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Diarygirl
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I am a God believer. I believe there is only one God and don't condemn others beliefs. Just my opinion and beliefs! I don't know all beliefs just my own and the closest that I have is compared to Buddism.
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Why believe in anything....? how can you compare your believe to something else....?[/FONT]
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The article below was written by a Buddhist to Buddhists.[/FONT]
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Medicine tell us that humans are mammals and are therefore related to many other animals which share our environment. Among the things that we share in common with animals are certain characteristic bodily functions. More specifically these functions are grouped into systems such as the circulatory system, the muscular system, the digestive system, and the nervous system. All animals need these systems in order to survive. Some animals depend more on one system than on the others for survival. Most animals make heavy use of the muscular system and the digestive system to move about and to assimilate food, but parasitic worms have little need for muscles to move or a digestive tract to process their nourishment. Perhaps more so than any other animal humans depend on a highly developed nervous system which has evolved into a higher capacity for memory with an enhanced ability for abstract thinking.[/FONT]
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So highly developed is the human ability for memory and abstract thinking that humans have given various names to the products {not products: just because tennis balls are delivered in cans and projected by racquets, does not enable us to conclude they are the products of either} of their nervous systems. Names such as concepts, theories, ideas, and beliefs have been applied to human thought processes. Over the ages the thoughts and beliefs of humans have grown more and more important to them, partly because thoughts were often heavily relied upon for survival, but also because the intense emphasis that was placed on thoughts and beliefs made them seem real to most all humans. As time went on many of the beliefs began to take on a reality and a life of their own, independent of the external reality that humans and other animals had hitherto known. Some of the beliefs became so real and so powerful to those whose nervous systems created them, that they became substitutes for reality. In the harsh struggle for survival suffering was frequently inevitable, and it could only be expected that humans would sooner or later learn to escape from the miseries of existence by living in a non-real world generated by their highly advanced nervous systems.[/FONT]
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The enhanced ability of humans to think their way out of problems thus led to a surprising new activity -- escape from the realm of reality into a world inhabited by beliefs. In all likelihood this activity came about merely as an accidental byproduct of a superior brain stem. Thus the human animal separated itself from other animals by using its nervous system for something that it had never been used before to any great degree by any other animal -- for the sustenance of beliefs that had no basis in reality. Up to this point the use of beliefs and thoughts as a human diversion away from the acute struggle for survival seems somewhat innocuous. But another unexpected surprise was in store for that advanced human nervous system. Humans began to idolize and worship their beliefs. They grew attached to the thoughts that they felt could cushion them from the fearful necessities of living. Their thoughts became crutches which they could always fall back on. Like cripples, many humans began to cling to their beliefs desperately. Beliefs were treated as possessions. Fearful that some outside group with different beliefs might deprive them of their mental possessions, many people were prepared to fight and die for the products of their own nervous systems. Animals had fought and died for food, for territory, and for mates, but never before had animals engaged in deadly battles to preserve one set of beliefs over another.
By this time the beliefs were given even more high-sounding names such as ideals, freedom, conscience, God, country, sacred path. Humans lacked the objectivity and insight to see that concepts such as "my ideal", "my freedom", "my God", "my path", and "my country" never appear walking down the streets in broad daylight, and that their reality was an illusory one that only existed within the brain stems of the humans who harbored the beliefs.[/FONT]
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Most humans lacked the perspective to know and understand the dilemma that the human animal had inadvertently fallen victim to, but there were some. In human history mention is made of a few rare individuals who had the objectivity and the perspective with which to understand the human plight. Many of the words recorded from these prophets echoed again and again in one form or another: "Know thyself" was probably the most common advice offered by all prophets. And yet, this advice has been almost totally ignored, being drowned in one belief system after another throughout most cultures and religions of the world. Humans, being blinded by their possessiveness for their own thought creations, failed to pay attention to this most important dictum. Instead they took the words of their prophets and tried to interpret them as beliefs, almost literally. Rather than trying to look inward and trying to understand what they had created within their brain stems, they succumbed to the tyranny of their petty beliefs. They unwittingly followed paths which their nervous systems and its beliefs had laid to ensnare them.[/FONT]
