That Jesus Fellow, Just Generally Speaking

You may have noticed a few posts in which I refer to the Bible, the relationship between religion and politics, the relationship between religion and individual choice, and so on.  I doubt very much that many, if any, of my friends would describe me as particularly religious.  I haven't gone to church in quite some time.  I think that my mother worries that I've turned into a godless sinner wallowing in a profligate lifestyle, and I think my sister is convinced that I haven't spent any time cultivating a personal faith-relationship with GOD.  

That being said, I actually am very religious, in a sneaky way that most people don't recognize, and generally think that religion, any and all religion, is a good thing.  I can't help but notice that however much I dislike the theology of the Mormon church, Mormons as individuals are typically kind, generous, reliable people who are very family oriented.  The same goes for Muslims, no matter how overhyped their bad eggs might be.  

I just don't think that people approach religion very sensibly, and it makes religious people come off as a gaggle of thoughtless assholes.  To cite one example, an incident that basically killed my urge to go to church, I once listened to a guy giving a sermon about Jonah (who was swallowed by a whale).  He started talking about Nineveh, and then said, "Now, I don't know how big Nineveh was, but..."  I immediately looked at the footnotes of my Bible (a New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, NSRV).  The FIRST footnote in the book of Jonah says "Niniveh (the capital of the Assyrians who destroyed Samaria in 722 BCE)" which starts to give you an idea of its size.  The footnote for the verse that says "now Nineveh was an exceedingly large city" explicitly tells you how big Nineveh was.  "Excavations at the site of Nineveh...have revealed a city about three miles long with a city wall eight miles around."  The Google search for Nineveh pulls up this, and the first link on the Google search tells you how big it was.  It took me less than ten minutes to figure out how big Nineveh is, just now.  This guy was giving a sermon, in public, to an entire congregation, and couldn't be bother to do a Google search and read a Wikipedia article.  

This, to me, is indicative of the amount of effort the average lay Christian puts into their religion, which is disgusting.

Here are my basic theological tenets:

1)  There is a God.  God is not an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omnipresent, anthropomorphic being.  If I had to take a swing at it, I would say that God is best described by Nishida in this book.

2)  Good and evil are terms that are defined by individuals in relation to an interests own self-interest as defined within their cultural framework.  Good and evil are the moral froth that are produced as a side effect of a consciousness' interpretation of events.  Good and evil, when defined by a society or group of people, are the arithmetic mean of each composite individual's personal definition of good and evil.  

3) Every individual has the responsibility to decide for themselves what is good/evil, just/unjust, right/wrong.  The yardstick by which these definitions should be measured is the collective good of humankind, and thought should go into the creation of these definitions.  

4) The Bible is a good reference in the effort to create these definitions, inasmuch as it is the documentation of oral traditions, poetry, pre-history, history, etc, told from the point of view of the perpetual losers of history, with complex intertextual relationships.  It can teach you a lot about humanity and inhumanity.  So can the Koran, and Hindu religious writings, and Buddhist writings, and history, literature, philosophy, practical experience, and quiet reflection.  An absolute, immutable TRUTH should be eschewed, because it turns people who believe in that TRUTH into assholes, and is typically the means by which small minds, cowards, and reprobates convince themselves of their own superiority and find the strength to continue on their path to disaster unswervingly.  

5) Think, dammit.  Don't be afraid to reject the traditional interpretations of morality or Christianity, because for the most part, they're based on cultural mores rather than good sense or scripture.  

6) Have compassion.  

7) Whatever beliefs you come up with are probably flat-out wrong, or at the very least cover only a very limited scope accurately.  

Those are my fundamental religious beliefs.  I don't think that they're too obnoxious.  The common argument that I get against them is that not everybody is as smart as me, has the time to study all that, or that my interpretations are pure heresy (this last I've only gotten once, but I included it so that there would be three objections for aesthetic reasons, and also because I think it's funny that people are still called heretics in this day and age).  My response is that if you know that you aren't that smart, and haven't spent much effort reading and thinking about scripture, you probably shouldn't be so damn sure about what's right and wrong, and what God wants us to be doing, should you?