How to Choose a Religion - A Prudent Shopper's Guide

What are the most important choices you will ever make in your life? You may first think of the big-ticket purchases you make. A house is probably the the most expensive purchase. Replacing your car every few years is another major choice. But several other decisions have a far greater impact on the quality of your life. Your choice of spouse, or your decision not to marry. Your choice of career.

Other crucial choices may not even appear to be choices at all. Your choice of which community to call home is a choice that has great impact on the quality of your life, yet many people never approach that decision in a conscious fashion. Many people simply remain in the community of their youth without making a conscious choice among all the towns, cities, states, and countries in which they could live. Perhaps the town in which they were born is the optimum location in which to spend their entire lives, but should that choice just be abdicated to habit?

As with the choice of a home town, the choice of a religious home is often left to habit. There are people who choose communities far from their place of birth to call home, and there are others who carefully consider such a move before consciously choosing their birth town as their lifetime residence, but such people are in the minority. Likewise with religion. While a few choose a new religion, or carefully compare religions and consciously choose their birth religion, most remain with the religion of their childhood out of habit.

If you were to move past habit and decide to consciously choose a religion, what would your criteria be? Let me suggest several questions you might want to ask.

1. What is the single most important function you want your religious organization to serve? To have a statement of belief that agrees with your vision of the nature of God? To provide ceremonies in which you feel comfortable participating. To offer inspiring weekly sermons? To provide fellowship with like-minded people? To provide a structure for civic action and community welfare? Or to answer some other primary need?

2. Are you looking for an organization that supports your personal relationship with God, or a church that offers a single level or hierarchic structure of clergy to act as intermediaries?

3. Are you looking for an organization that aligns with your beliefs about the nature of God, reward and Heaven, damnation and Hell, sin, forgiveness or not, vengeance and compassion, civic responsibility, and a myriad of other questions? Or do you want a church that is acceptive of varying beliefs among its members? Or are you unsure of your beliefs and values and are looking for a church that will tell you what you should believe?

Have you ever attended a service of a different denomination? If so, were you able to identify what you liked and didn't like, or were you caught up by how "different" the experience felt?

This week, consider attending a religious gathering of another faith. If nothing else, you may gain a greater appreciation of others in your community.

On the Unworkability of Vengeance

I find three major reasons to purge all thoughts and feelings of vengeance from my life:

Read this article on vengeance at http://www.quotes-daily.com/2009/04/on-unworkability-of-vengeance.html

An introduction to Buddhism for Christians

I occasionally quote the Buddha and the Dalai Lama, and have found that this makes some of my readers uncomfortable. With apologies both to those who are well versed in Buddhist philosophy and to those who have been taught that Buddhism is a pagan affront to Christianity, I would like to present my two-minute overview of Buddhism.

Siddhattha Gotama, known as the Buddha, lived in India about 500 BC - at the time the second temple was being constructed in Jerusalem. He was a wise teacher, and is revered, but not worshiped, by those of the Buddhist philosophy. He was born into a wealthy family, but left home as a young man to seek insight into the nature of life. At first, he denied himself all earthly goods and pleasures, nearly starving himself. Then he came to the realization that possessions and comforts were not inherently evil and that asceticism (self-denial) was not a path to enlightenment or unity with Spirit. He discovered that the block to enlightenment is ATTACHMENT to the things of this world, rather than the things themselves. This great revelation is known as the Middle Way - living in moderation, without either gluttony or denial, and without attachment.

Buddhists believe that suffering is inherent in life, and that suffering is the result of attachment. Eliminate attachment to the things of this world, and you eliminate suffering.

Over the last 2500 years, Buddhism has spread and has developed variants. Some branches consider the Buddha to be what Catholics would call a "saint," but others do not. Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is the current leader of the Tibetan branch of Buddhism. There are about 350 million Buddhists in the world today. I encourage you to read more about Buddhism.

Here are some of my favorite Buddhist quotes:

Hate is never conquered by hate,
Hate is only conquered by love.
- The Buddha

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it, no matter if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
– The Buddha

You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.
- the Buddha

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.
– The Buddha

What we think, we become. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.
- the Buddha

Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own unguarded thoughts.
- The Buddha

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle,
and the life of the candle will not be shortened.
Happiness never decreases by being shared.
- The Buddha

I teach one thing and one only:
that is, suffering and the end of suffering.
- The Buddha

If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

The purpose of our lives is to be happy.
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Through violence, you may 'solve' one problem, but you sow the seeds for another.
- Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile, but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy.
- Thich Nhat Hanh

The only reason we don't open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don't feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with. To the degree that we look clearly and compassionately at ourselves, we feel confident and fearless about looking into someone else's eyes.
- Pema Chodron

Be gentle first with yourself - if you wish to be gentle with others.
- Lama Yeshe

Oscar Wilde: Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
- Oscar Wilde

They are different from us, they live in a far-off land, we don't understand their ways, so they must be immoral. That kind of thinking got our world where it is today.

