Our Soul Purpose

Thoughts

 Searching for God on the Internet • posted by Sue Anne

I was curious today. I was doing a random search on the internet for various book titles, and it occurred to me that eventually we will be able to find just about anything or anyone on the internet. I marveled for a moment at the importance of information gathering and sharing to life here on earth. How we have come from grunts and cave drawings to bytes and web pages is fascinating to me and always raises the question of why it is so vital to our life here to gather information and share it. Why do we feel so compelled to understand and communicate? Are we simply acting out some DNA encoded, evolutionary drama of the collective unconscious wherein knowledge of our surroundings and the sharing of thought is crucial to our survival here? Or, are we responding to a higher spiritual intuition unrelated to our physical existence yet bound to it by some mystical code of the universe? I don't know. I wasn't given that information when I got here.

So, I was curious about the information that is being exchanged around the globe, and I decided to look for God on the internet, just to see how many websites that my particular search would list. I thought I would start small and look for various religious and spiritual figures first. I found relatively equal numbers of websites mentioning Buddha, Mohammed, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Theresa, with Satan and Bill Gates coming in at the next level. I wasn't really thinking of Bill Gates as a religious or spiritual figure, I just wanted to see where he fit in.

Jesus was the next highest in terms of websites with references to him. I also looked for general references to inner peace, faith and spirituality. Spirituality is a very popular thing to find on the internet it seems.

Then, I looked for God. There were millions of site references, way too many for me to visit. God seemed to be the most popular until I entered the general topic of Religion. Religion garnered the most references so far. I played devil's advocate for a moment and looked under the topic of Science. As I suspected there were many more sites with Science on board than God and religion. 

On a whim, I looked up Microsoft. I wasn't really surprised to see it outweigh God in cyberspace.

Then, I searched for love.

There are well over 170 million references to love on the internet. Of course, some of those refer to love in the physical sense. But, most are focusing on the love ideal that we all hold in our hearts. I found a certain comfort in knowing that love was prevalent on the internet. It gave me some hope for the rest of the World Wide Web and the rest of the world.

My curiosity was satisfied after that discovery. 

The marvels of the Internet are vast. As we continue to seek information and ways to share it, I hope we will continue to include meaningful spiritual icons in our questions and our answers. They provide the many faces of love to which we can relate. Thankfully, it is clear that whether we are tapping out our thoughts, experiences and findings on a rock wall or on the latest ergonomic keyboard, we will always be searching for, finding, and including love.
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 Why Don't we Love and Connect on Deep Levels? • posted by Sue Anne

As a child, growing up in a Southern Baptist church and town, I would attend church on Sunday morning, Sunday evening and Wednesday evening. I would go to Vacation Bible School, Christian Youth Camp, and, in general, lived a life surrounded by the doctrine of my family's religion. 

I remember the lessons that I was taught, and, in my adult life, I have tried to peel away the human-tainted vessels to get to the simple messages that could be found within. And, the messages truly are very simple. And the universal message is always "Love." 

As a child, the concept of love was presented in many ways. Through the church and through my family, I learned the human form of love, a love of necessary conditions. The conditions placed upon love seem to be both minor as well as all encompassing, but nonetheless conditional. I learned of one love concept, however, that has always comforted me. 

Agape love, as we define it, is a love so complete and pure that only a God of great power and omniscience could bestow it. This Agape love would manifest itself as a loving creator who loves human kind so much that the giving of life would be the ultimate no strings attached gift. A gift like that is almost incomprehensible to our finite human minds. 

However, if we can begin to think past these human shells and expand our understanding of love, we can start the journey toward unconditional love, toward Agape love. And, simply from taking the first step on that journey, we are forever changed. Then, Agape love is no longer reserved for some "other" being. Instead, Agape love is what we are as we watch the creation of ourselves and each other unfold.

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