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The purpose of religion - can paradise be achieved by a universal prayer?

Started by David Pinnegar, December 10, 2013, 12:19:44 PM

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David Pinnegar

Hi!

I have written elsewhere about a prayer familiar to us all . . . and have been working on a form of words that is universal in its meaning. . . This was helped recently by a friend pointing out that Jesus used the word Abba, meaning a familiar and implicitly loving form of Father, as in "Daddy" . . .  Changing the tense of the first line to the present continuous is a helpful emphasis and "heaven" is too ambiguous, often associated too much not with this world, this time and this life, whereas in fact that's really what the prayer is all about. Likewise, the "Name" is too ambiguous - what name, who's name, rather than that which John Chapter 1 tells us about . . . .

Crucial, is an understanding which I suspect is not taught to all people nowadays with reference to the connection between the mind and the material . . . so that the breath of life becomes not just that which identifies a living breathing being but that breath of life that feeds the mind, just as bread is that which feeds the stomach but represents food for the mind alike, as in the manna in the desert in Exodus.

"Our origins being in paradise,
Sacred be your name, the breath of life, (pause, take and exhale breath)
May your kingdom come on earth as it is in paradise . . . ."
setting the scene for a more active understanding of the remainder which sets out steps for how that paradise can be achieved?

Does such clarification of ideas set a better scene for all, of all faiths, of all religions, of all who share life to embrace a common understanding of the direction of our teachers?

Too easy has it been for people to worship their teachers rather than the subject taught, and in this way to create local heroes, local gods and idols set up with different names to cause conflict.

A recent front page story
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/08/south-africa-soweto-regina-mundi-church-apartheid-nelson-mandela
echoes questions so often inferred by belief in a personal teddybear, which is then challenged as to why it fails, as it did for instance for so many who lost those killed in the first world war:
QuoteWe have asked ourselves, where is God? Where is the light? Why does he allow such evil? Why has he deserted us? Why has he forgotten us?
and Father Sabastian Roussouw expertly and deftly answered referring to life, to our lives:
QuoteEveryone, he said, had a Mandela in them somewhere

The personal teddybear who loves us provides an easy hook of faith for the vulnerable, but fails in the incompleteness of its analogy, and leaves those deserted by their teddybear bereft, depressed, suicidal and eventually faithless and atheist.

But the idea of Life itself as God, the giver of life, leads us always in the image of god, positively acting as the driving force of life.

For many of us, too much emphasis is given to the narrative of Christmas of the birth of our local hero in the first three Gospels without actually getting as far as reaching profoundly the first chapter of John upon which the whole of the book is founded.

Where we see religion going wrong, whether it be our own or others, and producing results bizarrely at odds with love, the harmony which religion overtly aims to bring between man and our surroundings, it's on account of the interpretation not having dug deep enough in our thoughts to reach the origins of life.

Disambiguating the opening of the universal prayer might be a good first step.

Best wishes

David P