Catholic church says not to take Bible as truth

[Neo]

Your sense of self is derived from your seperation from others. I believe part of the reason we are here is that we are in love with the feeling of being an "I." We saw our own reflection in matter and started clinging to it. There are a few physical theories which suggest that eastern religions may be on the right track. There was some good discussion about what it means to have an identity in the clones thread I believe.

One thing I find interesting/amusing is Buddhism. Your goal as a Buddhist is the ceasation of desire since desire is the root cause of all suffering. You can't hurt if you don't want or long for something. They spend most of their time meditating and with the hopes of becoming as enlightened as is possible on this physical plane before rejoining what they consider God to be. In my opinion there's nothing wrong with doing this, but I figure that as long as we are on earth we might as well make use of our time. If we fell into matter because we wanted to know ourselves and to learn it seems like a waste to rush to get back where we started. Yes there will be suffering but pain is a part of life. Without pain and cruelty we wouldn't know joy and kindness.

And while I'm at it, I might as well mention that I think the ultimate purpose of existence is to experience joy. Some would say the purpose is to love. While loving may be the best way to obtain joy, it's still the joy itself we're after. Plus I feel like it's kind of a slap in the face to those who may have recently lost someone or gone through a bad break-up. Some suggest the purpose of life is to learn, but I ask why do we want to learn? We learn because it gives a different kind of joy. We wouldn't learn if it made us feel bad. Same thing with helping people. Helping people and sacrificing ourselves for them makes us feel good. This is really a type of egoism, but I could argue that all actions are selfishly motivated, even that of self-sacrifice. It just depends on your perspective.

I feel like christianity is kind of a jazzed-up version of spirituality. If religion is a book, then christianity is the flashy movie inspired by it. It has its players, heros, enemies, and a personified God which thinks, makes choices, and becomes wrathful. When you apply these qualities it necessarily generates philosophical problems which drive some people (me) up the wall.