I believe there are worse sins than those the Catholic church prescribes. The worst thing, even worse than dishonesty, is ignorance. We all have our own spiritual path to walk down and must thoroughly embark on a search for divinity that forms the foundation of our secular and religious beliefs through our understanding of science, and a judgement of truth that is based on our reasoning on the balance of evidence. Once we have established the justification for our beliefs, we must then take the obligatory leap of faith for things that we cannot lean on our own understanding for.

A while ago i asked over 20 people i know who subscribed to New Age belief structures to state why they believed what they did, and the response alarmed me. When i asked the same number of Christians, they were all equally ignorant. There is an unwritten assumption that to be accept spirituality we must do it blindly, which i believe to be unsound. We have been given minds and conciousness that can sense and reason, for a reason. If we were here to behave that way, we would simply be robotic animals. I have to know why i believe what i do, and that it is justified. And i respect the beliefs of others when they are the same. We can’t all be scholars, but we have an individual responsibility to the truth and not to base our lives on ignorance.

The book i’m nearly finished writing is called “Let Me Know Your Name” is a scientific, intellectual and logical journey into the universe, the nature of God, historical analysis and answers for difficult questions. It ends with a number of conclusions, but essentially it is a statement of my own faith, why i believe what i do and what the end result of the search was.

This is that statement.

———————————

An argument that the brilliant Richard Dawkins often uses is that belief in a God is a facet of evolutionary development (i.e. the “mind” and other intangible functions being a construct of the brain in response to environmental stimuli) and the belief in a God is effectively indiscriminate as to who that God is. Frequently he answers that a belief in the Judeo-Christian God is no different than belief in Viking gods such as Odin or Thor. My own view is epistemological, in that all beliefs should be backed up and justified, not based on “faith” alone.

I am not an atheist because i see absolutely no evidence whatsoever to demonstrate there is no God.

I am not an agnostic because i believe in absolutes, the importance of investigation, and the need to understand and make a decision and choice as to the nature of my own existence.

I am not a humanist because i understand man to have been a spiritual creature since his evolution, and that homo sapiens to be too separate from the other animal species.

I am not a naturalist because science can only explain the nature of the universe and not the cause of the beginning of its existence.

I do not believe in Odin, Horus or Thor as they are polytheistic divinity structures that are logically impossible, clearly primitive and humanistic, and associated with cosmological entities.

I do not believe in Father Christmas because it is a literary fictional construct of someone’s imagination, and scientists have failed to detect his presence in the uninhabitable North Pole or find out where he lives.

I do not believe in invisible pink unicorns because science has not established them as an existent species, and they would be pink if they reflected pink electromagnetic radiation but could not be invisible at the same time (i.e. reflect no EM radiation).

I do not believe in the universe’s “energy” as a form of God we all exist inside or forms of pagan natural divinity, as it is logically impossible.

I am not a New Age practitioner because the belief system is a scrappy and syncretic mix of ancient ignorance and relativistic obscurantism; it misrepresents science and is logically impossible in most respects.

I am not a scientologist because scientology is an utterly ridiculous sci-fi religion dreamt up by Ron L. Hubbard that is scientifically corrupt and seeks to profit from its members.

I am not a Hindu as the polytheistic divinity structure of the Dharmic Vega gods is constrained by the physical universe and therefore logically impossible.

I am not a Buddhist as it is Dharmic religion with a logically impossible divinity structure, and does not offer a satisfactory or realistic explanation of man’s evil nature or the cause for the universe’s existence.

I am not a Mormon because it is a perverted polytheistic interpretation of Christianity that has a divinity structure that is logically impossible and the scriptures and evidence are written off by scholars.

I am not a Christ Scientist as i reject the idea that sin and evil are irrelevant and medicine is unnecessary.

I am not a Jehovah’s Witness because as a cult it is based on a flawed interpretation of another religion that has been removed from its original context.

I am not a literal creationist as science has revealed that our existence was driven by abiogenesis and Darwinian evolution over billions of years and the biblical scripture is metaphorical.

I am not a Satanist because i believe it is an extension of humanism and the concept of a human becoming its own God is logically impossible.

I do not worship my ancestors or objects on the earth because they are objects inside a physical universe arguably created by a supreme being outside of it.

I am a not a Jew because i am by race a gentile, i.e. my mother was not Jewish, and  i do not reject that the prophecies of the Old Testament have stopped or remained unfulfilled.

I am not a Muslim because the Qu’ran is scientifically unsound, the concept of God is logically impossible, i fundamentally disagree with the values and principles presented in Sharia law and the Hadith, the pronunciation of Christianity as corrupted has little to no basis and i do not recognise the nature of God to be the one presented through my own experience.

As an aside to that, i find it deeply unsettling that the Hadith states Mohammed had a wife of six years old that he consecrated his marriage with when she was nine.

I am a Christian because:

• The bible is the only scripture that correctly orders evolution as revealed to us through science;
• The spiritual description of our existence is the only one that aligns logically, philosophically and scientifically with modern science and our understanding of time, natural physical laws, spatial relativity and cosmology;
• The historical and archaeological evidence for the Bible and the events depicted in it is better than almost all other literary sources combined;
• That evidence arguably suggests the fulfilment of prophecy as recorded thousands of years before is the highest record (> 95%) of any spiritual movement;
• Only Christianity provides a way for our dark human nature to be reconciled with God;
• I agree with the  values, principles and morality proclaimed in Christ’s teaching;
• There is no other realistic explanation for the historical events of the 1st century other than a physical resurrection of Christ;
• My personal spiritual experience confirms the same.