99% of Open Source Religion is Not About Religious Beliefs
Yes, that title is designed to make you double-take a little bit. Now that I’ve got you here, I want to explain something of a contradiction within Open Source Religion, or rather how beliefs can be viewed.
Look up any definition of religion and you’ll find the mention of beliefs. Beliefs, as I say, are the building blocks of a religion. However, there is an interesting distinction between religious and non-religious beliefs. Take Love at First Sight; it’s certainly a belief, but it belongs to no particular religion. The same can be said of the belief that The Color Red Represents Anger and/or Passion, or that Life is Unfair. With that in mind, I’d like to contend that…
99% of your beliefs are non-religious
This is very important and I’ll tell you why. Beliefs color everything you think, say, and do. All your relationships, life goals, choice of pets, and eating habits are dictated directly by what you believe or don’t believe. So rather than allowing these beliefs to passively dictate your life, suppose you got a hold on what you believe. Which leads me into my next point.
Those 99% of non-religious beliefs are also the most flexible of your beliefs
Try imagining changing your religious beliefs, it’s not an easy task. But any number of ideas or experiences can change your non-religious beliefs in seconds. You might have always thought “You Get What You Deserve” until one day you’ve lost your job and your significant other asks for a divorce. You might suddenly believe “Life is Unfair”. Then a friend might give you a talk after all of this, telling you to get a great attorney and convince you “Life is Unfair, but You Can Make it Unfair in Your Favor”.
As you can see, your 99 percenters are very malleable; but that fact can be both dangerous and beneficial. Either you don’t have control and are thus at the whim of life and its hazards, or you are in control and able to hold on to life saving belief modules, while perhaps letting go of the rotten ones.
Quick Question: What is the contradiction I mention earlier?Answer: While I contend that 99% of your beliefs are non-religious, I’m also saying beliefs (all beliefs) are the building blocks of religion, even if it is your “personal” religion. For me, the distinction seems to be that some beliefs more or less originate from Proprietary Religions (Christianity, Buddhism, etc), so I call these religious beliefs. However, despite this, all beliefs are building blocks of religion, personal or organized.[/pl_alertbox type="info"]
How to Get Started
If you want to start right away on getting control over your beliefs, I’d recommend signing up at OpenSourceReligion.net and just making a few forum or blog posts outlining some of your own belief modules and discussing how they fit in your life, what caused you to believe them, and what you might do to improve them.
And with a bit of patience you’ll have access to the Belief Genome soon, where you can map, module by module, your entire belief structure.