My views on religion

In my opinion, religion is for those who are scared of going to hell, and spirituality is for those who have already been there.

I don't like religion. I think all religions are dishonst, in that they offer expertees on a subject that no mortal can really, truly understand.

Life is a mystery. It always will be. Sure, some elements of all religions have pointers to some greater truth, but the problem with religions is that they make absolute claims, each of them, to that greater truth.

Every religion, is strikes me, is founded in a misunderstanding of profound truth. Just as all knowledge reveals itself over time, and has to discard the stepping stones that led to its greater unveiling, so religion really should do that. The problem is that it doesn't. Religions aren't geared to progress, because the nature of religion is to lock itself in time and philosophical, spiritual stasis. Religion digs its heels in, fightin against knowledge, just as sure as any lover demands that a love affair isn't over, when the other one knows it's time to move on.

Religion demanded that Galileo not see Jupiter's moons, and forced him to retract what he knew. Today, Islam does something similar.

It can't possibly be said that the world has a very effective moral compass, but the way things stand, no single religion has the answers. It won't be until we have a global religion, that embraces some aspects of all the religions, but embraces, too, modern scientific understanding, that we'll have any kind of lasting peace.

Because at the root of all the problems is the conflict in belief systems.

Sprituality has to come from a rational understanding of life, death, and purpose. Not from ancient scriptures that have to be interpreted and translated from some dead language, by other mortals.

Spirituality has to be a personal thing, and not be hijacked by groups of people, for whatever reason. It doesn't requires spending vast amounts of money, or being committed to any local deity.

What makes anyone think that their God or saviour is the world's saviour, when other parts of the world have got on for thousands of years having never even heard of him?

And so in that respect I know that Christ and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest were just people who had insights into the nature of the universe that have been disrorted by fearful, exaggerating Chinese whispers over the millenia.

It's time to throw religion into the bin or the melting pot, once and for all.

Life is a mystery, and we should embrace that mystery, but realise that every religion is only an imperfect vessel of understanding The Mystery, and is no more than an imperfect teacher, which is what every teacher is.

The religions of the 21st century, particularly Islam, strike me as being as truthful as Euclidean geometry. Brilliant in its time, Euclidean geometry showed us angles and lines, and laws of triangles adding up to 180 degrees and such. Even now, they seem to make sense. But not when you go beyond that limited mathematical thinking.

Our understanding of space and time now leads us to knowing that straight lines are irrelevent in the bigger scheme of things. Geodesics are something Euclid could never understand, yet the higher intelligence of today does. As such, Euclid's geometry is seen as an anachronism in the whole of current understanding, just as Newtonian physics is seen as a limited, Earthbound system of thinking.

And religions are the same. Religions haven't caught up with 21st century thinking, and that's where the problem lies. Until they do, we'll still have people who think that the world was created 5000 years ago, that the meteorite that is in the Cube in Mecca is something more than just a meteorite that was seen by a man a few thousand years ago who didn't have the intellectual capacity to embrace what he was seeing, and that Jesus was anything more than a somewhat enlightened man who's mother probably had him from an affair or was raped.

Religion positively reeks of stupidity. And it really is time that sensible, powerful people admitted it and not let insanity and ignorance dictate the running of the planet one minute longer.

One of the big problems, though, is that there's an intervening period where those who reject religion reject all forms of spiritual understanding, and that's the "dark night of the soul". Recovering an understanding of the spiritual nature of The Self is the ultimate quest. In that, is the real enlightenment, and when religions can be seen for what they really are: blind men leading the blind.