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It’s Easter Sunday, but i didn’t go to church. I used to attend every Sunday, and even at other times during the week. I did that for, wow, 40 years plus. But as the Religious Right slowly insinuated themselves into my churches, and changed those churches from houses of worship to houses of hate, I gradually found myself alienated from the people in the chairs around me. Though i’m not alienated from God, as it turns out, or from my religion per se. My religion was never the same entity as the hateful subculture in the churches; although both the Religious Right and the atheists are trying to convince me that it is. When two groups who hate each other are saying the same thing, it’s a good bet that the truth is the opposite of that. So this morning i took my coffee out onto the back porch and looked out into the yard. It’s an early spring morning in Dixie, and looking out across my yard and over the yards of my neighbors, there’s a morning mist resting on the yellow forsythia and the dogwood blossoms and the vivid green grass. We have bird feeders and birdhouses in our yard. A nuthatch and a sparrow latch onto either side of a feeder, pecking their breakfasts out. That sparrow’s eating well this morning. My memory brings back an old gospel chorus: “I sing because i’m happy, i sing because i’m free; His eye is on the sparrow, and i know He watches me.” It’s a song about significance, about being important to God even though you’re insignificant to society. It resonated with me when i was a teenager and a young man, insignificant and unwanted by society. To the people on the Right, i was insignificant because i wasn’t rich or athletic. To the people on the Left (those hypocrites who claim to be tolerant and egalitarian), i was insignificant because i didn’t know how to dance, wasn’t sexy, didn’t know where to get weed, just generally So Uncool We Need To Avoid You. But religion sang this song of significance to me, told me i was precious to someone. I remembered that this morning. So today i didn’t go to church, but i certainly had a religious holiday. The gay-bashing Bible-Belters, and the God-bashing pseudointellectuals on the Coasts, are very shallow in their thinking. They don't know what faith really is.
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God is a concept that people constructed to explain the things around them that could not be explained, and to provide moral guidelines for behaviour. It's startling to me, someone who was not indoctrinated in a religious organization, that people still cling to 'immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing being' based belief systems. No doubt our beliefs are still radically primitive, and our understanding of the universe..infantile. But it seems to me, at some point we let go of the notion that the sun was pulled over our sky by chariot each day, and we'll also grow beyond many of our current beliefs held about a God or gods. [media=] Dr Neil deGrasse Tyson, Astrophysicist
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