Trust No One

It may seem cynical to say, "Trust No One," but it can actually be a reassuring and positive thought.

Read this article on trust at http://www.quotes-daily.com/2009/04/trust-no-one.html

Have all Republican Christians Forgotten about the Good Samaritan

One of the most famous passages from the New Testament is the story of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:25-37. The parable tells of a man lying injured by the side of the road being ignored by men who professed religion, but being aided by a Samaritan - an individual from a group not generally known for charity. Jesus praises the act, and ends the parable by saying,"Go and do likewise."

A recent Gallup poll reports that 79% of Americans identify themselves as Christian. An even higher percentage of Republicans consider themselves Christians. So where is the charity toward those who have lost jobs in the Republican-led recession and whom President Obama is now attempting to rescue? Ever since Barack Obama was elected president, the blogosphere has been filled with hateful rhetoric decrying charity toward the jobless. One of the more unfortunate quotes on the blogs is Adrian Rogers saying, "You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity." Adrian Rogers was the three-term president of the Southern Baptist Convention who also said, "I believe slavery is a much maligned institution; if we had slavery today, we would not have this welfare mess." Where is the Christian spirit in such a sentiment?

Beyond being the Christian thing to do, government creation of jobs is good for the economy and for future generations of Americans. Without federal government support for job creation, our great country would continue its downward spiral. Private companies laying off yet more workers in response to lower sales, causing yet more unemployed workers to cease being consumers, further reducing the demand for goods and services, and triggering more layoffs in a tragic cycle that only federal government intervention can reverse. State and local governments, without the power to balance income and expenses across budget periods, also lay off, reducing or eliminating education and other services vital to ourselves and our children. These local government layoffs also begin the same downward spiral of layoffs, reduced spending power, and more layoffs that we see in the private sector.

America's jobless need help, now. America's economy needs a shot-in-the-arm, now. I'm all for free enterprise. For all its flaws, it is far superior to any alternative. Free enterprise has and will continue to make America the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but ...

One of the biggest flaws of free enterprise is its tendency to create boom-and-bust cycles. When times are good, optimism reigns supreme. Everyone is sure that things can only get better. Consumers consume, investors invest, businesses hire additional workers and increase production. This is what happened in the late 1990's. In Silicon Valley, as an extreme example, companies speculated on an exponential growth in demand for computers, internet bandwidth, and electronic gadgets of all kinds. No one was without a job, and the salaries of even entry-level engineers were bid up to astronomical levels.

Then bust hits. Goods have been over produced, and begin to pile up in warehouses. Companies stop hiring, then they start laying off. Investors stop investing, and then attempt to convert their investments into cash. Laid-off workers stop consuming. The news media screams "Depression." Pessimism - fear actually - takes hold of the nation's emotions. That's America's situation today - fear rules, and few see good times returning quickly.

The solution to the boom-and-bust nature of the free enterprise system is for government to cool the economy when economic enthusiasm surpasses reality - such as in the late 1990's, and to stimulate the economy when pessimism strikes and American's become afraid to produce, hire workers, invest, and consume. Now is a time for our government to stimulate America's economy.

Critics raise the cry of creating inflation, "counterfeiting" money, and socialism. These arguments are badly timed. 1998 would have been a great time to argue for increased taxes to dampen an over-stimulated economy and build a war chest for hard times - such as today's recession. There will again be times when unrealistic optimism reigns in America, and an unsustainable boom needs to be moderated. That will again be a time to raise taxes to dampen the boom and rebuild the reserves.

It is always difficult to imagine times being different than they are today. Even though the cycles of boom and bust are fully predictable - if with irregular timing, people's emotions get caught up in the feeling that times will always remain good - or will always remain bad, whichever they are today.

America's government needs to spend more than it receives in bad times, and tax more than it spends in good times.

I commend to you the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, spoken in his second inaugural address in 1937, "In our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up, or else we all go down, as one people."