Why So Many Different Religions???

Hasn't it ever crossed your mind? I am sure it has. Do you think your religion is the only true religion and the rest are fools? Or do you not believe in any religion, but feel that there is something... something bigger then just individual unconnected objects?

I was raised a Catholic. I believed in God until I was in my early 20's. It was at that point in my life, that I started seeing the world as a whole, and yet religion seemed to divide everyone.

Religion made less and less sense for me. Yet at the same time I knew that there was something connecting everything... something big.... something that was actually bigger than religion. Bigger because it existed not only in people, but in animals and plants and mountains and the air and so on and so on.

In the past twenty years, I have come to think of religion as a form of "expression" for something people feel inside their being. As primitive man felt this, it was our nature to explain it.

Independently, people all over the world took this inner feeling of there being something beyond our bodies, and from it, we created Gods and Goddesses and Mythical beings and God like animal spirits.

We felt connected to the heavens, and found ways to celebrate and honor that feeling.

Only problem is that as one group came up with their own unique way to express the awesomeness they felt inside their "inner being"... another group was coming up with their version.... which led to people fighting over who was right, and who had the "true" religion.

Here's my observation.... maybe it's not "God" we feel. Maybe it's a pure type of energy that coarses through us, and everything that exists in the entire universe, and when we connect to it, it makes us feel euphoric.

For me... I have found so much comfort by thinking in this way. Religion has it's good points, but it's one major downfall, is that it divides us... to the most extreme base, where we fight to the death over it.

Aren't we smarter than this???

I'll leave you to think about this..... more to come.....

Life in the Ocean and Our DNA

I watched a program about a group of scientists who are taking samples of water from all the oceans around the world.

It's called the Ocean Genome Voyage

They are trying to collect and identify DNA from the smallest of creatures, some microscopic. There is already information on most sea life, but only three or four types of microscopic life in the ocean has had its DNA documented. In their search, they have identified more than 1,800 new microscopic creatures. I can't tell you about all the technical stuff involving how they will go about mapping out the DNA of all these new found creatures, it's a subject all in itself. But, as I watched them talking about how individual strands of DNA from these new found creatures shared the same bits of information with all life, I felt sort of "at one" with everything.

I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual person. Spiritual in the sense that I believe everything is connected by some type of energy. I just don't believe in a superior being. But I do believe that everything in the universe is all connected. I don't know, maybe you could argue that nature, and science IS my religion....

I only bring this up because I think it's time for people to start looking at the world through different eyes.

When you think for example, that because of this project in the ocean, (just to identify DNA of life there) which then inadvertently "stumbles upon" 7,000 new creatures, you can't help but think that if there are that many creatures we didn't know about.... right here in our oceans, right here on our tiny planet... what other life must exist in the universe!

For me, all religion goes out the window with that kind of realization. We share the same bits of DNA with microscopic life... period. Microscopic life that has NO RELIGION. But yet we are connected.... pretty cool huh?