If You Want A Better World, Teach Tolerance

The Spirit, without moving, is swifter than the mind; the senses cannot reach him:  He who is ever beyond them. Standing still, he overtakes those who run. To the ocean of his being, the spirit of life leads the streams of action. He moves, and he moves not. He is far, and he is near. He is within all, and he is outside all. Who sees all beings in his own Self, and his own Self in all beings, loses all fear. When a sage sees this great Unity and his Self has become all beings, what delusion and what sorrow can ever be near him? ~ Isa Upanishad

Gnosis is a Greek word roughly translated as “knowledge,” thus the word agnostic literally means one who has no knowledge. It simply means that one doesn’t know, and I don’t.

I consider myself a spiritual agnostic because while I’ve spent years reading various religious scriptures and philosophical texts, praying for guidance, and pondering the meaning of it all, no definitive answers have ever been bestowed upon me.

After several decades of seeking the ‘one true religion’ and finding all the answers wanting, I’ve finally concluded that neither I, nor any other human being can ever really know the answer.

During the first thirty years of my life I was at one time or another associated with three different Christian denominations – United Methodist, Southern Baptist, and Latter-Day Saints. All of them played a part in my eventual abandonment of all organized religious activity. Like Mahatma Gandhi said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

I’ve got no problem with what Jesus Christ preached, in fact, I rather like those ideas and try to live my life accordingly. My problem is with the fact that most modern churches have corrupted the core values Jesus taught, and added a whole bunch of other stuff that Jesus never said anything about – no dancing, no drinking, homophobia, white supremacy and a big steaming pile of other irrelevant garbage all aimed at controlling people.

I also reject the idea of an anthropomorphic God who needs endless appeasement to keep from losing his temper and smiting the whole lot of us into oblivion. That’s pretty much the description of the Abrahamic God of the Old Testament, the one most fundamentalist, evangelical Christians are always falling back on to justify their hateful, bigoted ideologies, in spite of the fact that Jesus made it clear that he showed up to give us a new, improved, more compassionate law of the land.

Either you is or you ain’t a follower of rules according to Christ, but no matter what you believe, “God” is an idea way too big to fit into the tiny boxes most organized religions prefer. I’ve already written about what I think “God” really is, although I prefer terms like Spirit or Creator over anthropomorphic labels.

The ideals Jesus taught are wonderful, but I refuse to limit myself to only one teacher, therefore I also study the teachings of Buddhism, the Taoists, the Hindu sages, and many other philosophies. Humanity is far too diverse for there to be only one right spiritual path.

I can’t accept the idea that there is only one way to gain entry to “kingdom of heaven” or nirvana and attain reunion with our Creator, if such an event is possible. If we do have souls, and I think that’s a pretty good possibility, each of us and all that we experience is a only a dim reflection of one facet of the whole that is the Universal Spirit or “God”.

Every great spiritual movement in the world can be reduced to just one or two primary ideas: overcoming the illusion that is life as we experience it and/or the progression of our souls toward reunion with our Creator. I believe we are here to learn to rejoice in our differences, to revel in our diversity – the infinite permutations of that which is the universe, and to leave the world a better place than when we arrived..

To my mind, we are “God’s” way of experiencing itself – without cold, one cannot know hot. In the absence of light, one cannot conceive of darkness; without strife, peace is a meaningless abstraction. Some would respond that this line of reasoning means violence, torture, and all forms of viciousness in the world are necessary, and to a point they’re right.

Without knowledge of war, mankind would never be able to appreciate peace, but humanity has also been blessed with the gift of intelligence and reflection. We can learn from our mistakes, and there is no reason for mankind to continue suffering atrocities such as war, genocide, predation, and poverty.

It’s our sacred duty to learn from the past and move forward, just as we have a duty to strive to emulate the examples set for us by such enlightened individuals as Jesus Christ, the Buddha, Krishna, Gandhiji, Mother Teresa, and countless others throughout history. We will never discover a spiritual path that appeals to or is acceptable to all of humankind.

Just as a world in which we all looked alike would be a terribly boring place, so would a world where all men agreed on every idea. Without disagreement, there can be no learning, but the missing key to a more peaceful world is, and has always been tolerance.