Church of Me

[kentauros]

[font size="4"]Church of Me[/font]
sean stubblefield

Every religious ideology contains similar essential precepts and fundamental edicts at their core.

Such as the concept of doing unto others as you would have done to you, and a sense of being connected to a cosmic energy source or consciousness greater than ourselves.

These commonalities among separate religions indicate and signify a profound revelation: that the spiritual foundation of all of these religions is the same. And what is religion but a philosophy of spirituality that recognizes and professes a connection of the self to the big picture?

A belief known as Foundationism seeks to integrate and reconcile any differences to focus on and discover the shared points of every organized and traditional religion.
(more at link)

For the most part, I agree with this blog post. Where I disagree is with the following:

To us, the word `God’ has no singular and finite definition… that it may relatively be used to describe what a person or faith-community feels to be the ultimate in their own belief system; or what is of basic and ultimate value and significance in their own lives.

In my mind, God/Source/All-That-Is does have a singular definition or existence. My definition is ever-evolving, though slowly, as new information comes to me that broadens my ideas further. The rest of that paragraph there is agreeable as well, as it does then offer a broader definition or idea. And this paragraph redeems Foundationism further:

Foundationist priests do not claim the right to know, interpret or mediate God for others; preferring, instead, to guide individuals towards defining paradigms and reality constructs for themselves.

There is some synchronicity going on for me with this post. Earlier today I had answered yuiyoshida's question about what are our beliefs, and while I had said I was a New-Ager, I'd also mentioned I would likely be a Foundationist in the Babylon 5 universe. (My favorite character, Dr. Stephen Franklin, is a Foundationist ) And then I stumble upon this blog post on the Interfaith Org site when looking at the "General Articles" section.

And, it seems to me that Foundationism is the epitome of what Interfaith is all about. I'm sure there's overlap with Unitarian Universalists, but I haven't compared the two in order to discover just what is the same. Anything that brings us together through commonality is a good thing.

[rug]

2. That film, and you, are both from the Church of Almighty God, correct?

http://www.findshepherd.com/?s=church+of+almighty+god

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Lightning

[kentauros]

3. I'm glad you know more about that and posted.

I wasn't sure how to reply as their post seemed to have next to nothing to do with my OP. I guess it was simply cleverly-disguised spam, and thus their removal from DU.

[rug]

4. I counted three of them.

Dangerous spam too imo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flirty_Fishing

Although there are some here who feign an inability to distinguish this from colanders and cathedrals.

[kentauros]

5. That's rather weird, too.

Sure, our monitors likely look upon everything we post as "rather weird" as well. Yet, I don't think our participants here quite resort to behaviors like that just to get others to believe them.

You know, you should write a book on this stuff. Just a little ebook we can all carry around with us for reference