On Apr 12, 2012, at 10:27 PM, Xenophaneros Anartaxius wrote:
[Temporary Internet connexion during my travels]
I found at an early age that making up one's own religion saves a
lot of work and results in a much more pleasant life. You can
choose a god, or no god, and what you must do or not do. To quote
Mark Twain: 'Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s
habits.' It is especially useful to get other to following in one's
wake. Alas, I was not successful in this, so must go it alone.
Without realising it, most make up their own religion anyway. That
inner heretic of the mind is a busy bee. But in the end, you find
out that whatever spiritual path you thought you followed or
created, was wrong.
Robert Thurman, who's a professor at Columbia, was talking to another
prof. and was surprised to find out that before about 600 AD IIRC, it
was considered normal for each person to have their own belief
system, in effect each person had their own religion. It wasn't
actually till later with the continued rise of organized religion
that beliefs became uniform and established with "rights" and
"wrongs". So in the overall history of religion, the idea of holding
a fixed or canonical set of beliefs is actually rather new.
