Really that important?

Ask the question "What is important to you" can be considered many different ways depending on the individual. In many cases people bring up religion and the impact that the structure their beliefs is encompassed around has made. I could easily delve into the structure of Christianity and what an impact it has made in my life, but the truth is, it is not just Christianity. All religions, all beliefs, anything that gives a human being's life purpose has grown to influence and shape me into who I am.

When I was growing up I had Christianity poured into me like a funnel. It was all I knew and I was taught that other religions were bad and Christianity was correct. I remember waking up every morning and going to church with my grandmother, sitting in the same pew, and listening to a monotone sermon every sunday. My mother and father and brothers never really attended church, nor did my grandfather. They did not believe they had to go to church to believe in what they did.

My grandmother died in 2003. I was in eighth grade at the time and her death impacted my family hard. She was the centerstone of our family, the rock. She kept the family together, and since her death it has fallen into dismay. I gradually stopped attending church over the years, mainly due to the fact that my aunts and uncles have become (or always were) hypocrits in their own rights. They ran me out of church by bad mouthing my mother which was unacceptable (and there is much more behind this story but for the sake of this blog post I am keeping it tightly knit). I could not fathom how someone who called themselves a Christian, who preached how they were right in their beliefs and justified their actions by the bible, could be how they were, a  hypocrit. However, they still preached how they were justified in God's eyes.

I slowly started believing in evolution over the years. Do not get me wrong, I am still a Christian, but I like to call myself a NEW AGE Christian. I define it as a person who believes in Christ, bases their actions on the concepts and idealogy of the Bible, but has embraced certain aspects that are unbeknownst to us in truth/fallacy. I can read the Bible, and I can shape my life to it, but in many senses I can not believe everything written. Mistranslation, missing information in time, and fallacy has all given me room to expand on what I focus on.

I have always been told, or tend to think of myself as a logical person. I believe that everything can be proven and yet not proven at the same time. While we claim something is true, we cannot logically state it as true. Anything can be proven false using logic.

After 911 everyone was very quick to jump on the bandwagon over racism and prejudice over the muslim community. History tends to repeat itself when our country does to muslim's what it did to the african american society. I knew this was wrong. I was alway taught to treat others how I want to be treated, that he who lives without sin shall cast the first stone kind of thing. Let me make this clear, practicing a different belief or religion may be a sin to certain other religions, but it is NOT anyone's place to cast judgement on them. I cannot recall how many times I have questioned my faith and what many Christians fail to realize is God says he wants us to question him. He wants to show us the answers that we do not comprehend. If we do not ask or question and just take everything as truth like a grain of salt, then how is that living?

I am one of the quickest people to defend a religion, belief, or community. I find it wrong to cast judgement on a group of people or persons just because they live life or view things differently than I/We do. In the end our beliefs all come down to a common goal and meaning.

Let me point this out real quick since I am on this subject of muslim and christianity. If we look at this from a geographical and anthropological standpoint we can find some interesting tidbits. First of all why do Christians for the most part always display Jesus as white? In no way could he have been white. Think about it. Jesus was from Jeruseleum, which is in the Middle East. The Middle Easts is a Arabic/Saudi ethnicity and always has been. Under no circumstanes could Jesus have been my skin color. I have come to accept that and no it as fact of our dimension (I say this because of the rules of logic/fallacy). Now in muslim beliefs their prophet was Muhammad. Both Jesus and Muhammad lived around the same time, and had the same intentions. Granted Jesus was for GOD and Muhammad was for ALLAH. Allah means God.

This is why I say things get mistranslated. What if muslim and christian beliefs were actually based off of the vey same start point, but somewhere got misconstrued. How can we say we are right and they are wrong? Do you want to die and find out? Is that how far this is going to go? I understand people are taught that we are to go out and preach the 'word' and convert, but it has gone to extremes. Jesus and St. Paul did not pressure or push people into conforming. They simple shared their stories. Jesus was a Jew afterall so he never pushed people into believing in him, he was there, he simple taught people how to live a better life and be better people, to not live out of anger, but to find peace. He was basically a hippy when you think about it.

So to wrap this up because I am getting long winded, when asked what is most important to me: it has to be my views. I have grown and shaped them over the years to what today is a very well rounded and logical standpoint. Everyone who has come into my life and left it has had a hand in molding what I believe in whether it be good or bad...