Religious Philosophy

Religious Philosophy
I grew up a child of the Hippies from the 70's that choose to toss religion out, for the most part. Our parents loved us but feared their children were all going to hell. We loved them but felt yearnings in our soul for reason, understanding and most of all love. My favorite song was a song called, Me and Jesus Have Our Own Thing Going. Most of us had a thirst for knowledge that not even our parents could meet as children and most of our teachers either. We asked a lot of "Why" questions that were most often answered with "because I said so, and I am the adult here." We rebelled. We felt unloved and we were not sure we wanted the God of our parents. We stopped going to church and once in a while if drunk or high enough on weed we might declare, "There is not God!"

While unlike lesson 24 about people who lost their religion because of political take-overs who pushed it out, we had tossed ours out ... but only on the surface. We wanted meaning, just not the way it had been handed to us by our fundamental Catholic and Protestant Fathers and Mothers who kept all the rules but seemed to miss the main factor - Love. We were sure if Jesus had been alive he would have been one of us and our parents had his ideas all wrong. It appeared to the church we were sinners, but in reality we were seeking truth and determined to find it, not just accept what was passed down by family, community, church or government. We studied Buddhism and lots of other faiths. We learned to still, listen, and meditate, even screwed up and took a few drugs to speed up the process.

A return to nature and a respect for her became important to us just as it had been with the Native American Indians. Most of us found we could not return to our parent's churches and thus the traditional Christian faiths have lost membership as our parents have or are dying off.

Strange though, as the parents of the hippies have die off and loose their final hold on us we have not tossed the idea of God totally out the window. We are returning to a faith stronger than ever - one that we have explored for ourselves, not something just passed down and accepted without question. It is real. Most of us have looked at many religions and have seen the things we hate about each and sought to understand why we hate it. Still, we have a need as strong as our parents or maybe stronger for religion. We don't like the term for it recalls the things we did not like with all the rules, power and need for control. We call what we seek "spirit" or soul. We think of ourselves as spiritual but not religious.

We have seen the golden rule and karma ideas show up in almost all faiths and we have decided there are the parts we will keep. Like our focus then in the 70's , our focus in still on peace, and love, not war. Even our parents taught God is Love and Love is God (even though we often felt ego and a need for power, and wealth got in the way of it's real meaning) and for us these three things along with a need have a to a respect and oneness with of all the earth and one another has became our new philosophy on R_____, that word we don't like to use.

Perhaps as we have evolved from cavemen to the humans we are today, religion evolves too. 

Rev. Linda Francis

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