matt

hey man, what if the universe is actually like one big dorito, man



thiiiiiiiink abouuuuuuut it duuuuuuuude

Amber wrote:

Beautiful post, Matt.



I agree, there is Truth in all religions and spiritual pathways. And I do not think that any one religion has the market cornered on Truth. I think that if we were to connect the dots so to speak...seek out the common threads found within all the various religions, we might be able to collect more and more nuggets of Truth. But humanity as a whole seems to be more interested in focusing on the differences in religious philosophy than they are in finding the similarities.



Amber

There are institutions that have a vested interest in divisiveness, but I think most individuals lean towards commonality when given the chance.

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths..

So what do you think of black holes?

Vaudevillian Hero wrote:

I can buy that there are grains of truth in all religions. I do reject the notion that all religions are fundamenally the same; they are not. But insofar as no religion is completely awful, I can agree.

I think the majority of popular religion is fundamentally similar.

jnorm wrote:

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

How can you be sure that not one religion has all the truth? How can you know that? And on what bases can you know that?

The teachings of each religion as understood from old text and translated material. There could easily be an ultimate truth, but not as we understand it. If there was an ultimate truth that made perfect sense it woul dhave to have a lot of evidence to supoort it otherwise it wouldnt be fully understandable. it wouldn't make perfect sense, so I don't think this religion exists, because if it DID, I would know about it. People would know about it. It would spread fast. Maybe one day science will reveal something like this. Science is the tool to understand observation and in combination with old teachings and ideas, religions, maybe they can prove a religion to be "correct".



I don't know why I am thinking so much about this, I believe anything is possible... tht was kinda the point of my post. So I don't know that there isn't a religion that IS the ULTIMATE truth, I wont deny that its a possibility, but from what i know, I think it is highly unlikely.

::Shelby, Holder of The Death Note:: wrote:

I agree. I don't think there's any one religion out there that has all the truth, all of the answers. I think there are religions that make the arrogant assumption that they have the ultimate truth, but it doesn't make them right, it just makes them afraid of the competition or something. I think all religions are kind of hovering in the middle - there's no ultimate truth, and there's no ultimate bullshit. Religion really should be about truth for the individual.

I think christianity has a lot of great teachings and that is why it is so popular. If there are lessons to learn, true life lessons, then there will be followers.

daniel wrote:

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

No religion would be successful without an element of truth. All religions should be given a certain amount of respect and the benefit of the doubt. Mistranlations occur frequently evenmore so as time passes. Rumors of rumons can turn what was word of a worm to the word of a lime. Totally unrelated. Most religious text is very old and full of mistranslations. If you dont understand it, then it is foolish to believe it. So if you here a conflicting viewpoint with a belief you hold which is not fully understood by you, then you should compromise your belief for the time being and keep an open mind for the confliction of this other proposed idea.



My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

All religions were appropriate and beneficial for the cultures they developed in. As we cannot predict exactly what form our societies will take in the future, it is a good idea to have a variety of traditions to draw from as we move forward, but also not to be afraid to make modifications, additions and mixtures to suit the changing challenges we face. At the moment, our differing cultures are converging as we become a more global society, but if we deveop off planet communities in the future, I think it is safe to say we will get diverging cultural groups again, as when humanity first spread out of Africa.

Day Dreamer - Matt Hays wrote:

My religion is this. Be honest on all levels. Believe only what you understand to be true and never close your mind to any proposed truths. Believe in possiblity because thats what life is about. Keep a balance. We all want to be free so strive for freedom. To be close minded is to restrict possiblity and to restrict your freedom of thought. Don't put up walls to block what could very well be true, it could even be key to a deeper understanding of your domain. Open mindedness, honesty, balance... My religion is simple.



Truth will find you if you let it.

Let me first adress the last line. You obviously take the approach that truth is something that is already out there and it is something that finds you ratehr than you finding it. Ok. I do not take this side but I cannot argue against a directivist approach because it applies to SOME knowledge.







"Believe only what you understand to be true" Two problems with this:

(1) All religion already does this. Those who are religioius do it because they believe it to be trueand

(2) Now lets get to the meat of this statement. When one makes this statement this is called and "intuition based" approach to thinking. You should believe in something becasue you think that it is true, you believe it to be true. The problem with the intuition mode of thought is that it is often wrong.





i agree that closemindedness is not the goal. But neither should basing a belief just because you feel that it is the right one....bcause you believe it to be true. That is perhaps the most dangerous level of religious belief that someone could be on. EVEN more dangerous perhaps than a fundamentalist.