Several years ago, I had a
dream wherein there existed a
religion called the
Church of Common Sense. All the people of my city were
flocking to join. The dream did not last long enough for me to observe a
service, yet I feel that I have been given this vision for a reason.
Though I have been ordained as a minister of the Universal Life Church, it now seems I am meant to establish the first religion on Earth to be be based solely on common sense! I'm sure the ULC will not object; I think the ULC is based on good sense, as it is.
So call me a prophet. The time has come, everyone, for some good solid sensibility. The problem is that common sense is hard to pin down. In one sense of the phrase, common sense has been wrong a lot; it's just a pack of things that people accept uncritically as they grow up. For example, it was common sense that the Earth is flat, and that Africans are inferior.
However, I feel that there's another way to view this. In another sense, it could mean discarding abstraction and basing the religion on nominalism and Occam's Razor; after all, the existence or non-existence of the abstract makes absolutely no difference to the concrete.
The Church of Common Sense has no need of lofty explanations and doctrines. Here are the tenets:
It doesn't matter if there is heaven or hell, because you are here. Do what you feel is right and don't look for an absolute value system; everything that matters, matters only to you.
If the past were totally different, the present would be the same, because the present just is. Concretely, it doesn't matter how things got to be where they are this exact instant, so why worry?
Don't bother creating big, orderly expositions of your belief system; it's futile. It will be full of logical fallacy and full of holes. Of course, it will make people think, and maybe they'll get somewhere on their own, even though you didn't succeed.
Just live. Inhale. Exhale.
Religion, indulgent spirituality, and science are all unecessary bull.
Don't believe any of that airy-fairy crap.
We're all just doing our best.
If you'd like to join the Church of Common Sense, then do. Although I feel I have made it somewhat paradoxical. That's what you get when you base reality on dreams.
Author's afterword:
Please, do not look to me for any sort of justification or responsibility for this writeup. I wholeheartedly refuse to take responsibility for this, just like I would for someone else's writing.
This writeup reflects the Sublimity of an earlier tradition.