Day 04

Your views on religion.

I tell others that I am Buddhist. But I'm Buddhist only by name. I'm much more agnostic than anything, or spiritual. I pray to the Bodhisattva Goddess of Mercy because I was raised that way. I go to temple and light incense and pray to whatever god, deity or higher being because I was told to. I have questioned my faith and know that I am a Buddhist on paper (except in China; not the best idea to mark your religion on any piece of paper in China) and faithless by heart. Is God up there? Perhaps. Is God the indescribable but undoubtedly masculine that resides in a place called heaven? Perhaps. There are so many branches and sects of so many different faiths that I cannot say that a certain religion is mine, and that mine is right. There's too many inconsistencies in every religions.

Then, there's an interesting argument a friend sent me about a "god particle." Then I got to thinking, maybe Jesus was just really smart for his time and thought about all this, but people were silly and didn't realize how abstract he was being and understood him literally as the son of God. You never know.


But, something interesting? The Bible's Commandments and Buddhism's Precepts are very similar. Except Buddhism's is much more precise about what not to do.


We should live without fear of a higher being smiting us. We should live without attributing all of our successes and failures to a higher being. But, I do understand the power of prayer, the power of meditation. And I have experienced a spreading warmth within myself when I was having a really shit time and decided to pray. Perhaps this "God" is within all of us.