All religions conflict with each other, and all religions have the same message.  They all seek a purpose and a meaning for this life that we  are living; and yet their metaphysics do not support each other.

Religions conflict with each other through claims made about the universe.  Is there a thousand-armed goddess who wants to give us spiritual insight as is espoused in Mahayana Buddhism?  Is there really a blue avatar (divine human) named Krishna who came down to Earth to redeem mankind, as Hindus would suggest?  Did the one true God, Yahweh, really choose one lonely desert tribe to be his chosen people?  Did God really send “His only begotten Son” down to Earth to die for our ’sins’?  Did Mohammed really ascend to heaven and talk with Allah Himself about how many times we should pray each day?

I doubt it.

But hidden behind these strange metaphysics lies the true substance of religion.  Every religion tries to reconcile the human condition.  We are here, and for some reason we think we are here for a reason.

There are universal messages to be learned from religion, but it has nothing to do with the mythology from which the stories are told.  The source of happiness doesn’t lie with the acquisition of material things.  It doesn’t come from the desire for happiness.  Rather, the source of happiness comes from within.  Not with selfishness, but with selflessness.  It comes when you cease to want to be happy; and with that realization you just are. 

Jesus said to give up all your possessions and to love God with all your heart and soul.  The Buddha said the same thing, but didn’t require a God.  Hindus have many Gods, Muslims and Jews had one.  What is the core teaching here?  To be selfless, to redirect attention away from your self and towards other things.

Being selfless is spiritual happiness.  It is the essence of peace.  To be angry, jealous, or ashamed entails a certain way of thinking that focuses on the self.  Being angry or jealous means that you, your ego, is somehow insulted by the goings-on of something outside of you.  Imagine these scenarios; your wife cheats on you; your friend stabs you in the back; you find out you have cancer.  Jealousy or anger are natural emotions that occur when these circumstances arise. 

Our anger and jealousy arises out of a desire for a different reality, rather than the actual acceptance of reality.  The angry person is the first victim of his anger.

To put it bluntly, religion is outdated.  It has attached to it all sorts of strange metaphysical claims about the universe that have no coroborration with science.  Like the firmament I mentioned in a previous post, religious claims about the nature of the universe or why God wants you to do a certain type of thing, have no basis in reality.  Religions are essentially old conversations about the human condition.  The fields of neuroscience and psychology are the new conversations that are tackling these same questions today.

If we can sift through the mythological “crap” in religion and filter those out by using our own modern-day knowledge, we can still see some of the marvelous insights of our great spiritual teachers of the past.   From there, we may continue on our very human journey to understand the very odd situation of our existence, and our self-knowledge of that existence.