Originally posted by Varqa
As I already mentioned there are many religious leaders who are using God to make a lot of money out of people.
There are a lot of religious ideas out there that makes you so called intellectual types cringe. Believe me most of it makes me cringe as well. Adam and Eve, Heaven and Hell, Satan, Sin and Salvation, Father and Son, these I believe have been gros ...[text shortened]... thwhile. Yours maybe money, power, education, knowledge, sex, family.... Mine happens to be God.
You may deny this, but we all need something (a crutch) to make our lives worthwhile.
But this says nothing more that that we exist in embodied form with conscious, thinking, emoting minds. That we do not exist any other way.
I wouldn’t call the “material” (including concepts) that we use to compose meaningful or worthwhile lives “crutches.” A crutch is something you depend on when you’re wounded; just as a map is something you use to find your way to someplace you haven’t been. When you’re well, you do not cling to the crutch; when you arrive at your destination, you fold away the map and see where you are.
If I were to suggest that you use the concept of a God (your concept and understanding of that) as part of the material you use to compose your life, would that be accurate? I am not questioning by that your conclusion that such a God exists, any more than I’m questioning that your mind exists. That’s not my point. The point is clutching (since that nicely rhymes with “crutching”...).
As soon as you begin to clutch at your concept of God, as soon as you try to impose that on others (which I have never seen you do, by the way), you start down the path of “idolatry.”
_______________________________
There are no idols
except the ones you need:
that is how you know them—
When you no longer need them,
they fall apart—
Watch out!
if they start to crumble
before you have walked away…
_______________________________
I have no problem with people whose religious expressions are simply part of how they compose meaning in their lives. And Baha’i is certainly a very broad and affirming expression. I am only responding to that “crutch” thing, and the notion that people who are atheists or non-religionists or non-theistic monists (like I am: think Zen or Advaita Vedanta, or the like) cannot compose lives as rich and meaningful as theists—if that is what you imply.
a God that teaches us to grow out of our selfish, self centered little beings
Zen and Vedanta teach the same thing, without a god.