On religion...

I have just started reading a fabulous book about Spiritual Mentoring by Judy Harrow and it had this passage that I just had to share.

"Historically, people have constructed a wide variety of myth systems and theologies - the bases for many different religions - then related to these facts about Deity, testable observations that can be, at least theoretically, at least relatively, proven true or false. When processes or things are observable and testable, reasonable people can compare their observations, replicate each others' experiments and agree on the results. That's science.

But religion isn't science. We can't test and replicate our experiences of Deity because the sacred is ultimately beyond human comprehension and description. Both honesty and humility compel us to admit that our knowledge of Deity is necessarily limited.

What glimpses we may get are also inevitably filtered through lenses such as culture, class, gender, etc., each introducing its own distortion. Denying these constraints and taking our speculations as literal fact can cause great harm.

...

Modern transportation and communication - most recently the Internet - have made it impossible to live in isolation. If we can truly accept that no one culture and no one mythos holds a monopoly on Sacred Truth, we can learn to live together in peace. Failing that, the culture wars will continue."