Love&Know Yourself

While in high school, I started to have misgivings about the years of Catholic education. I began to see that the story really did not make sense. The all-powerful God did not align well with our complex universe. I discovered Zen (while in college) mostly in the books of Alan Watts, who also was brought up in a Christian environment. His books come from a similar perspective - comparisons between the Christian religions and the Eastern religions including Zen.

During my college years, I bought a number of books regarding religion, many of them by Alan Watts. The list of books that I find very interesting is available on this site. (A list of books about religion, including Zen)

I live in Wisconsin, which is certainly not part of the United States sometimes called the Bible Belt. Even so, we have our Christian radio stations and we have our regular letter writers to our local newspaper that often talk about needing more prayer and more teaching of the Bible in our schools and how God said or did this and that. The Christian God is simultaneously all-good (and we should thank Him endlessly for his goodness), merciless (and we should beg Him endlessly for the forgiveness of our sins as we are not perfect beings) and arbitrary (and we should thank Him endlessly if anything good happens to us but if anything bad happens to us it must be our fault - and since God did not prevent it from happening and since we are less than perfect, we should grovel (or pray) that it does not happen next time). At times, it seems incredible to me that our civilization is on the verge of interplanetary space travel and we still have large numbers of people still holding on to primitive religions that are many hundreds of years old.

One of the central concepts of Christianity is that God is the maker of the world and so the world is just an artifact that followed a plan. In our world, we have things that are made, like machines, furniture, etc. There are also things that are...