Our religious Crazy Quilt

So why do we have such a hodge-podge of belief systems today? Are any of them right? Well that is something to think about. I have been to many different Christian churches and even to a synagogue and I have yet to find one that I think has it all right. But then, who am I to judge? If I knew it all then perhaps I would be obligated to start my own religion as a service to my fellow man. There seem to be more different belief systems than there are countries even.

I think we have this huge variety because nobody can really prove who is right and who is wrong, and maybe that is a good thing too. After all, isn't being human about the freedom to choose? Lower animals cannot choose, because they do not have the capacity for reason. Higher beings may also not be able to choose, because there is no choice when you know absolutely what is right. So would there be any free will if everything were revealed to everyone? Perhaps being human is a vacation from being God? Or is being part of the divinity a vacation from being human. Are the two simply different states of the same spirituality, just as energy and matter are two states of the same physicality?

I look at how we play games. Nobody wants to lose all the time, but neither do they want to win all the time. If either of these happens we often stop playing after a while. So maybe it is an essential part of the human spirit not to know and to be always striving to learn. So each patch in the quilt has its own pattern and texture and each is beautiful in some ways and maybe not so beautiful in others. Until and unless we have many many patches, the quilt appears unbalanced, because no two are alike, but with the huge variety a balance is achieved in the overall mosaic. I wonder how a lawn would appear to us if every single blade of grass were exactly like every other one. Would it appear perfect or maybe only artificial and boring?

Of course the next question is which one has it mostly right? And the answer is.....Maybe all of them. What, after all, do most modern belief systems have in common? Well, for one, they all share a belief in good and evil. They all believe that certain things are good and others are bad, virtuous versus sinful, positive and negative. Duality seems to be inherent in every belief system, except, perhaps, the atheist belief system that discounts the existence of a creator or controller and attributes everything to some kind of "lucky accident" theory. Of course, if you try to pin down an atheist as to how that accident occurred or why, and back them up to each level until they are left with an inert singularity that could never be anything else without the existence of a creator, then they retreat to pointing out the flaws in creation, ie. Disease, pain and crime.

But are these flaws? If there was no disease, what would health be? Without the capacity for pain can we ever know ecstasy or joy? Since crime is deviance, without it, could there be a "normal". It seems that all of these depend for existence upon the existence of an opposite. Everything seems to have two sides, just as God said, as portrayed by George Burns: I never really learned how to make something with only one side.