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Religion does not Own You |
Many people are subjected to ownership by their religions. "You do not own yourself, you belong to GAWD!" they tell you. You have to surrender yourself to Jesus. You have to give up control of yourself to your master, priest, mullah, teacher, group will, or whatever wants to dominate you. That is one of the big differences between the Church of Reality and many other religions. We believe in self ownership and many of them believe in religious/deity ownership and that they are in control of what you can do, what you are required to believe, even what you are allowed or not allowed to think about. You are their slave. You may be a slave by choice, but a person who chooses to be subjugated is still subjugated. Many people who believe that they have chosen that path freely believe it because they are told that they have to believe that they chose that path freely.
In order to explore reality the way it really is, we need people to be explorers, not followers. Followers don't contribute anything to the exploration of reality. Yes, learning is a fine thing and people do need some learning in order to get started exploring. but the Church of Reality expects that at some point that you will begin Intellectual Tithing, which is to contributes something to the Tree of Knowledge. In other words, you figure something out and tell us something that we didn't know. You contribute something exciting that we can build upon. The Church of Reality isn't here to tell you what to believe. We want you to help us explore reality together. In order to do that, you have to own yourself, to be an individual, to think for yourself, to keep your mind sharp, and to be imaginative and innovative. We need you to be you, not to be us.
We don't have a God to tell us what to do. So we have to do the hard work and figure it out for ourselves.
Followers don't come up with new ideas. That's why religions that own you are static religions that don't come up with new and better ideas and don't fix the mistakes of their past. They tell you what to think. You aren't allowed to come up with your own better ideas and help the religion evolve. The Church of Reality is a dynamic religion. We are an evolving religion. We are a religion that is constantly under development. The more minds that are working on it, the better we are most likely to become. We don't have an omnipotent authority figure to tell us what to do through dead prophets who wrote ancient holy books.
We are realists and we have to do the hard work. We have to fill in for the missing invisible cloud being that remains hidden and silent. The Church of Reality requires that you think for yourself. You can't do that if someone else is doing your thinking for you. You have to own yourself, take control and make your beliefs your own personal beliefs because you thought about it and you concluded that you are in fact correct. If you happen to agree with other Realists, then great minds think alike. If you happen to disagree, then we figure out who has it right.
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Self Ownership 
