My beliefs

As I get older, my disdain for using religion as a form of spirituality grows with me.  It seems to constrict the identity of a divine entity that created the world to man’s imagination.  All religious text was written by men, so it leads me to suppose that it came from their personal and internal view of how a god should be.  With our advances in science, it gets more difficult to place significance on historical stories from the bible, or even other world religions such as Bhuddism.  Not that they didn’t occur, but that they are coming from a person'(s) ability to measure the significance of what is happening to them.  Also, it comes mostly from the victors of the ancient world with the impossibility of staying unchanged by human cultures along the way. It’s not that one can cease to find meaning or spiritual enlightenment from the text, other that it becomes less applicable as a completely true picture.  We can’t directly interact with a god or deceased ancestors and just ask them what happens.  So, one can only speculate.  I do believe that we have an innate desire to find significance in our existence and using religion gives somewhat of a stable platform for people to launch themselves into a way of finding meaning in the mundane meanderings of day to day life.   My faith if I have any, is that what life experiences that are our own, from information gathered to our interactions we have had with others, we can carry that on into an existence that extends beyond the grave.  I also hope if there is an entity that created us all, that it is far more morally complex than we are.  I also have faith in the idea that we all play a part in a greater tapestry of meaning, kind of a big picture of existence.  I hope that there is some final destination in living and experiencing what we call life.  Another facet of my faith would be to continue the valuable relationships that I have built and hold meaningful to me into some sort of future past death.  We do exsist, that is a reality.  We are here.  So if that’s possible, then perhaps death may not be the end. If I had to side with a religion, however, it would still be christianity.  I would just snip out the portion of an eternal hell of anguish and also  add in an eternal journey of experiencing the greatness of gods ongoing creation of the universe or universes.