I grew up in a severe religious culture. Not the kind of religion that you participate in casually. It was all or nothing. Some might even call it a cult. I'm undecided on using that term. But that should paint the picture.
Of course it was all crazy. For an outsider, it would seem ludicrous for anyone to be a faithful follower of that religious breed. I agree. It's crazy town. BUT, on the inside it doesn't always seem that way. Imagine being indoctrinated into a belief system since birth, and your whole life that line of education is continuously pounded into you from the leadership of your community. Over and over and over.
And everyone else around you also believes the crazy. Hook line and sinker. It becomes easier and easier to submit to that dogma and join the crazy train.
And that process is impossible for an outsider to really understand. You have to live it.
And not only do you have to live it, but you need to escape it.
And once you escape it you have to look back on it with fresh eyes.
And like the matrix, you can see that world for what it really was.
Dogma. A control system. An imposed belief system that makes herding the sheep a hellava lot easier.
It wasn't all lies. And that's why it works. A little bit of truth mixed in with an agenda. Just enough truth to get people to bite the hook.
That's what a cult is. That is what modern religion is.
So skipping over my peek behind the curtain and finally seeing who and what was controlling the machine of my religion, here I am.
I made it. So what's next. What happens when everything you had been taught and everything you believed turns out to be a hoax?
First you get pissed.
That will pass.
Then you get hungry.
I was left with a void. I always wanted knowledge. I had so many questions before that couldn't be answered. Now I was left with even more questions because a huge part of my knowledge base turned out to be a fairy tale.
Cool, now I have no limitations. No box to mold my experiences into. No dogmatic worldview that forces me to fit the life experiences I have into, in order for them to make sense.
Nope. None of that. Clean slate.
What happened next was that I immediately went the other way. If religion is false, then of course science right?
Sure. Science is important.
And here comes the other shoe about to drop.
Science as we know it doesn't have all the answers either.
Bummer. No problem. At least with science there is a continuous search for truth and a process to prove the claims of truth that we accept and believe. Right?
Right. Except there is a dogma attached to scientists and it's just as bad as religion.
Another dogma.
Read that again.
Science in its pure form, when it is intellectually honest, is amazing. The answers we don't yet have, we CAN have. We just need to put in the work.
So what do we really know now?
What do I really know? Essentially I know that I just don't know.
There is an overlap, I believe, with our human history, religious texts and science. The stories in scripture may not be literal. I believe they are not. But they are full of symbolism and metaphor. Occult meanings laid out in the form of stories.
Modern religion for the most part neglects these concepts. Instead they focus on the literal, and have faith in fairy tales.
However, if you remove the dogma from religion and realize that there is more to the world than science can yet explain, then pieces begin to fall into place.
Is there a god? I don't think so. Is there life after death? I believe so. Is there a higher power that binds us? My experience tells me yes.
This is just the groundwork for what I have planned to publish in the days to come.
These ideas are beginning to flesh themselves out and manifest. Concepts are becoming more and more clear. The more I learn, the more I realize I don't know.
If anyone tells you they have all the answers...well......
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