The thing with me is this: I don't regret or feel guilty about using contraceptives in my illustrious and somewhat craven past. I don't regret the abortions made in deliberations with past partners. I regret marriages far more than I regret divorces. I regret meeting some people far more than I regret marrying them.
I find that Christianity, so far as I know it from my present study of the congregational and doctrinal manifestations in this early epoch of the 21st Century, is highly dependent on people feeling absolutely horrible about themselves and their actions. I doubt that Christ had any such intention. I doubt Christ has anything at all to do with Christianity, per se, in the current epoch, and I seriously wonder if he ever did.
I am strongly drawn to some Christian, Islamic and Buddhist scriptures, for sure, because of their beauty and wonder, yet when you really research them all, they are fundamentally and equally appalling in terms of human rights, same sex expression and relations, contraception and indeed the importance of Man rather than People.
I have used passages from the Great Really Really Old Books as well as small enlightenments from Michel De Montaigne, atheistic Zen, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, and great novelists across the cultures and races of the Earth to gradually create or build my philosophy and indeed, my religion, per se. I think we all have this responsibility. Just because someone puts stuff on your dinner plate, it doesn't mean its good manners or good health to eat every bit of it.
I'm very fond of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, and have underlined and italicised the magical thinking of this lovely mind (If God isn't magical thinking, I don't know what else to call Him or Her, or Them):
“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [...]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
I find that Christianity, so far as I know it from my present study of the congregational and doctrinal manifestations in this early epoch of the 21st Century, is highly dependent on people feeling absolutely horrible about themselves and their actions. I doubt that Christ had any such intention. I doubt Christ has anything at all to do with Christianity, per se, in the current epoch, and I seriously wonder if he ever did.
I am strongly drawn to some Christian, Islamic and Buddhist scriptures, for sure, because of their beauty and wonder, yet when you really research them all, they are fundamentally and equally appalling in terms of human rights, same sex expression and relations, contraception and indeed the importance of Man rather than People.
I have used passages from the Great Really Really Old Books as well as small enlightenments from Michel De Montaigne, atheistic Zen, Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, and great novelists across the cultures and races of the Earth to gradually create or build my philosophy and indeed, my religion, per se. I think we all have this responsibility. Just because someone puts stuff on your dinner plate, it doesn't mean its good manners or good health to eat every bit of it.
I'm very fond of Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola, and have underlined and italicised the magical thinking of this lovely mind (If God isn't magical thinking, I don't know what else to call Him or Her, or Them):
“We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [...]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer.
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