Category: Meaning

Many people think religion is a collection of beliefs about God, the soul and the afterlife. This view of religion drains all the life out of it. It flattens religion into an interesting fact you’d find in a dusty old textbook.  When the Apostles’ Creed opens with ‘I believe,’ the Latin is credo, which means…… Continue reading Faith is Fidelity: religious belief as a lived commitment

We search for peace as if it were the highest goal. We try to remove suffering and agitation, hoping to find a state of satisfied equilibrium. But suppose we did achieve that state, would it be enough? The last article in this series described how aligning ourselves with the universal good produces existential well-being. The…… Continue reading When Love Overflows: why the source of reality must be personal

Few doctrines have done more to diminish faith in a loving God than the idea some people will suffer eternally with no hope of redemption. For many people, this isn’t an abstract theological puzzle, this is the image of a loved one lost forever. The doctrine’s moral repugnance and its prominence in the Christian tradition…… Continue reading You’re Already in Hell, and Why That’s Good News

When some people hear that God is love, it arouses the image of a benign old gentleman. An inoffensive chap who is insipidly polite and agreeably kind. But this image is misleading and comes from a habit of materialist thinking. We’re accustomed to think of love as an emotion, a feeling evoked by an object…… Continue reading God is Love

The problem of evil is often called the rock of atheism. This describes its enduring power to cast doubt on the existence of a loving God. While we think of it as a logical problem, its force reaches far deeper than the intellect. The logical problem of evil has a well known answer that reconciles…… Continue reading The Problem of Evil and Suffering – Is there a solution?

The doctrine of karma is sometimes interpreted as a system of cosmic justice. God as judge, enforcing his laws through reward and punishment. Suffering is divine retribution for sin, and sin is disobeying God’s commands. With this interpretation of karma, it follows logically that people deserve to suffer. Their suffering is a just punishment for…… Continue reading The Law of Karma – cosmic justice or natural law?

Human beings need a worldview to function. A worldview isn’t a single belief or even a collection of beliefs. It’s the widest possible view we can take of reality. A worldview is an interpretative framework, a conceptual map containing all the various facts about the world. It orientates us to the world and informs us…… Continue reading How to Construct a Worldview – A blueprint for building tolerance and humility.

Faith is sometimes described as belief without evidence. Non-believers promote this idea, but many believers also say this is the substance of faith. If we had evidence, why would we need faith? But if that was the substance of faith, faith would be irrational. But the deeper understanding is that faith transcends the rational. Faith…… Continue reading Reflections on the Nature of Faith – Transcending the limits of the intellect.

Vedanta has been called the science of spirituality. It’s one of the six schools of Indian philosophy and takes its inspiration from the literature of the Upanishads. Upanishad means to sit nearby. It suggests the texts contain the secret knowledge of the sages. The Upanishads give the conclusions of India’s sacred Vedic literature. Veda means…… Continue reading The End of Knowledge – Introduction to Vedanta

The question of why there is something rather than nothing is the most fundamental of all questions. This is not the question of why some particular thing exists, but the mystery of existence itself. When we stop to contemplate existence in the abstract, we find ourselves in an encounter with reality that at every moment…… Continue reading The Mystery of Existence — From the Cosmos to God