[Skybird]

And more scriptures, how could it be different with you. Okay, whatever you want to spend your time with. It's your life, and your "karma", and your deeds that create your consequences you will not escape - for the good as well as for the bad. It all is yours. So do with it what you want. Your prayers had been listend to. God gave you the ability to decide and to act by yourself and to take responsebility for those who are to weak and depend on your help.

I see every morning many foreign people, some of which for years now, whose life have increased in quality and thankfulness and who won peace of mind and heart's trust in life by burning their books and giving up on all these things, and opening their eyes to see that there are no frontiers of the kind you point out. Beyond a certain point they stop to worry about themselves, give up former lifes and careers, give away what they possess far more easily than before, think more about others than about themselves, are not concerned with materialism and consuming anymore. Not all come that far, but if one amongst a hundred is coming that far, it was worth the effort to deal with the other ones as well. Many of these people went through severe personal crisis of multiple kinds, some of them went through very close encounters with their very own possible death by deseases or accidents, death always makes people think about their lifes. And their example is far more convincing to me than the description of just a powerhungry, punishing God in ancient, man-written scriptures, who keeps people in obedient dependence and at their lowest of possebilities, not wanting to see them at their best.

I myself do not complain about my life. I have more time to spend for things I am interested in than I would have if sitting 50 hours a week in some boring office adding to the world’s confusion and raising it’s paper mountains, and I live in material safety, not really rich, but on a reasonable level of modesty and slightly above the level of monetary sorrows (and that is already more than enough), and at nobody’s cost, so that noone can point finger at me. I have seen quite some places of the world, I had adventures, I was well led by good leaders and later became a leader myself, I was gifted with two wonderful, wise and very skillful teachers (I received these many years of martial and mental training for free, and offside the paths of the usual training schools and business makers, all I had to invest was trust and friendship and now I can say that I have had two fathers instead of just one), I can smile time and again at the confused faces when I have defeated another great fighter coming along with a set of coloured belts in this or that technique and afterwards telling him I even do not hold the lowest official grade in anything, I had many encounters with people who shared some precious experiences with me by their own suffering or dying, I have seen at closest range the cruelty and barbarism man also is capable of, I survived three times in very critical and violant situations myself because my teachers have prepared me so skillfully for exactly that, and I have learned some abilities of which I have all reason to be very confident and for which people ask my advise or even hired me for good money (and sometimes I do things all for free). Generally I have all reason to say that I enjoy life but do not stick to it at all costs, and do not fear death but do not actively seek it, for I have understood that in a way both are one and the same, and all this running around is useless, and an illusion. I also enjoy the misery or pain that sometimes happens to come around, it is necessary to make me aware of the difference between what is beautiful and what is ugly. Nothing worse than a life without occasional hiccups – but one must not stick to them. My life comes at a price, that is my loved one got killed in a car crash years ago, my Mom is badly suffering from a very malignant desease since a long time, a conventional career in a profession is no more likely (which isn’t really as bad in my eyes as it sounds), I have no family and will not have children of my own, so that at higher age I will not take any comfort from such circumstances - but the absence of these gave me the freedom to be available for people who are/were in disorientation, fear or despair about life, future, dying, and I must not be in sorrow over the possible suffering of my children when they have grown up and are confronted with a world that in twenty years without doubt will be much more brutal and harsher and colder than it already is. There always came something good from what was bad, and I never take a good present for granted, and do not think bad things last forever. I suffered from consequences that I have to take responsebility for, and I take the benefit of consequences of decisions that I made myself. It’s much like mountain climbing – your own deeds decide wether you will live or die, so you better choose the difficulty of a tour wisely. I accept the randomness and the factors that cannot be calculated in advance, like a climber must accept the risk that he will be killed without his fault, by a sudden stone avalanche. I do not climb myself, but it is a nice metaphor.

That’s what I would call peace of mind, and freedom.

The value of a religion is simply this: what does it make people doing in good or bad, what kind of motivation does it hold? If the way you live your life is fine for you, and if your personal and your national community's living style is not at the cost of others, individuals as well as nations and people, then noone needs to try to separate you from your religion as long as you do not try over and over again to enforce it to others, wether it be foreigners or friends or family members.

But that I would not agree that your national community's living style as well as that of my own country are not at the cost of others, is pretty much wellknown now, I suppose. Keeping state and church two separates is good and a huge gain our ancestors have suffered for, but here is where religion necessarily touches the field of world politics and economics. If religion forms or allows and encourages these kinds of dysbalances in the world and these kinds of destructive violance and egoism we see daily, then something is seriously wrong with it, and it neither is for the good of the one or the few, nor for the good of the many.

Do as you want to. Probably you have no other choice anyway. Consequences will be yours, not any God's.