Logical Religion

My religious beliefs are logical. By my system, no matter what your faith, everything can be true.

My definition of a soul os sort of like a mind, but instead of holding thoughts it holds beliefs. Beliefs can be anything at all, to do with gods or an afterlife and they are all created by your mind and stored in your soul. When a person dies, their mind shuts down - fact. I believe that after this, the soul takes over and all their memories are transfered to the soul as it simulates their former mind. Now, whatever the person believed in while they were alive, really truely believed in, will be simulated by the soul. For example if christians who believe that they have led good lives will spend eternity in their own interpretation of heaven. This means that people with poor imaginations will experience something incredebly boring, most likely involving clouds and harps. Another example, if you believe that nothing wll happen at all, then this is exactly what will happen...nothing.

If you dont know what to believe then perhaps your soul escapes as it hasn't been properly defined by the mind. This could justify ghosts or paranormal activity as being escaped or 'lost' souls.

Regarding gods, this is where I start to get quite extravagent and any Discworld fans may recognise where I get my inspiration from. Well, the earth istelf has a soul. It cant have a soul. The earth dosnt have a soul soul, but instead a soul made up of every single soul of every single living creature on earth. I've dubbed this soul the 'Plain of Gods' :o). The Plain of Gods is where gods are created. Most people believe that gods created people, well I think it is the other way around. The Plain of Gods gives way for multiple faiths. For instance, Prophet Jim writes a holy book about his god Bob, who appeared to him in a dream the night after Jim had been on a pub crawl. Now it is two thousand years on and Jim's book has been published worldwide. 50 million people now believe that Bob exists - and he does. Whenever a soul believes in a god, that god is created in the Plain of Gods (remember the Plain is just made up of all the souls in the world so if a god is created in an individual soul, it must also appear in the Plain). If another soul believes in that same god, then it dosnt mean a different god is created, it means that the same god grows in power. In our exapmle, Bob is now 50 million souls strong. There may be many other gods in the Plain aswell as Bob, depending on what people are believing at the time. This also works the other way around, in that if you stop believing and loose your faith, the god drops in power, and when it has no believers left at all, it disappears. (A way to destroy a god! Get everyone in the world to stop believeing in it! This is how The Discworld's equivelent of Santa - the Hogfather is assassinated in the Discworld book Hogfather :o))

I don't as yet have any idea what gods actually do yet, or what they are for or if they have any actual influence in our afterlife (they do indirectly I suppose, as if someone believes that they have displeased their god and deserve to go to hell, then they will infact go to the hell they believe in)

A popular belief is that all religion was simply invented to try to explain the complexities of life and the universe. I thought up these ideas to try to explain the complexities of religion, so dont swear by them!

Of course I cant claim all credit for these ideas. I have been influenced mostly by Terry Pratchetts novels, Small Gods and Hogfather in particular. I do think that my ideas could be feasable, they certainly clear up a lot of misunderstandings, and if this system was true, then there would be no need for war over religious matters since all religions could exist at once.

17th March 1999 - edited and retyped on 24th February 2001