Everything I know I learned from Confucius
If you never know pain, how can you know what joy is?
If you never know hate, how can you kow what love is?

If you never know loneliness, how can you know what togetherness is?

Life is filled with Pain and Suffering but through Suffering you come to know extreme joy.

It takes a wise man to admit he doesn’t know everything, but a fool believes he knows all.

Those who stay uneducated get exactly what they wish for.

AND MOST OF ALL:
Those who feel that they’re beliefs are right and everyone else is wrong, is probably wrong in his beliefs. Those who force their beliefs on you have their argument written on sandstone, crumbling under even the slightest scrutiny. Those who listen to other’s beliefs have the strongest of faiths.

Most everything I believe in came from one religion or another. While I am a Christian by definition of believing in Christ as my savior and attempting to live how he taught, there are a lot of other wonderful teachings out there that I have incorporated into my faith. I have decided that not everyone on Earth is capable of believing that God is the answer. He comes to us as humans in many forms — these forms are His because not everyone can understand one particular image of God. I believe he gives non-believers one last chance to believe and that is at the end of our lives. If you stare at Him and still you don’t believe, God won’t force you to go to Heaven. Hell is truely a place of our own choosing. Jesus is the Son of God, but he is also an amazing teacher. “Do unto others as they would do unto you” is an amazing philosophy that everyone should follow regardless of what your beliefs are.

Another thing I gleamed from studying religions is the concept of emotional energy. I believe that we are responsible for every reaction we give to outside stimuli. For example I was chatting with a friend once who happens to be of African heritage. Now this is important only in that it’s appropo to the story. It seems that her son was called the “N” word by the son of the Pastor of her church. Her first reaction is to get very angry. Now after I got over my shock at hearing about a pastor’s son using such hate speech, I told her that the “N” word really means nothing in and of itself — it only means something when you react to it. Everyone’s reaction is different, but if you are black, your reaction may be the same as my friend’s was.

I used the analogy of an electrical lamp. The lamp can only receive power from the outlet in the wall. The words people use receive power only if you “plug” into them. If you plug into negative energy you can only burn negatively. If you plug into positive energy the opposite occurs. Negative energy can only be created by humans, in my opinion, and positive energy is all around us waiting for us to attach to it. In my opinion, that positive energy is provided to us by God.

I then came to the conclusion that a lot of the words we use to describe negative behavior don’t really exist outside of our identifying it. In my faith, God is Love. An absence of God is not Love. Hate is the opposite of Love. I therefore believe that Hate doesn’t really exist; it is merely an absence of Love or an absence of God. Ignorance is an absence of knowledge or an absence of the Lord who provides it. You get my point I hope.

Sounding so Eastern in my beliefs may sound odd coming from one who claims to be a Christian. I believe, though, that Jesus perhaps believed some of these same types of things. St. Paul wrote in one of his many letters about how our behavior proves our faith to others.

I hope that this isn’t too jolting for my non-Christian friends who know me as a poet, but a lot of my poetry comes from being so deeply in touch with my emotional core. While I am not always happy — some would say that I’m pretty dark emotionally — when it comes down to it, I’m a pretty satisfied person.