talkin' 'bout god and shit

Spoketh Shenry aloud to the He-Man action figure atop his computer monitor:

A strong person needs no outside foundation for his/her beliefs. A strong person should have the intelligence to engineer his/her belief structure from scratch, irrespective of what pre-fabricated religions and philosophies already exist. Build my own religion first by asking myself fundamental questions about existence. Do I have a soul? If so, define what the soul is. Is there a god? If so, define what god is. Do absolutes exist, specifically relating to the concepts of right and wrong? If so, list those absolutes. Keep asking myself these types of questions until I reach the minute details of my own personal religious manifesto. Like, is it ethical for me to blog from work? Or, is proper ass-wiping technique front-to-back, back-to-front, or side-to-side? Intuitively, I already know the answers to a few of these questions. Many questions I must meditate upon. And, many-many I will not know the answers to.

The LAST thing I do is take my religion/philosophy and overlay it upon the pre-fab options out there. Do I coincidently match up with an organized religion? Odds are I don't. Odds are, if everybody took the time to do this, nobody would match up with a pre-fab religion. People who say, "Yeah, I'm Catholic but I support homosexual unions," aren't really Catholic. The benefit to overlaying my religion with those that already exist is that the answers to some of those questions I'm unsure of may exist elsewhere to my satisfaction. Be cautious, however, that I do not adopt dogma out of convenience, but that (if I adopt any dogma) I adopt it out of conviction.

A strong person may subscribe to a religion that nobody else does, but a strong person doesn't give a rat's ass about people who object to his/her beliefs because a strong person has the strength to champion his/her own religion/beliefs/morals/ethics. Furthermore, this same strong person is able to identify flaws within his/her religion as they become apparent and is willing to modify those doctrines. This results in a living religion/philosophy that evolves with the creator-disciple.

…

This whole outline is something I've been meaning to follow through, actually going so far as to write down my own manifesto on life. So what's up with me? Why haven't I started? Oh, but I did start. Unfortunately, I started with a question that I could not answer. I asked myself if god exists and I concluded (after much poo flinging) that it is impossible for me to know.

Now that I've had six months for my head to heal (or "heel" if you're into puns) from the effort of perceiving god, perhaps it is time to assault another basic question.
...and so it was written, shenry at 3/04/2004 01:50:00 PM.
...and so it was appended with .