Love as a symbol for the Ultimate Mystery requires faith that a connecting fabric stretches over all the universe, and trust that the inherent nature of that fabric is good...Contemplating Love as the Ultimate Reality forces us to stretch beyond the limits of our human reasoning skills, and admit to possibilities we will never be able to fully grasp. Read more
The fearsome, yet somehow oddly thrilling words jumped right off the page, crept stealthily past the obviously snoozing hogwash detector in my brain, and spoke directly to my heart: “Stage IV men and women will enter into religion in order to approach mystery…” I grasped the book a bit more tightly, reread the words, then threw it down. A prickly sensation worked its way up my spine. Read more
The bigger picture story is that humans seem to share a universal need to connect with something larger than themselves. It seems each individual religion was created by one group of people as their way to explain the universal human need for connection. Read more
The more we learn about the belief systems of other cultures, the more we learn to recognize that each was created by humans to address a universal human need to connect with something greater – to transcend the self. …and in some cases to provide answers about the meaning of life. Read more
...attempts to govern our society based on biblical authority represent a regressive or immature form of spirituality. Read more
If more people were connected at times to parts of the universe beyond their separate selves...they would care more about who is left out when certain religions claim superiority, and would care less about which religion was right. Read more
For some reason people seem to be able to apply more sophisticated reasoning to less crucial issues - "Do I have a good boss or a bad boss?" But when it comes to our most compelling social, political and theological issues, these same people insist there are only two possibilities--yes or no--limiting their reasoning to the same simple binary logic computers use.[1] Read more
Global communications are contributing to our realization of the universal truths brought to us in the holy books, and the religious stories told by other religions. Those of us willing to take the bird’s eye view global communications are granting us should noticing that all religions are localized expressions of a universal human need to form a story that gives meaning to life. It is evident that we now need...a bigger story. Read more
So the problem with assuming we know exactly who God is, and what “he” “wants,” is that it limits our understanding to that which our churches teach – and that God almost certainly excludes some of what is considered to be his own creation. When you think about it, this cannot really be. If we are to allow ourselves to fully explore the truth in an open and honest fashion, we must realize that God (or god) is something way beyond anything our limited human brains can understand. Admitting that we may not have the capacity to understand something so all-encompassing shows a much greater degree of humility, and brings us closer to the Truth. Read more
The need to address spiritual truth—that spirituality IS about way more than any given organized religion—and that we owe it to our children to encourage them to develop a broader, more authentic spirituality than what our holy books teach—is part of an ever-growing need in our society to embrace a “bigger” story. We need a story that encompasses both organized religion and open spirituality, one that can meld the rich rites and rituals of a given religious tradition with an open minded—and open hearted—welcoming of input from other sources of spiritual wisdom. Read more
Faith Beyond Belief
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