The Church Experiment

For a long time, I have tried to understand religion. I have studied different ones from around the world. I was doing so in hopes to find somewhere to fit in. I always feel like I am just on the surface of fitting in with the "normies" out there but never completely. The closest religion I have found that I can actually wrap my head around, is paganism.

I have this tendency to be very analytical and scientific in my thinking and that had lead me to where I stand today.

With paganism, I can "worship" the earth in all it's glory. I can see nature working every day, right under my nose. This I can grasp.

What I cannot grasp is this notion that god is one gender and that gender is male. We see it in nature over and over again, to sustain and create life, we need both female and male DNA. I wonder then, how it is that one would come to the conclusion that god is a man and only a man.

I have seen forces at work which I cannot explain. I know there is a higher being (for lack of a better term) out there, something with more power and capabilities than a meager human can possess. I am certain however, that this life force must be a duality. In order to create, it would need to be.

There is the pagan way of thinking that there are Gods and Goddesses but I know deep down that back in early life for humankind, we created beings from our own image in order to make some sense out of the world. Humans need something to believe in for without it, a lot are lost souls and no one likes to be a lost soul. People like to fit in, to feel a sense of camaraderie with others. I don't blame us one bit, for being alone is not pleasant, especially if you think too much and over-analyze everything as I tend to do.

I cannot wrap my mind around these Gods and Goddesses either. What held power over us, we decided must have the same qualities as us in order for us to not fear it. I believe fear is the basis of most organised religions today. Fear and control. Humans have always had a need to control or feel as though they are making an effort to control and that is why we created these Gods and Goddesses. For if we could make sacrifices and pray to them, maybe their wrath would not be as catastrophic the next time.

You hear it time and again in the Christianity and Catholic religions. Fear of God. To put the fear of God in them. I believe this was done in order to control the general populace. Without governing forces and those to enforce them, there would be chaos and anarchy. That is simply the way we as human are, for we are but animals. Highly intelligent and highly arrogant by nature.

They say paganism is the oldest religion. I believe that to be true. It is very evident in my readings and studies of this that they were taken over by Catholics by force, for the whole island of Ireland was once pagan. When the "new religion" came it came with force and an ultimatum: "Join us in what we believe or die." When the person would not submit, they were marked for death. We can see evidence of this in the old churches which still stand in Ireland. When the stonemasons and carpenters were forced to covert to Catholicism and they were ordered to build churches, they secretly craved symbols know of paganism into the woodwork and stonework so as to not feel like they were betraying their Gods and Goddesses.

That is appalling in my opinion and no loving God would want that to ever happen. It was all about control and the fear that some (men) would lose it that drove them to promote an organised religion in order to scare the underlings into submission. I can wrap my head around that. Killing, wars over religion, they all sound so very primitive.

I think the bible was created as a set of rules for all the (now) sheep to follow, those who were free-thinkers were killed or banished from their homeland.

A lot of it sounds really fishy don't you think? If we are all sons and daughters of Adam and Eve, we are all products of incest. No thanks. I don't wish to label myself as that! That is pretty gross. For as the story goes, Eve was created from Adam's rib bone. Right there, creates an imbalance of power between men and women. Of course God (he) created a man first! For the man is all powerful and we must respect that. Alright so, they were the first and since you need both a male and a female (apparently God did as well) in nature to create life he created Eve to make babies in some Utopian society. Oh that's wishful thinking but not the reality of our nature nor will it ever be. We could try but you can only suppress the animalistic thoughts and behaviours for so long. Anyway, leave it to a woman to go and screw things up, right? Eve ate the apple which screwed all of humanity for eons. What a stupid woman eh?

I do believe Jesus lived. I think he was a man with very forward thinking. I think he questioned the wrong people and was put to death. Plain and simple. There have been instances of this throughout humanity. I also believe that people did a lot of opium back in the day and it produced some very interesting and neat-sounding stories with which to fill a bible up with. Have you ever heard of the game of telephone? I also believe it's entirely possible that that has happened in this case, to some degree. It's plausible. How many years old is that thing anyway? ;)

Those are some of my thoughts on religion and where I stand with what I believe in. It's not truth for I have no solid evidence to base these thoughts on, but it's the result of a lot of analytical thinking on my part and a lot of questioning.

I attended a church session this past Sunday because my husband is Christian and he was not able to make it out over to his parent's church. I was awake and I wanted to go support him and so I did. Well, as a person who is not big on musicals at all I didn't like all of the off-key singing. Sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up. That must be bad for someone with low blood-pressure...such as myself. The minister said some words that were good in my opinion, the message was not one of fear but of love which is a lot better than some church sermons out there, that's for sure. Of course, it was still under the pretense that God is a he. Oh well, I think most of these people mean well but are slightly misguided. That's all.

I do have one question though.

If God is in heaven and heaven is supposedly up above us, why then when they pray, do they bow their heads to the ground. Is that not where their evil lives? An evil they have dubbed Satan? It would seem more logical to me that one should look in the face of whom they are speaking to in such a manner with grace and glory.

I believe there is evil in all of us, just some are not able to control it as well as others.