I am the way...

If faith grows out of love and love from hope and hope based on knowledge which is the best remedy for fear, then faith in oneself is the highest most honest faith that one can have. Because it's obvious that you can only love what you know and that what you know best and deepest you are destined to love most. If you believe that you were created in God's image or you believe that you are the pinnacle of evolution no matter how imperfect you are - you have to love yourself to be able to love anyone and anything else

It is a delusion to believe that I know anything at all if I don't know myself first and from myself my deepest desires and boldest dreams. Then it looks like you can't believe in anything at all if you don't have faith in yourself first. And if that is the most honest possible faith why don't pray to yourself:

Dear me - please, help me become the person that I want to be and may my will be done... Perhaps if you do that then God, or Nature or Society or all of them together will help me achieve just that. Or not - you do believe that God will trade favors for prayers (as if God needs anything from me) or Nature will just take a course naturally favorable to me (it actually did already if I am the progeny of a long line of survivors or perhaps because they were survivors it looks like nature was simply good to them.

David didn’t wait for God to kill Goliath - but picked up a couple of pebbles and opposed the scary giant who died confused by his own arrogance. I can’t imagine David praying to God to kill Goliath because David is understandably reluctant to do it himself. David has faith and took action in his own hands to get what he wanted. Was he always good - no. But what makes David admirable is his honesty and faithfulness to himself.

You cannot be saved if you don’t save yourself. That’s what airline safety instructions tell you to do. If you don’t put on your oxygen mask first you may faint before you are able to help that child next to you. You have to love yourself so everyone can love you and so you can love the others. And you can only love yourself if you reach deep inside to that divine essence, some call soul.

There is no gate to the way but many roads lead to it.

Can a government burden future generations with debt they haven't had a chance to agree to.

Definitely not! That is against the principle of no taxation without representation.

But what if the money is spent to keep the parents of these future kids alive?

What is good and what is bad we might be able to tell but how to measure it? Does the greatest good for the most people maxim work? The experience of Hitler and Stalin's persecution of minorities under the false pretext of common good tells us enough to be able to judge. Most important, ignoring the fate of unrelated minorities will lead inevitably to the time when they will come for me and then there will be no one left to protest.

While the Tea Party religiously is carrying the future generations to the mountain to sacrifice them to an imagined principle of decency Obama is trying to do the intuitively correct thing and borrow a sacrificial lamb from the neighbors although he doesn't seem to have a very clear idea how he is going to pay for it.

Who is right? Burden the future with debt or kill the present in the name of the principle even if the principle is in itself correct – even sacred? There is no one correct answer. Perhaps we need to keep in mind that the Sabath was created for the people not the people for the Sabath. But then again the unity of diversity makes the nation and even if the people can be enslaved a proud nation – never.

Thoughts by Cicero, Jesus, Buddha and from the Old Testament were paraphrased in this post.

If faith and ethics mean anything in life they must bring real profit

But what is ethical and what isn't. Eve's pursuit of divine wisdom doesn't seem to have yielded any tangible results. I know there are uncountable sets of rules and regulations - legal, religious, cultural and whatnot. And most of them are very useful and going against them can get you into real trouble even if your indiscretion is not discovered by the relevant authorities. I am not talking about divine intervention because it seems that God more often than not looks the other way when the good are crushed and evil prevails. To sum it up life's different from an old Western with a happy ending. Perhaps there is some higher purpose or perhaps the atheists are right and the only real law is the law of the jungle of a tooth for a tooth and an eye for an eye.

Do moral principles work at all? Could there be a workable set of rules worthy of keeping by providing adequate return for the good guys apart from the questionable place in that luxury retirement home - Heaven - resplendent with scores of virgins singing boring hymns? What if there is no afterlife and we just die and rot which seems rather obvious except for that atheist Richard Dawkins who reckons we live forever in physical form through our own immortal selfish genes. And we are destined to live in this real, material and fluid world which could be Heaven or Hell depending on perspective, luck, attitude and the results of your actions.

Can you judge others and complain about their actions - yes you can but that is mostly a waste of time because you have to look at yourself first). If you don’t like the world you’ll have to start  and from the man in the mirror and be the change you want to see in the world. To look deep inside and find that divine God given soul or genetic predisposition for survival - depending on how you prefer to call it. Because that idea/form/gene/meme/soul that will survive is the only thing that matters. There is the way of life and the dead end of death. There is a way to learn to be immortal - we are all offspring of a race of survivors - all the way back to Adam and Eve. So we have inherited a treasure of useful knowledge and a lot of nonsense (there were people who believed you have to kill someone to make the sun rise or kill an innocent child to win a battle). I don’t covet the neighbor’s donkey or his ass and we all believe his partner in life is free to choose. Still if I treat my neighbor badly and disrespect his right to life, liberty and to choose the way he pursues happiness than most probably my neighbor will disrespect my rights and property. And then we’ll both be in real trouble.

And if you ask whether you are your brother’s keeper then he might be asking the same silly question too.

Thoughts by Jesus, Ghandi, Buddha, Petar Danov were used throughout the text.