Get the Pope, the President and the Prime Minister on the phone, quick! I've had an epiphany, a flash of understanding about the nature of the divine that should literally SAVE THE WORLD.
It's revolutionary, you ready?
Come closer.
Here it is --
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. That's it.
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Even the most devout believers in each religious tradition are therefore nonbelievers of everything else, no matter what doctrine or denomination they claim as their own, or whether they claim any religion at all.
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. Of someone's else's religion. Of someone's else's truth, and lies.
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever because in order to believe one thing, you must disbelieve everything else.
For any one given religious belief, most of us will be in its nonbelief camp.
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever.
The recent post from Thomas Jefferson 198 years ago, got me pondering all this:
"Because religious belief, or non-belief, is such an important part of every person's life, freedom of religion affects every individual. [1] State churches that use government power to support themselves and force their views on persons of other faiths undermine all our civil rights. Moreover, state support of the church tends to make the clergy unresponsive to the people and leads to corruption within religion.
Erecting the 'wall of separation between church and state,' therefore, is absolutely essential in a free society.
In other words, any denomination's "believers" will disbelieve more religious doctrines and denominations than are believed. That's the whole point of religion [2], to nail down in great detail my few chosen beliefs from all my generalized, vaguely understood, chosen disbeliefs.
So obviously every single one of us is a NON-believer of most religions, most of the time, even though some of us may believe something most people don't, some of the time.
Although inexplicably unrecognized before this moment by kings, kooks, Christians and countries alike, what unites the diverse peoples of the world is one absolute universal state of being -- nonbelief!
This must be our common heritage, the universal foundation from which tolerance can flow freely and with good will toward all. We are one in our nonbelief... the global and governmental question of what *non-believers* are entitled to should be given highest priority, while accommodating any group of beliefs is, well, not nearly as important.
Because the universe of nonbelievers includes by definition anyone who "refuses to believe (as in a divinity)" [3] it includes by definition all of us who who have any divinity in which we refuse to believe. Religious belief as a whole therefore, can never hope to match the universal absolute of nonbelief, not even if humanity eventually homogenizes some inoffensively common universal divinity every meme signs on to worship. As long as there is even one person on the planet who chooses to believe in no divinity at all, nonbelief wins. By definition.
Dear Abby and Ann Landers ofen explained that on any topic, they would get letters from the tiny sliver of those feeling sufficiently insulted, excluded or otherwise engaged on that topic, never from the majority of folks reading, who always, always, would remain unaroused to action. In similar fashion, every religion on earth hears from its most vociferous nonbelievers, and faces their resistance, argument, insult and exclusion.
And if you can follow my logic one short step, it should be clear that every religion on earth needs better skills at relating to its nonbelievers than its believers, because it just naturally has more of the former than the latter.
Also, we don't all need to learn how to behave as believers but we'd sure better learn to behave as nonbelievers! We owe each other that. Our schools should specialize in it, maybe that should be the very definition of "religious education" hmmm . . .
Every person on earth is a nonbeliever. If all of us can embrace our nonbeliever-ness as well as any believer identity we may fancy, every person on earth will see this one blindingly clear truth and begin to treat each other as brethren in our nonbelief.
Peace will break out everywhere. No more believers defining the terms of our wars by their minority belief despite our universal oneness of Nonbelief!
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