Beliefs can be tricky.

I was surfing the website of K’s quotes and landed on 14 that had to do with belief. Here is one of them… The screen of belief… “You believe in God, and another does not believe in God, so your beliefs separate you from each other. Belief throughout the world is organized as Hinduism, Buddhism, or Christianity, and so it divides man from man. We are confused, and we think that through belief we shall clear the confusion; that is, belief is superimposed on the confusion, and we hope that confusion will thereby be cleared away. But belief is merely an escape from the fact of confusion; it does not help us to face and to understand the fact but to run away from the confusion in which we are. To understand the confusion, belief is not necessary, and belief only acts as a screen between ourselves and our problems. So, religion, which is organized belief, becomes a means of escape from what is, from the fact of confusion. The man who believes in God, the man who believes in the hereafter, or who has any other form of belief, is escaping from the fact of what he is.”   I “believe” K would have gotten on famously with George Carlin. George had a very low opinion of all religion and frequently used some of its absurdities in his stand-up routines. Here is an excerpt from “Brain Droppings” to show what I mean… “Sun God” “I’ve begun worshipping the sun for a number of reasons. First of all, unlike some other gods I could mention, I can see the sun. It’s there for me everyday. And the things it brings me are quite apparent all the time: heat, light, food, a lovely day. There’s no mystery, no one asks for money, I don’t have to dress up, and there’s no boring pageantry. And interestingly enough, I have found that the prayers I offer to the sun and the prayers I formerly offered to “God” are all answered at about the same 50 percent rate.” Beliefs can be tricky. Like, in the “story lines,” the time when four successful businessmen traveled together to Germany to attend the world construction equipment expo. One of the group had a pet saying while in the pub… “You have to believe in something. I believe I’ll have another drink.” Anyway, just for fun, we had baseball caps made up with this saying embroidered on the front, in German. But apparently the cap company miss-translated it and the German folks took it to be a religious saying and thought we must be in some kind of cult. Beliefs can be tricky!