On the Road

So what is the something that prevents me from truly believing in any established religion?

I come from a line of Danish theologians but have other genes that have led several in my family to become scientists. I seem to have a foothold in both mindsets and have begun to think that the frontiers of theology are actually to be found in science and science fiction.

I live in NYC but for many years I would visit my late aunt in LA (and I swear the minute I left the airport and went into the sunlight there my brain became far more credulous). She was a minister of Religious Science which is part of the New Thought movement begun in the 19th century partly influenced by Ralph Waldo Emerson. This offshoot, Religious Science, was founded by her mentor Ernest Holmes who knew the "Secret" long before Rhonda Byrne - in other words there is little new under the sun.

Being an omniverous reader I would browse among the books in her library. There were several Bibles and concordances, the books of Ernest Holmes, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita, the Upanishads, books by Blavatsky, Gurdjieff, Sri Ramakrishna and others. I found that all this "new thought" still relied on old teachings.

The universe is approximated to be 157 billion light years in diameter and 13.7 billion years old, consisting of possibly one trillion galaxies each containing billions of stars with countless planets orbiting them. We are, in all likelihood, not the end all, be all of creation. I believe there are other intelligent lifeforms out there, though not necessarily in our Milky Way, and their way of looking at the universe and their place in it will certainly bear little resemblance to any of our earthly religions where we most assuredly created our gods in our own image.

J. B. Phillips once wrote a book titled Your God is Too Small which he spent the rest of the book refuting to his own satisfaction. However that is my take on the so-called revealed religions - these gods are far too androcentric and Earth-centered, their scope far too limited. Would a deity who could see a sparrow fall on Earth and a similar creature on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy really be too concerned if one wore linen and wool mixed together or women wore men's clothing?

These beings on other worlds may not have anything remotely male or female about them. There are creatures on Earth that have no sex (ie. amoebas), creatures that change sex or develop into a specific sex due to who it is they first encounter, creatures who are both male and female and species of fungi that have 20,000 sexes! If god encompasses them all how can he have only one particular sex? Therefore I simply cannot believe in that male god pointing the finger at Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the Judeo-Christian tribal god who runs around having tantrums. And this variety of lifeforms is just on one planet - who knows what forms life takes elsewhere in the universe.