People carry a lot of baggage when it comes to the small three-letter, “God.”
I know, I’ve been in this religion business a long time – I’ve written books about God, authored countless articles and podcasts on God, and have given lots and lots of talks on the subject. CVC an acronym teachers of early readers use for three-letter words patterning consonant-vowel-consonant.
I’m going to suggest something that might surprise you: It doesn’t matter if God is real. It simply doesn’t matter if there’s an external deity who controls, condemns, or even cares. It just doesn’t matter.
Whether or not God is real is not what
religion is really about. What’s important
is your experience of life.
The true goal of a spiritual-religious life is
not to transcend what we have now in
favor of experiencing an afterlife – but
rather, to experience this life as
fully as we can.
Let me repeat that: the goal of a spiritual-religious life is not to transcend where we are now – but to be fully alive, fully aware, and fully here.
True religion should not set you apart from anyone. True religion should help you figure out that you’re a part of everything. A truly religious life isn’t about being at bliss with God or nirvana or heaven or something else. It’s is about living life fully – as it is ours to live – with the ups and the downs along the way.
A religion is a simply a collection of people who have agreed upon valuing certain things as more than just ordinary. That’s what real religion is about, and it has nothing to do with a deity. A deity is just the highest notion of the holy and the not-self.
We need to get past this idea of “us versus them.” (We believe in God, they don’t believe in God. We don’t believe in God, they believe in God. That’s craziness.)
The question of whether or not there is a God, doesn’t matter. It’s how you live your life that matters.
Spiritual-religious advice:
Forget about God, and think about living.
With love,
