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We Contemplate Everything |
One of the things that distinguish the Church of Reality from other religions is that we embrace understanding. We want to understand everything. Our religion starts where understanding starts. Most religions start where understanding stops.
There are two kinds of religions. There are religions based on faith and religions based on understanding. The religions are opposite in a sense because you don't need faith to believe in anything that can be understood through logic and reason. To have faith is to decide that you are not going to try to understand what you believe in because understanding would undermine faith.
Faith is a decision to loyally believe in something regardless of whether or not it is true. Understanding is excluded because if you try to understand it and you determine it isn't true then you are expected to abandoned your reason and believe in it anyway. The Abrahamic religions require one to turn their back on understanding, and it's in their holy book.
One thing that the Church of Reality has in common with Judiasm, Christianity and Islam is the concept of the Tree of Knowledge. The Tree of Knowledge in the Bible is called the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. The concept of describing the world in terms of Good and Evil is to experience reality through your emotions. Good and Evil are emotional evaluations. This feels good, that feels bad. These are emotional evaluations. One experiences and evaluates right and wrong with the "heart".
In their book the Earth was created in 6 days. After creation God creates Eve and they are told of the forbidden tree called the "Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil" and it is forbidden to eat of the Tree. But they disobey God and Satan (the evil one) seduces Eve and causes her to seduce Adam to defy God and partake of knowledge. Thus the Bible makes the pursuit of understanding a sin.
Our religion has a Tree of Knowledge too, but we aren't a religion that relies on emotional states and the imagination as our way of interfacing with reality. Instead of Good and Evil our Tree of Knowledge is something we embrace. It is the sum total of human understanding. Our Tree is the separation of Truth and Fiction. The Tree is our connection to each other. It is our common link to humanity. We depend on the Tree and we are dedicated to the Principle of Positive Evolution making sure that the future is better than today.
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