God so loved the world he
gave himself so that we may have everlasting life,
if we believe Jesus is God incarnate.
Theology is the study of
making excuses for God.
There is no God.
There is no God but God, and Muhammed (PBUH) is His Messenger.
God so loved the world he
gave himself so that we may have everlasting life,
without condition.
God is also Goddess - God is co-creative relationship and God opposes patriarchal conceptions of God.
Life is a site for progressing through incarnations towards dissolution in the infinite.
We cannot know, so why bother?
Sarcasm is easy. Are you capable of reverence?
Are you capable of imagining that God exists, and cares, and interacts?
Are you capable of imagining that there may be no God?
Can you conceive of a
religion as a work of imagination - yet possibly true?
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Could it be that God wants us to play with whether God exists
or not?
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The Church of Maybe
Mission:
To go beyond Yes or No.
To practice the possible presence of God.
To play with and explore Yes; to play with and explore No.
I thought religion was anti-imagination. ("Believe x; it's the Truth.") Then I wondered "Am I even able to imagine God is real?" Does faith require imagination?
Which is better: belief or imagination? It could be said that if you don't believe, you won't be inspired, but if belief was important to God, God would appear before everyone at the same time to and give an experience no one could deny. Since God doesn't do that, either God does not exist, or God wants us to live without certainty. God wants us to play with wonder at the possibilities.
The Buddha offers a radical perspective:
During his last moments The Buddha said:
"Don’t mourn at this moment of joy ...This body, the great storehouse of suffering is passing away. The great danger of rebirth is at last being uprooted, and I am being released. When … I have seen the world to be without essence, then contentment accompanies my end as does the cure to an illness." (Buddhacharita 25.68-26.86)
But it is not true. Enlightenment is not experiencing everything as an illusion.
Nor is it true that there is a living and loving God. Nor is it true that life is a fluke without meaning.
The truth is that any one of these may be true - or not.
Siddhartha "Buddha" Gautama claimed that everything is an illusion - except that perception. In other words, every statement is false, except that one. Can we go beyond Buddha?
What the world needs now - and always - is not another claim to the truth - but to live in uncertainty. (And yes, if you want to know, that includes uncertainty about whether it really is better to be uncertain.)
Can you live as if God may or not be real? as if life may or may not be an accident without meaning? as if everything may or may not be illusion? Can you practice the possible presence of God? (in other words: the possible absence?)
That practice can grow a sublime, tremendous, magnificent peace.
And it's as enlightened as humans can get - unless/until God [appears] in an undeniable way, or we find undeniable proof there was no Creator.
So where is the Church of the Possible God? Why do religious organizations aim only to bring people into their pre-established truth? Where do people go who want to explore possibilities?
(If such a place exists, why don't we all know about it?)
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Do you agree? Disagree?
Would you change how this was written?
P.S. How do you answer "Why is there something rather than nothing?"
P.P.S. Imagine God (The Church of Maybe) simultaneously grows people's freedom in their personal stories.
My family thought they were beyond religion, but their atheism was their religion, complete with everything they hated about religion. Because they were not aware that they were interpreting reality, they were more blind than most believers. Have you discovered the joys of metafiction, finding fun arise from an awareness of variables in your interpretation of reality?
Feel free to comment or start a discussion - on the Facebook page.
Try practicing the presence of God - in every breath.
Instead of thinking
alone, imagine you are thinking/conversing with God.
Imagine God is an
encouraging audience (a participating audience?) in the sky, and in the Earth.
Imagine everyone you see is a child of God.
Oh, and see www.imagonation.org.