get off of that pedestal

Who are we to tell one another what God wants or thinks we should do? 
Who are we, with our highly limited human capacities of divine knowledge, to put words in his mouth and demand that others follow them religiously?


I don't appreciate when people use their religious affiliation as an authority to judge or dictate what others should do.  We weren't born with an instruction manual with directions on what god wants us to do. What we were given instead were the tools-- an able body with a heart for feeling and brain for reasoning-- to navigate right from wrong in this crazy, complicated thing called life.  Everyone and every religion applies those tools a little differently based on their experiences...

  Thats why there are so many interpretations of the human collective idea of good----because they are contingent upon the time period and place in which we were born, contingent upon the people and the surroundings where we gathered our initial understanding of the world.  These collective ideas of good thus manifest themselves in a variety of ways-- they manifest themselves in different sacred texts with different characters. Its important to realize that these different ideologies have the same message, however, and there is still a uniformity in variety. Every text and every church whose ambitions are to help people be the best versions of themselves they can be, all have the same basic message : Follow the innate moral compass god gave you, always choose good, fill your heart with love, practice kindness and teach it to others so that we can all enjoy this gift called life too.

I say all this because I wish I could see more empathy and compassion in people as of late... I hear about religious persecution everyday, I hear about the work of appalling extremist groups in the news...and I just want people to realize that we are all in this journey of trying to make sense out of life together--we are all human, created by some same higher power, trying the best we can with what we know to live lives of quality. We don't actually have any concrete answers--faith and fact shouldnt be confused with one in the same...We didn't come with any instruction booklet, which leaves us all striving to find our own answers about God and how we should behave using the factory settings he did give us  ( namely our instincts, our intelligence, and our conscience). 

That is quite a daunting task, one that institutionalized religions have been fighting over and trying to get down perfectly on paper for thousands of years-- so lets not be so harsh on one another for going about it in different ways.