As “life can only be understood backwards and be lived forwards” (Søren Kierkegaard), I consider all my endeavours as part of the process of learning. In this way, my life and my learning are given to me. By whom we might ask?
All we have received and experienced is offered to us by life, or at least something that is bigger then we can imagine, see, or embrace. I consider there is one natural force that is behind everything. This force is something alive, both in us and around us, and is the driving force in everything. In my perception this is what the monotheistic religions refer to when they say, “there is only one true god”.
Believing this with certainty makes me a religious person and does not deliberately make me a person of religion. Meaning, I accept religions as a way to organize people into learning communities based around believing and sharing the best practices in spiritual life. I consider the organisation of religions as one way to help people to find a way to believe something through the structure of these teachings and learning experiences.
As I experience the 1God organized religions nowadays, they can often be too directive on “how to believe and be a good one-way-of-believing person”, to enable me to feel free to deeply connect to my “god” or bigger source to life. I therefore generally reject the way religious organisations/ communities (i.e., Christian churches, Jewish Rabbis and Synagogues, etc.) tend to impose on others how we should believe, because in so doing they shape the practice of belief for others, instead of giving space to shape it themselves. That is why many people left Christianity, Judaism, etc. to look for a different way of connecting to a bigger source. That is also why 1GOD.com has a good chance to get a big meaning across in our international spiritual society. Like the big religious organisations, many of us lost our own source and are looking for new ways of believing. I believe the religions hold a lot of wisdom on how to do so, while their rules prevent us from connecting to the reason of religious rules and habits.
As I believe the religious organisations in our world need to let go of their hierarchies and get back on why they exist and from there offer frames for us to believe our own way, I think they should look back and understand their existence backwards. It is us, the believers, that can make a start by doing so ourselves by asking, “why am I in this world?” and, “why did the holy spirit breathe life into me?”
Moreover, we need to take more ownership over our spiritual path so we might find ways to reconnect to “our original religions” by organising ways to stay connected to our spiritual feelings. For me it helps to stick to keeping with some Jewish traditions AND embracing that there is more to connect to my spirituality. My idea might be considered as vague and it might get more concrete and clear in that case ☺
And an important side note about G’ds gender: I do not believe G’d is a male or a female. But if I am proven wrong, G’d would somehow be part of many of the females our world.
