Anonymous asked: what religion are you, what do you believe in

I don’t identify with any singular religion. Not to say that there aren’t beautiful sentiments to many of them— I agree with many Eastern teachings of Buddhism and the like. But I can’t possibly believe that one of the dozens of religions are completely correct, it makes no logical sense and I think that many people just believe what they do because of where they live geographically and what they were raised to believe without ever expanding their minds to other possibilities. I think that I identify most with Pantheism- that the universe IS the great divinity and that there isn’t any physical creator watching over us. Alan Watts sums it up beautifully: “The standard-brand religions, whether Jewish, Christian, Mohammedan, Hindu, or Buddhist, are—as now practiced—like exhausted mines: very hard to dig. With some exceptions not too easily found, their ideas about man and the world, their imagery, their rites, and their notions of the good life don’t seem to fit in with the universe as we now know it, or with a human world that is changing so rapidly that much of what one learns in school is already obsolete on graduation day.”

     “An ardent Jehovah’s Witness once tried to convince me that if there were a God of love, he would certainly provide mankind with a reliable and infallible textbook for the guidance of conduct. I replied that no considerate God would destroy the human mind by making it so rigid and unadaptable as to depend upon one book, the Bible, for all the answers. For the use of words, and thus of a book, is to point beyond themselves to a world of life and experience that is not mere words or even ideas. Just as money is not real, consumable wealth, books are not life. To idolize scriptures is like eating paper currency.”