Well, let’s start with the Bible. I had my own at age eight. I had read it cover to cover twice by the age of ten, Bible readings from my mother twice a day with Sunday mornings dedicated to recital, with consequences for less than perfect performance. My mother was open to questions and I had many questions about concepts all in this book presented as absolute truth that appeared to me to be in conflict. Usually the conversations boiled down to my not being able to understand the mind if god as a flawed creation, pray for the peace the transcends all understanding, or sovereignty of god, just accept it. By age twelve I had a reference Bible with eight versions in columns side by side, and eight times the conflicts as two years before. Hebrew and Greek versions followed, along with dictionaries for those languages, but no answers emerged.

I’m 26, busy with college and I take an anthropology course in witchcraft and the Wiccan religion. Rituals galore, but like prayer, no solid responses or outcomes to correlate, eg. If a ritual with silver coins, green velvet cloth and moonlight leads to financial wealth, and there is no personal liability for prayer acceptance, just a series of acts to influence, than why are all Wiccan practitioners wealthy? History, world religion, and more anthropology classes follow and a general pattern emerges. Religion exists where groups of people experience death, risks, scarcity; every group of Homo sapiens ever to exist essentially, and the religion is always specific to the cultural understanding of the natural world, and the most prevalent risks in their environment. Religions generally present as separated absolute truth, but struggle with cultural shifts. The LDS church facilitates this by having a living profit who can change scripture at will, as it did in 1963 when it was no longer acceptable to teach that black people had dark skin because they were descended from the lines of Cain, while white people were descended from Able, the brother accepted by god. Some Christian churches have accepted female pastors, or gay people into the clergy in spite of very clear scripture addressing these things. I do not blame religion for shifting dogma to accommodate cultural evolution, and I do believe that faith based communities are integral to the human experience, important vessels that hold vast repositories of moral and cultural wisdom, but I think it is important to recognize that they are functional fictional constructs, and nothing more. If communication of one faith’s wisdom is accepted by another, both benefit, institution and individual. This flow of wisdom is hampered by “absolute truths” that cannot be negotiated as they are universally held in some arcane place or being, out of the reach of scientific or personal inspection, addressing things like the ether of our being, or the afterlife etc. Beliefs are important, I believe and have faith that I can do some things formerly unproven by accomplishment, I have that same faith for others based on long observation of their capabilities. I have theories about some observed wonders currently unexplained by science, and I like to discuss them with other people, it’s disappointing when we can only talk within a constraining ideology of some dogmatic absolute truth. I’m interested in your journey and your thoughts.