Spiritual and Religious Dogma, Modalities, and Texts
I posted a little disclaimer on my posts and decided I wanted to shed some more light on a few of my opinions. Plus, I have a great analogy to share and I love a good analogy.
I like to think of spiritual and religious dogmas, modalities, and texts as tools. Each tool has a reason or a season. Some tools are a favorite and others we may know less, or even nothing about them or how they work. Yet they all serve a purpose.
Analogy time…
Let’s say you LOVE your hammer. LOVE. It is the be all end all of tools and there is no other tool for you. Yet, what happens when you come to a task where a hammer doesn’t work? What if you have a Phillips screw that you need to take out? There is one specific tool for the job that will take that screw out cleanly, but it’s not your precious hammer. Maybe you could find a way to make the hammer work cleanly, but that is highly unlikely. More than likely, the only way you would be able to use that hammer to remove the Phillips screw is if you break and destroy the structure holding the screw in place. You might be able to get the screw out, but to what end? You needed to destroy something to do it.
Spiritual and religious dogma, modalities, and texts are the same way. If you pick one and never explore anything else, you may be able to make it work in all situations in your life. However, you’ll likely be destructive or harmful in your pursuit when you are only opening yourself up to experiencing the one tool.
To add to the analogy, let’s say that you love your hammer, but I love my screwdriver. When we seek to make the other wrong for having a different preference, we both end up in the wrong. At some point, your hammer won’t be able to do the job and in another case my screwdriver won’t be able to get the job done. Both the hammer and screwdriver have a place. Neither are bad or wrong. They’re just different tools for accomplishing tasks. Hopefully, we can respect that we both have different favorite tools. When we start enforcing our favorites and demand that everyone makes that tool their favorite, too, we step away from respect and move towards harm.
When you consider all the tools and all the possibilities, you may find that you’re able to accomplish more than if you only have one tool that you ever use. It doesn’t mean that you don’t have a favorite or a preference; it just means that you’re not limiting yourself to understanding one tool or one principle. All of the dogma, modalities and texts have a use. There may come a time where someone might need to branch out to find the one that fits the situation the most.
What would happen if you considered other tools? What other world might open up for you if you consider the many as opposed to the few?
