Archives for posts with tag: creed

It is a truism that almost any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law
if it acquires the political power to do so,
and will follow it by suppressing opposition,
subverting all education to seize early the minds of the young,
and by killing, locking up, or driving underground all heretics.
Robert A. Heinlein, Postscript to Revolt in 2100.

Religion is the metaphusical ‘thing’ inside which people who hold a set of tenets to be true are able to build a community.

Religion is sociological phenomenon. Something belonging to the realm studied by those who try to understand how large number of people work together.

Religions – on the other hand – are ‘sets of tenets’ put in practice by various groups of people.
Sets of tenets which survive for as long as they continue to help the people who uphold them in their quest to survive as a group. As a community.

Religion cannot be ‘changed’.
Religion can be studied. May be better understood.
Like physics. You can’t ‘change’ physics! With what? With chemistry? Things don’t work like this. The only thing you may do about physics is to ‘deepen’ your knowledge about it.

Religions can, and sometimes have to, be changed.
By the very people who ‘use’ them to survive.

Since nobody can survive on their own, each and everyone of us needs to belong.
To a community.
To a religion, actually!

And what do people do when they realize survival is impossible in certain conditions?
Die or do something about it, right?

Now, which community can survive based on hate?
It doesn’t matter whether you are asked to hate somebody inside or outside your community.
Whether you hate individually or collectively.
Hating – or despising – somebody blinds you and exhausts you. Puts a huge burden on your back. Focuses your attention so tight that you are no longer able to notice the real dangers.
Those which actually make you less likely to survive.

And this is valid both for you as an individual and for you as a hating community.

People act as if the world is as each of them sees it.

Nobody does anything unless they are convinced that there is some merit in ‘that’ particular something being put into practice.
Otherwise put, nobody starts doing anything before believing that the thing being started is well worth the effort.

In fact, doing – anything, in a voluntary manner – is an act of faith.

‘OK, I can live with that.
But which faith? Cause there are many…’

This is the moment when I’ll start commenting on the difference between creed and faith.
Creed is very specific. Personal creed, Christian creed, Islamic creed, even professional creed…
Faith, on the other hand, is more general. The concept itself encompasses creed and goes a lot further.

Personal faith is both the conviction which drives each of us to do something and the specifics about how we implement that something.
Those of us who are faithful Christians derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their Christian creed.
Those of us who are faithful Muslims derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their Islamic creed.
Those of us who are agnostics – or atheists, derive their energy from their faith and the particulars of their action from their specific creed.
In this sense, faith is more like a state of mind – shared by all faithful people, while creed is specific to each category of people. Down to each individual.