Religion - an interesting thing

As we prepare to go to a foreign country and fight an insurgency that is fanatical to the point of blowing themselves up to kill one or two of us, it occurs to me that most of the world’s ills and wars have had something to do with organized religion. It also has occurred that although there are tons of religions in the world, most of them come down to a few basic beliefs that most hold in common. In light of these revelations, I present this short synopsis on my views of religion and the belief in a higher power.

From the beginning of time, man has sought to quantify all things – counting numbers, making pictures on cave walls, and so on. We do this in order to be able to come to grips with the expanse of things we don’t know. What is beyond space? What was before us? What happens when we die? We have developed organized religion as a tool that helps to explain those questions that would otherwise boggle the mind.

It seems that most religions have key beliefs at the core and they are:
1. Usually a single deity that set everything in motion.
2. Some sort of earthy representation of that deity that came down and gifted us with heavenly knowledge.

Looking at the biggest, longest lasting religions in the world, we see these core beliefs. In Christianity: God is the Deity that created the earth, etc, etc. Jesus is the earthly representation.
In Islam: Allah is the Deity (oddly enough, Allah is also one of the names for God in the Bible), and Mohammad taught the ways of Jesus. Islam and Christianity have almost no reason to be different religions. They are more like different sects of the same religion – Protestent, Catholics, Baptists and Muslims. They all believe the same general thing.

The way I see it is this:
Yes, there is a God who set things in motion way back when.
Yes, there is life after death, but as to what form it takes is anyone’s guess,
My personal thoughts on that are that this life is one where you learn about the greater picture of the universe by experiencing the everyday human ordeal. Your spirit (for lack of a better word) is an on-going being that leaves your body upon death and goes back into the universal plane of existence, on a different level than this one.

- A brief tangent on your spirit – I think that your spirit is what gives your body life. Without a spirit your body is just a mass of flesh and bone. This can be shown by the fact that no matter how much you shock with electricity, or inject drugs into someone after they are dead, you cannot make them alive again – even if all the organs and body parts all fully functional. Without the spirit a body has no life. Where does the spirit “live” in the body? My best guess is that it resides somewhere in the brain. You can lose limbs, organs, and numerous body parts and still be alive, but once your brain is damaged or destroyed, your spirit has no place to reside and you die.

So, once the spirit is again free of a physical life it is free to wander around the universe, check out the planets, the galaxies, and stuff that are out there. The purpose of a spirit life is to experience and learn until your spirit is maxed out on knowledge and experience – which I’m going to guess takes longer than can be imagined. As a spirit you can travel at will, but I don’t think that emotions or physical things play a big part in the spirit world. That is why your spirit must live in a physical body – to experience that which cannot be experienced in the spiritual realm. I suspect that you have some modicum of control of what you choose to be born as, but have no idea about the future of that life until you live it. The more you experience in each life, the closer you come to attaining the ultimate (although possibly unattainable) goal of absolute knowledge. The spirit’s experience outside the body is highly limited and passes too fast to be absorbed, which is why we choose to be born into a physical form – it slows down the experience gaining process, but enables a more complete understanding of what is being experienced.
Sometimes we choose to be born into a life of prosper, of riches, and other times we choose to be born into a simpler, poorer way of life. Why would anyone choose live a poorer life? For the experience. When you make the decision about what to be born into, you have all the past experiences and lives to draw on, but once you are in that body, living that life, you don’t realize that you chose to be there and that you are gaining experience that you deemed necessary. You may hate your life, but you are the one who chose to learn something from it – so why not do so to the fullest? Once you leave your body, you are instantly reunited with your past experiences and lives and, at that time, decide what to do next. Maybe you died too early in your life to get what you wanted out of it. So you try the same thing again. Maybe you try it differently. But, you will try it again.
This theory of reincarnation helps to unravel some of the mysteries that cannot be otherwise explained – such as Bach, Beethoven, and other geniuses that be incredible things at an early age. Somehow, when they entered their new life, they retained some portion of their past lives and experiences that enable them to start quicker in their new life. I think that this is a glitch in the system, but is allowed to stand by that Deity because it does serve a purpose – it leaves things unexplained and unexplainable to the simple human mind. Ghosts and apparitions could quite possibly be spirits who for one reason or another have found a way to communicate or be visible on multiple planes of existence. Perhaps that is another piece of knowledge gained along the way.

After all of this rambling and carrying on, I have only accomplished one thing. I have once again set up a system that enables my mind to grasp the enormity of the universe and life – I have in effect, created my own religion – like we people have been doing for eons and will continue to do until the end of time or our existence.