Hey everyone. I've always been really curious about different religions. As a little bit of background, I grew raised Christian, my mother married a man who practiced Judaism and then they adopted 2 children who were Hindu from India. I have had a very different religious experience to say the least because we practiced all of the religions in the house hold.
I strayed away from Christianity around the age of 20. I would say that I actually strayed away before then as I stopped attending church and stopped practicing the religion around the age of 16 but I still always considered myself to be a Christian. Why I changed my views at 20 was because of a philosophy class I had taken during college.
Learning a lot about western philosophy and finding that most of the great philosophers in the world do not really practice any religion was fascinating to me. This class focused a lot of the philosophy of religion and taught a lot about how these religions were started and how they changed over the years in to the current forms practiced today. The religions that truly fascinated me were the predominantly Asian religions. Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism in particular.
I strongly agree with Buddhism in many ways but I myself have never been able to fully practice Buddhism due to the sobriety and celibacy clauses in it. I feel that if you are going to practice a certain religion that you should do so to the best of your ability and try to incorporate all aspects of the religion into your life. I still read up a lot about Buddhism and thoroughly enjoy things like meditation and even practice kundalini however I just cannot call myself a Buddhist.
During this philosophy course I began to consider myself a Taoist which is kind of a branch off of Confucianism. For those of you who do not know about Taoism, the Tao literally means "way" or "path" in Chinese. Taoism is the focus on your "way" or "path" through life. The great Confucian philosopher Lao Tzu wrote the Tao Te Ching which is really the only book that means anything to the religion. It is a very short manuscript and can be read from front to back in about a day that has many great teachings and thoughts. If you cannot read Chinese you have to find the best translation of it that you can and I have read about 3 different translations at this point. What I have gathered from it is that we are all on our own path through life that is decided by us and the decision that we make throughout this life.
Lao Tzu basically thought that he was in control of his own destiny. That there was no plan that a higher being had for him but instead he could control his own life and based on the decisions he made about certain things is what directed him down one path or another. He neither confirmed nor discredited the fact that there is a god, instead just accepting that there is something that has created everything. To me that something would be god. A god in the sense that it created the universe but it doesn't have a grand plan for everything. This god could be the many different forms but no one knows for sure. To the Christians it is something that created man in his image, to scientists this god would the the big bang, to to Native Americans this is Mother nature. There are many different ideologies about how the universe was formed but whatever formed it would be the god of everything regardless of what it is.
This is the religion I have chosen. It seems to be the easiest for me to understand and also the most comfortable for me to follow. I find solace in the idea that I create my own destiny. I enjoy thinking about many different aspects of the universe and this religion allows me to do so while still having something to believe in. Anyone who wants to read the story of Lao Tzu I strongly encourage it. He was a man that wrote a book that an entire religion was founded on, based on the things he learned and thought of through life, and then disappeared over night. There are many different stories of him but they are all truly a fascinating and it is great religion! Thanks for reading!
Please tell me about your ideologies.