10 July 2017

 I have my personal experience that I can relate to. I do not know what other life-forms experience, although people's attempts to communicate their lives can resonate with my own set of memories.

There are a lot of basic experiences that have been repeated over and over, throughout time, that have generated sets of both good and bad responses. Deciding what's good and bad tends to be built on emotional reactions. (I recall a book in the last 20 years that looked at studies of how lack of emotions impaired judgements)

(I might cross-share this to Facebook)

One of the things I love about Buddhist meditation is that it challenges me to form first-hand insights behind my experiences. Similarly, AA's programs says, "Try these behaviors, see what happens, and use that to form your own experience with a God, as you understand him"

A lot of people wring their hands over what others tell them that God is, or, more often... over people telling them Godly behavior and then practicing the opposite.

I think religion does not create a good model of how the physical world works. However, it does do a good job of looking at social interactions, good and bad, through the ages... however, religion has given rise to philosophy, psychology, even history, and influenced other social sciences - and those fields are now coupling with science to give good insights into social behavior and also abnormalities and how they can "break social rules"

So, I claim to be agnostic. If there is a God, it's much more than my personal experience and understanding. Yet, to thrive in this world, it greatly helps to depend upon experiences beyond my own. I.e., I learn from my elders, sharing in their success and avoiding their mistakes...