Thoughts on Religion

Question: What does your religion mean to you?

Answer: It means everything to me. It inspires me to benefit others, it gives me strength in times of doubt, it carries me through in times of trouble, it gives me the patience and fortitude to make great works of art, and it protects me from evil and hell. These things are what religion is for, and I encourage everyone to find these things in their religion.

Question: But, especially in some religions, these things can be so easily perverted into something which causes hate, intolerance, and violence. What should one do when religion leads them on this path?

Answer: Abandon it.

Question: Abandon it forever?

Answer: If something causes these negative things, it is not a true religion and is worthless. Sometimes the truth is buried deep in garbage. That doesn't mean the garbage should be taken as truth.

Joke

This life is a joke, and nobody's laughing.

Conventionally Ultimate

Edit: This experience has actually happened to me. Every two weeks, on the dot, I experienced extremely ultimate physical pain while I slept, beginning at my incarceration in the mental hospital, and lasting several months. Eventually it faded, but there is no possible way in human existence to experience more physical pain. It was as though every nerve ending of my body which had the capability of feeling pain was fed overwhelming supplies of the molecule responsible for pain. The dreams only reemerged once, recently. In the recent case, I was on a reality television show, and the pain was accompanied by the words "Medication Alert" on the screen. I felt the pain coming on, and the usual hopeless inevitability, but this time, I was saved by the unexpected presence of a Dharma teaching. Please be human. Please oppose psychiatry.

Question: Is there such a thing as ultimate pain?

Answer: Yes, I think so — in a sense. Pain is a concept like everything else, and thus can exist in pure form in an entropic environment.

Question: What about in another universal formation that allows for more of similar elements?

Answer: Yes, that too would be ultimate. They're both ultimate in relation to their constructs.

Student: It's like for one man something is ultimate, while for another man something else is ultimate.

Answer(er): Yes, sort of. Except, concepts only make sense in regards to their universal formations, so the idea of "ultimate" is really the same in both cases — there is no hierarchy.