Faith

Faith can only be in your heart, faith by definition is not knowledge, and when we try to make faith into knowledge, it kills the essence of what makes faith so great. It is when we try to turn faith into knowledge that we judge others, and it is when we think we know that we feel justified in condemning people. In my pursuit of faith, I tried to pursue knowledge, and in the process nearly killed my faith. Wisdom cannot be written into a book ... despite the fact there were no shortage of scribes Jesus still decided to surround himself with disciples that could not write, perhaps he knew that the "Religious leaders"would have control over the book for thousands of years to come. Yet faith still stayed alive in the hearts of people even with zero exposure to the book, just as faith love and hope live in the hearts of people the world over, despite what the religious leaders say. The religious leaders would say that even though all of the different religious books say that there will be very very deceitful wolves in sheeps clothing, we all should simply believe based on our gut feelings, which has resulted in many different good hearted people honestly believing their contradictory gut feelings which religious leaders have manipulated to get us to dislike, or hate, or even kill other people who really arent that different from us. While religion was sharing the table with kings and monarchs agreeing that kings were ordained and morally superior to commoners, it was evidence and reason that showed us that all of us are equally capable. While religious leaders fueled the fires of racism, it was evidence and the simple purity of love and compassion that taught us that we are all equal. Today religious leaders are striving to teach us that we should only love and accept people that have our same exact belief system, or we should shun, reject, judge, dislike, even hate, all while there is so much suffering in the world. While religion keeps feeding us reasons to dislike others unless they become exactly like us, which by definition is based upon judging others, the whole world shares a common love for goodness in their hearts, and it is religion that teaches them to turn this purity to condemnation for others. Jesus sorrounded himself with disciples that could not write, and the scholars that study greek, aramaic and hebrew from every religion including yours know that all of the manuscripts have been intentionally tampered with. The people who wrote the gospels never even knew jesus, but I think despite all of the corruption imposed by leadership, we can all know the truth by following the most basic principle of love ... focus on helping others in need not as someone who is above but on their level as Jesus did, and have the faith to not worry about making laws that drive division in society ... have faith in love and goodness, and leave judgement of others to god, that is something that should clearly not be left to our limited human understanding. Most importantly to me faith is about leading and living our lives trying to help those in need, loving without any judgement, and leaving the act of moral condemnation to god. If I look at the history of all of the ugly things associated with Christianity or religion, it always has to do with man thinking they are smart enough to assume the role of judgement. What I see when I read between the lines in the bible is that though we cannot know for certain what Christ said, just following the example of getting to know some of the homeless, diseased, sinful and suffering, and learning to have love and compassion without judgement, that is all we need to know god.