WTF
Exoteric religion is ugly. Esoteric religion is generally not. Most people are simply too simple to handle the esoteric. When intelligent people are exposed only to the exoteric, either via experience or voyeurism, religion and/or faith seems silly. Much exoteric practice is silly.
YES: at the core of many beliefs are the tenets that you must internalize it, you must make it your own and come to and understanding of how it can, should, and has shaped you. Failing to do so, you might as well be faking any one of your own attributes to everyone around you, you will be fake, insincere and that stigma will creep into every facet of your life. Even the Bible itself states that one must question the teachings within or the follower has never understood the teaching.
Styrofoam beliefs, look like they hold water, but under pressure, crumble and fall.
Also, just for the record there are a few things that must be clarified here: I’m not writing this shit as an “academic.” Sorry if I used a few big words but I don’t like to dumb myself down. Here in America we live in a christian society, like it or not. My point was that any divisive religion, any religion such as Christianity (but not just) that says my way is the only way is destructive bullshit . Me personally, from what I understand and know of Buddhism, I like it; I wish we were a Buddhist society. As it is there are only about 1.2 million Buddhists in America (40 percent of which supposedly dwell in southern Cali) while roughly 3/4’s of Americans practice Christianity. Like it or not, these Christians are poisoning our society with their supposed morals, which are tainted as fuck (and imposed on everyone). Why do think there are so many witch hunts going on in present time? Nothing has changed with these people, they can’t even look at their past to see all the trouble they caused and then try to change this (no introspection–these people should meditate {silent prayer} as Christians used to). Our culture is permeated with Christianity–ask yourself this: If there is a separation of Church and State, where is the atheist president? Why isn’t this possible? So how do all these people keep their faith, why are they here? Are they all talking to an invisible man in the sky that won’t take my calls? I think not. They all practice some sort of blind faith, and this troubles me. That’s why I think that agnosto-atheism is the only sane way to broach the invisible Holy Mountain. In fact, we should be agnostic with all our beliefs bc life is a constant process of revising–it has to be bc you don’t receive all your stimuli in one instant, as R Buckminster Fuller put it, reality is non-simultaneously apprehended.
I wager you are incorrect, enlightenment IS the understanding that what you are doing is correct, because it is correct. In fact, in true enlightenment-since, the way becomes one with the path you are walking. As one comes to understand the way (note: you must understand, comprehend, actions without motives are purposeless and thereby could be said to have never happened) then they don’t have to go the whole round of telling oneself to act accordingly, just to _not_ do, as in the Tao, motionless motion is the way.
So, as in every book, there is an introduction, a voyage, a conflict, and resolution. If you don’t try to understand and consider why you are doing something, question your actions, then you just stay at the introduction, and that makes a pretty bland tale and worthless lesson.