Muslim musings & religious ramblings

With all the terrorist/Muslim rhetoric going around it's easy to get lost in it all.

I'm very impressed with, and totally support, the move to separate the extremist beliefs and actions from the mainstream Muslims, as I do with any religion. It's a sign of maturity and the ability to exercise non-reactive thinking.

It's also incredible that millions are coming to the realisation that we must respect each other's beliefs and aim for a deeper level of understanding and unity amongst all of humanity.

But I keep looking at religion in general. I mean ALL religion. And by that I mean the whole concept and need for religious belief systems.

Now if you're a regular reader of my rants and raves, you'll realise that I have constantly questioned the whole paradigm about our need for building religious systems.

We all do it - yes even me! We can't help it. We form ideas about the nature of life, God, the universe and everything, and formalise it into a system or structure that helps us to understand it better, and act on it. Even atheists do the same thing, the only real difference is their anti-theism viewpoint.

But we just can't help ourselves - we decide that our system of beliefs about the universe and spirituality are the best/most logical/most spiritual/most beneficial/most life changing/most... anything really...

We fail to realise that they are simply ways of seeing something that we just don't have the full depth of knowledge about yet. We don't know what the "spark of life" is that we all have. We don't know what was before the big bang. We don't know what's inside a black hole. We don't know so much!!

But we are learning!

200 years ago, we used religious belief systems to understand and describe things that we now completely understand in a rational and scientific way. The "need" for a religious belief system for these things has gone, because we can see how they work - no more mystery.

We are learning at an even more rapid rate, and areas like quantum physics are now explaining some of the most foundational questions about the "nature of everything". SO much is simply being stripped away from needing to be viewed in any religious belief system.

This is a wonderful thing, because it allows us to see the true value of our humanity, that transcends all religious/spiritual systems. Finally, we are beginning to see that science and spirituality are the same thing, and we are ready to move into this new level of understanding.

So back to my point...

Religion is the problem - not just accepting and respecting each other's beliefs, although that's an amazing and essential step on our journey - but the whole concept of religious systems is the problem. They can't help but separate at the most fundamental level. We can modify our religion and find the unity in the basics of every belief system (well, some of them at least), but they are still inferior and short-sighted stop-gaps that divide on some level, until the day when we will understand the true nature of life/consciousness/God etc.

I propose we keep aiming to move past religion in any form. That we simply recognise whatever belief system we have as a stepping stone - something we need as a source of comfort until we truly understand. We just have to look at the last 200 years to realise how redundant most of religion has become. And even my thoughts I'm expressing here are limited by my own perceptions, and I can already see holes in what I'm saying, lol. But if we don't express this stuff, if we don't discuss and realise these foundational issues, we will never grow and achieve the very thing that we ALL crave.