Can you Learn about a Religion from books or is our Creator something much more than preconceived ideas??

Question

Peace and Love

Answer 1

creation is an effect of the self's(God) existence,God is from where we came ,existed and return.all knowledge is ultimately self knowledge you wont find the real in books you must retreat to the deepest chambers of your being there you will realize the nature of the self which is oneness

Answer 2

I believe that it is our souls that have the desire to look for it's Creator/Designer from the start. Early man searched for meaning, for puposes, for what or whom put him here. The ones who did not know God, made up their own gods. Still is happening today. You can learn about a religion starting from books but books can only take you so far. Religion is also the faith, the community of people, the traditions, and such. It a combinations of many things. But most of all it's faith and what your soul feels is true.

Answer 3

You can indeed learn about religions from books. However, you have to understand that religion is a grouping that people have made and it is quite different to just simply having faith in something or someone. There are several and differing religions all proclaiming to be the true one but you are right in saying that our Creator is something more than ideas. As St. Francis once said, it is like trying to put the whole ocean in a single bottle.

Answer 4

We may receive inspirations from God, but we also need to read the Holy Books to interpret these inspirations and distinguish them from vain fancy or idle imagiantion.
The sacred verses in the Holy Books are not preconceived-ideas of men, but they are the revelations of the Messengers of the One True God. Our reading and practicing those teachings is of great help to our spiritual progress.

Answer 5

You are right, we will never fully understand our Creator. But Saint Paul says ``All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness.`` (2 Timothy 3:16)
I think the best way to learn about Jesus is to read the 4 Gospels.

Answer 6

the concern isn't only for the Bible. it truly is someone project and under no circumstances in trouble-free words concerning religions or spirituality. you'd be prisoner of each preconceived theory.. also in technological understanding, in the moral.. the in trouble-free words element i imagine is the superb, is to be loose... Of an interior freedom! Freedom from dogmatism, critical ism, and each and each of the preconceived recommendations that faith has realized to us when we were little ones. in this manner you'll locate Bible etc books communicate to you in an rather different way. Excuse my unperfect english... Mauro

Answer 7

Religion is not made by God. we have created it for our own interests. God never asked u to pray him/her. Whatever is written in any sacred text is the thinking of human mind and nothing else. If u want to learn abt God, forget religion...think on ur own..and u will find him wid u always.

Answer 8

To know God or Jesus Christ we need to have a living relationship with Christ Jesus. To do this we need the Holy Spirit to help us maintain this relationship and to study and know the word of God.

Answer 9

religion is a set of rules that dictate how to worship a certain superintend. but since all super beings are the creation of human imaginative minds, religion is a superstitious practice.

Answer 10

Well it depends on what you are asking.

If you want to learn about "A Religion" then yes. You can go find a book about a particular relgion and read it and learn what the people who subscribe to that religion believe. There are lots of books on world relgions that tell you what the different religions teach. The Catechisim of the Catholic Church was written to tell Catholics what Catholics believe for example.

If you want to learn about GOD, that is a different kettle of fish, and you have hit on a really great philosophical point.

In the old days people used to talk about two kinds of knowledge, natural and revealed. Natural knowledge is things that we can figure out for ourselves, using our senses and our reason. Science is the ultimate example of this, but logic and philosophy play into it too.

Revealed knowledge is knowledge we can't figure out on our own, so God told us. Let me put it to you this way.

Lets say you are an American Indian. You are living in Maine in the year A.D. 1066. You go down to the beach to collect clams one day in October, and you look at the ocean, and you say "Gee, I wonder what is out there. Is there land? Are there people? I wonder if they do anything interesting. Wouldn't it be great if they came over here?"

Well there is no way of you knowing this, but at that very moment, on the other side of the ocean, William the Conqueror is defeating King Harold of England in the battle of Hastings, and in about 450 years his people WILL be coming over, even though you have no way of knowing it, and have no way of ever knowing it. It is impossible for you (as an Indian) to know what is going on in England...but that doesn't stop, change, or effect what is going on in England in any way.

That is the key point. Just because we here, in this life, have no way of knowing what does or does not happen in the afterlife (if any) doesn't mean it doesn't happen. We are like the Indian on the beach. Just as he was wondering about what was going on across the Atlantic, we wonder about Heaven, God, Hell, and the afterlife. Just like he had no way of knowing about William the Conqueror from where he sat on the beach, we have no way of knowing about the afterlife from where we sit.

So God revealed Himself to us. He knew we had to know certian things, and that we had no way of knowing them ourselves, so He came and told us. Moses got the 10 Commandments this way. Jesus' whole life, death, and resurrection was about that.

Revealed Knowledge fell into disrepute because it can't be proven. This means anyone can (and many have) stand up, lie, tell everyone that God came to them and start their own new relgion. Personally I think it is pretty easy to see that guys who say "God told me you are supposed to give me all your money and all your women" are lying...but if you look around you can see that more than a few people have fallen for such guys.

Still just because there is a lot of invalid/false stuff that claims to be revealed knowledge, that doesn't require that all revealed knowledge is invalid.

In any case, if you go to the Bible you can find revealed knowledge about God. There are also books out there that CLAIM to be revealed knowledge, but are nothing but lies.

That being said, God gave us brains for a reason. This universe follows certian laws (physical laws, logical laws, axioms of reasoning) and we can use those laws and our brains to figure things out.

St. Thomas Aquinas (one of the 10 smartest humans to ever live) wrote the Summa Thologica

(go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_theologica )where he used his reasoning to deduce and figure out many things about morality, and God.

That being said you are right when you say "our Creator is sometihng much more". A human trying to understand God is like a Doberman Pincher trying to understand sub-atomic physics. I mean a Doberman is smart, you can train a Doberman to do many things, but you will never get one to properly calculate the amount of fissionable material required to create a chain reaction. ("Go Fetch" is one thing, higher calculus is another.) That being said we can know SOME things about God., but nowhere near everything about God. (Think of it as the difference between what a 3rd grader knows about the Civil War and what the Chairman of the History Department at West Point knows about the Civil War.)

So this is a long way of saying, Yes. We can learn SOME things about God, from SOME of the books that claim to be teach us about Him, but not all the books will tell you the truth, and even the ones that do tell you the truth can't tell you ALL the truth.