Love G-d, Love People, Nothing Else Matters

I'm going to Uganda because I want to know what poverty means.

Religion is Dead.

Religion is a product of culture. Period. Your religion is how you are raised. If you were raised in the middle east, you would be Islamic. Only when we accept this do we become tolerant.

This has been hard for me to accept. Growing up, I've always been taught that Christianity was the way to life, the only way. Now, I know that is not true. Religion is not synonymous with love. G-d is love (so say the scriptures), therefore, G-d is not religion. Religion is exclusive. Religion, in it's present day context, has become nothing more than politics. A campaign of persuasiveness.

What if I were to say that scripture calls us to be good people. What if I were to say that the gospel is an example of what a non-oppressive lifestyle looks like and that religion, of any kind, simply perverts that. As an example, the evangelical believes in showing people Jesus. However, by being so strongly convicted that you are to tell people about your culture (or religion), are you not just loving yourself? What if you just developed a genuine relationship with people. What if you cared about the things they were going through enough to not talk about your religion and simply love them. Does G-d not exist in that relationship? In that love?

This is not a call to hate religion, just to understand it.

Love G-d and love people. ALL of the law and the prophets hang on these. (Matthew 22:40)

Religion is dead. Jesus is alive.

Understanding

It doesn't take much time to realize that the way America portrays Islam is wrong.

Find out the truth about Islam.

Also, love your enemies.

YES! Finally. Soulmates 4 lyfe!

Happiness is Emptiness

(The meaning behind the blog URL)

Can happiness really be empty? If so, why do we exist? Who is God and what does he do? How is he all-loving?
First, just to be clear, these are the questions that I ask myself everyday. These are the reasons that all I have is ideas. I am a religious person, I am a spiritual person, I believe in God, and most importantly, I am insignificant. It seems that this has become the basis of my faith in recent months. I find myself struggling daily with the question, how is God all-loving? To explain this problem is a common example. I find myself praying about things at times such as a friend that is sick. When this friend becomes better, I say, “Thank you God, you have healed my friend”. In the same amount of time that my friend is miraculously healed, a child in Africa prays intently for one meal for the day, but sadly dies of starvation in weeks to come.
To believe in God, do I honestly have to believe that my white, middle-class, American friend was favored over a starving child in Africa? This is the kind of thinking that is typically fostered in churches, not to degrade church in any way, or to say that any church intentionally wants us to believe that we are favored in any situation, but churches often cheapen God’s grace and mercy by labeling anything happy with God’s name. The sad truth is, the reason churches harvest this kind of thinker is that they fail to deal with tough issues such as the problem of an all-loving God. So the question is does God fail to meet the all-loving status or could it be that our idea of God is completely off?
Most Christians believe that we are to be the hands and feet of Jesus. But most Christians also get upset when any man is credited for an act such as removing cancer from an individual’s body. This idea is very paradoxical. If we are called to be the hands and feet of Jesus, and we want to believe that God is all-loving, then it makes sense to believe in a God who works solely through us and in us. A child starving in Africa says nothing to limit God’s power and love, but it does everything to show us where we are failing to allow God’s love to flow through us.
Everywhere I go and everywhere I look people are searching for happiness. Most days all I want out of life is to find happiness, but I think I couldn’t be farther from the truth in this. In a sense, to be a Christian, happiness has to be emptiness. This idea seems extremely controversial but logically, it shouldn’t be. To explain how happiness is emptiness in one question I would say something like, “When was the last time you saw a married couple that was happy all of the time?” The bad thing about happiness is that it is temporary. Happiness comes and goes and when it goes (which is inevitable because it is waged on our feelings and emotions which are also temporal) it leaves us feeling worse than before with possibly even more problems to deal with. Another bad thing about happiness, from a spiritual standpoint, is that it promotes selfishness very strongly. This explains why happiness has to be emptiness to be a Christian. Jesus says, “Love others as I have loved you”. In the hardest case, this means that I should love my enemies unconditionally. In a life striving to find happiness, this would be next to impossible.
Although happiness, in most cases, is empty, I do believe happiness exists. To relate back to the earlier question of an all-loving God, we sort-of have to believe in happiness to believe that God loves us and in the same sense, we have to believe in happiness in order to find a soul-mate that we will spend the rest of forever with. The conclusion was met earlier that happiness that is sought after is selfish and can therefore be named empty as well because something done out of selfishness cannot also be done out of love. This means the only real happiness is something that cannot be found. In a sense, it can only be given. Because real happiness can only be given and good things exist out of love and love only, then the only way to happiness is through love.
I believe that God is calling us to abandon our search for happiness.
We are insignificant as individuals. But together we are not. Therefore, may we long to make a difference, not for ourselves, but for others.