There Are More Similarities That Unify Us Than Differences That Pull U

[Kattaluna]

It never fails to amaze me how many things could in fact unify this closeminded world if we as a people could look past what most people see as differences. These differences are there to show us how vast our concepts of the Divine can be. Instead of seeing them as stumbling blocks why not use them as stepping stones to lift us higher? I love the idea that the Divine is also very human and can love, hurt , and understand us. If this is true, then consider that the way we know someone and the name we know them by may be different form others but dosen't change who and what that someone is. This is part of what makes the world and it's people beatiful reflections of their Divine Makers.

[kokigami]

It never fails to amaze me how many things could in fact unify this closeminded world if we as a people could look past what most people see as differences. These differences are there to show us how vast our concepts of the Divine can be. Instead of seeing them as stumbling blocks why not use them as stepping stones to lift us higher? I love the idea that the Divine is also very human and can love, hurt , and understand us. If this is true, then consider that the way we know someone and the name we know them by may be different form others but dosen't change who and what that someone is. This is part of what makes the world and it's people beatiful reflections of their Divine Makers.

They started it..

welcome aboard..

[The Greedy Monk]

Differences ROCK!

Welcome to the Melting Pot, my friend.

Cheers,

The Greedy Monk.

Edited March 19, 2007 by The Greedy Monk

[RevBob1957]

"The Beduin could not look for God within him: he was too sure that he was within God. He could not conceive anything which was or was not God, Who alone was great; yet there was a homeliness, an everyday-ness of this climactic Arab God, who was their eating and their fighting and their lusting, the commonest of their thoughts, their familiar resource and companion, in a way impossible to those whose God is so wistfully veiled from them by despair of their carnal unworthiness of Him and by the decorum of formal worship. Arabs felt no incongruity in bringing God into the weaknesses and appetites of their least creditable causes. He was the most familiar of their words; and indeed we lost much eloquence when making Him the shortest and ugliest of our monosyllables.

This creed of the desert seemed inexpressible in words, and indeed in thought. It was easily felt as an influence, and those who went into the desert long enough to forget its open spaces and its emptiness were inevitably thrust upon God as the only refuge and rhythm of being. The Bedwai might be a nominal Sunni, or a nominal Wahabi, or anything else in the Semitic compass, and he would take it very lightly, a little in the manner of the watchmen at Zion's gate who drank beer and laughed in Zion because they were Zionists. Each individual nomad had his revealed religion, not oral or traditional or expressed, but instinctive in himself; and so we got all the Semitic creeds with (in character and essence) a stress on the emptiness of the world and the fullness of God; and according to the power and opportunity of the believer was the expression of them." -- from Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence

Today's society, so full of THINGS yet empty of spirit, is our desert; and I believe we, here gathered, are the new "Beduin".

The Divine exists within each of us, as we exist within the Divine, only the manifestation -- the perception -- differs. Some see Unity, some Trinity, others a Pantheon. It is WE who label the Divine He or She or It or They, and then argue about the difference. Yet it all is the same; only our flawed mortal perception differs.

I claim only to be a Deist. I pursue enlightenment.

Peace through Understanding.

RevBob