Religiotic

It's fine to use a known religion as your preferred ontological self-expression. I'm not against it. Unfortunately, more often than not, people get caught up in the semantics of their flowery words and concepts and lose track of the original intent in their "philosophy". Then it becomes a thing, a monster, a mob mentality that's bigger than its purveyors. Here you have Christianity, a concept whose very existence specifically sets out to contradict and confine its own semantics. It's like raping yourself. Judge not lest ye be judged? And the first thing, the most frequent thing, most Christians can do is start a war against those who would not fall prey to their witnessing. Paradoxical right? Jacque Lacan says that language, being a symbolic representation meant to approximate reality, creates a divide in the mind that separates us from fully understanding that reality. This chasm, if you will, is the hole that would be filled, or the anonymous desire that lives in everyone and drives us to question our existence. Thus the paradox; we can't fully understand our reality if we don't use language to define its components and once we've done that we'll never fully understand reality. Now consider atheists. I liken the self-professed atheist (which I spent the better part of my life being) to a counter-racist. They're so concerned in the belief of an absence of god that their personal philosophy becomes an attack on the belief in its presence. Both sides have made their decision about what the end result is, and so will go on choosing to ignore everything in the middle. Both are believers. And if either side had the least bit of ethical understanding, neither would know what to do with the foundation of lies they'd built. The proof and disproof of possible historical events is completely irrelevant when talking about the concept of an Unmoved Mover. So why are they so concerned with finding Noah's Ark or disproving the existence of Jesus? These efforts are futile. We must first start at the beginning and then start there again and again. Instead they start where the last generation left off, with no foundation for understanding the whys and hows. Start from the epistemology and work your way up. Then feel free to give your findings all the flowery absurd names you want. It's not like you're going to come to understand reality anyway. But at least there would be less confusion. For instance when a Pentecostal pastor I know asked "If God gave you permission to hate something what would you choose?" and then people answered it. Doesn't that imply that whatever your answer is probably something you already hate it? And what is hate anyway? I would've swore this was his idea of a trick question. Trap the sheep and show them the error of their ways sort of thing. Nope. Wasn't. Seems counter-intuitive as far as spirituality goes, right? But that's my point. Religion (or anti-religions which are religions in their own right) does not equal spirituality. Religion in and of itself is an institution. And institutions never get anything right.