My belief system has changed over the years in interesting ways. As a child I had no belief system. How could I? I did not know belief systems existed. I was taken to church every Sunday by my Mother, but I never thought anything of it. I was to sit and be as quiet as possible for an hour or so. I had no real idea what was going on or what church was all about.

I remember the first time I had a religious conflict was when I asked the reasoning behind a story the class we were told by a Nun. I was sent to the priest for my indiscretion. As a Teenager, I had a lot of questions, and some answers were missing logic, common sense, or were not bible based. During my teenage years I drifted into something resembling animism. Little pieces of God sprinkled all over my little piece of the world, and across all earth and space.

Of course some people were not too happy with the idea that I could possibly think that God is everywhere, and not at some far off undefined spot watching how I spend my life, adding and removing weights to a scale whose purpose determines where I will spend eternity. My own life was complete though, because if I could see God in weeds growing in the yard, I could certainly imagine a little piece of God living in every human being in my world. That thought did not make some people happy, they felt I must be awful full of myself, to think God resides in each of us.

Slowly in the following years, God retreated from my life and reformed out in some distant undefined place. As this slow retreat happened, so did my dissatisfaction with organized religion which started looking more like a combination of a clique and business. Where belonging meant upholding the party line, and belief system, whatever it was depending on which church. The Church party line changed depending on where I went. This constant changing of ideology did not mesh with me for a church trying to have one unified face.

It certainly started looking once more as if God was in each human, plant, animal, rock, and piece of sand. Perhaps there was more to the idea of God than God hanging out somewhere far away waiting to decide my eternal fate. What if everything I knew or could conceive about my physical and spiritual self was because God had a thought once upon a time and I am a result of that thought? The idea seemed to tie up a lot of loose ends for me. God simply had a thought and everything I know is a result of that thought whenever and wherever it occurred.

I tried to put God on a scale I could comprehend and relate to. Something that was not as magnificent as the creation of the universe and distantly experiencing everything in it. My pets were a fair starting point. I decided yes, I do experience more with them than I could without them. Whenever I am around them I am part of them and they are a part of me as we share almost the same space. I saw them young and happy, I see them sick, I see them as they grow older. In a small way I experience their life as they live it.

I do not stand with a clipboard with a sheet of paper on it and a line drawn down the middle, one side good and one side bad, keeping a running tally of how I perceive them. My pets are, and they do not decide what is good or not. I do not have the trouble of trying to decide whether they are more good than bad, or bad than good. I do not have to consider whether they do something because they are tired, sick, distressed, or just mean and angry.

After I worked my way through this, I decided this must be how the world is from God’s perspective. It is not important whether I think God is in everything in the universe, that God is in some distant place, or whether God lives in me or not. Deciding those ideas is not important, and something that I can not really determine no matter how I try. Once I arrived at this thought, my beliefs became simpler, yet more encompassing.

Other posts of possible interest:

Scientology verses the right to believe what we choose

Basic truth, sharing, and the fundamentals of belief