WHAT BELIEF SYSTEM FOR ME?
Through the years, and during the duration of this blog, I have been called an atheist, communist, socialist, Jew, Moslem, ad infinitum. So, it is fair to directly deal with it. What belief system do I adhere to? None, but I take from most of them. I am not out to save my own skin for eternity. I do not believe in man-made religions, which major religions are. The three major religions of the Western World all have much of their foundation in the patriarch, Abraham. I like him. In Genesis he confronts God about God's vengeance and over-reaction and brutality, and the God depicted in the Bible certainly needs that confrontation. But none of those 3 major religions follow the "good" parts of the Bible. They claim they do, but simply look at the actions of the people who wear their religion on their sleeve.
Here are some quotes that help me forge morals, ethics, compassion, empathy, love, tolerance, etc.:
"I am a man; nothing human is alien to me." -Terence
"He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone." -Jesus of Nazareth
"The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan values and ends is. . .the source of all religious fanaticism." -Reinhold Neibuhr
"Callous greed grows pious very fast." -Lillian Hellman
"I never knew any man in my life who could not bear another's misfortunes perfectly like a Christian." -Alexander Pope
"When a fellow says, 'It ain't about the money but the principle of the thing,' it's the money." -Frank McKinney Hubbard
""...we face the danger of a right-wing take-over and eventually a fascist society." -Rev. M. L. King, Jr.
"I consider myself a Hindu, Christian, Moslem, Jew, Buddhist, and Confucian." -Mohandas Gandhi
"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr." -Mohammed
"A half-truth is a whole lie." -Yiddish proverb
"I confess that I cannot understand how we can plot, lie, cheat and commit murder abroad and remain humane, honorable, trustworthy and trusted at home." -Archibald Cox
"We have among us a class of mammon worshippers whose one test of conservatism or radicalism is the attitude one takes with respect to accumulated wealth. Whatever tends to preserve the wealth of the wealthy is called conservatism, and whatever favors anything else, no matter what, they call socialism." -Ronald T. Ely
"Until you have become really in actual fact a brother of everyone, brotherhood will not come to pass. Only by brotherhood will liberty be saved." -Feodor Dostoevski
"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do at all in their separate and individual capacities." -Abraham Lincoln
"When a man has pity on all living creatures then only is he noble." -Buddha
"We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the same sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart." -H.L. Mencken
"My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests." -George Santayana
"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -George Bernard Shaw
"We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon." -Konrad Adenauer
"Most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing as we already do." -James Henry Robinson
Well, there you have it. Nit-pick it to death, think you have found an a-ha! moment to draw some conclusion about my thinking. I believe some of the above, but not enough to dress in vestments, or chant, or build huge edifices, or go to war, or whatever. There is truth in the quotes, there are shortcomings. Such is life.
