Mathematics and religion.

While sitting down for a cup of coffee outside my lecture hall, I couldn't help but overhear a conversation between two guys sitting opposite me. It seems that one of them had some issues at home, with his father having to face problems with his children that were more or less birth-related. And the person said that his paternal grandmother - a Christian whom I reasonably believed was pretty pious - got pretty fed up with what was happening, mainly because of the fact that they family did not receive much help. And as he told his story to his friend, his friend quietly nodded, while scribbling on a piece of paper.

To cut short the entire story, his friend eventually asked, "so who do you think is at fault? The church, or God?"

Now, we all know what the answer was. Who could ever blame an all-perfect being?

So it began, a whole session of reflecting, and so the direction eventually came clear - God has his plans and so on and so forth. It could be that the church was not being very helpful and so on and so forth. And religion is still a pillar of support and so on and so forth. There is good in religion and so on and so forth.

I swear this can go on forever.

It really isn't my intention at all to slam or hammer religion, but I really detest the fact that every time something like this happens, the same thought process follows. God blah blah blah, plans blah blah blah, good blah blah blah. And this happens every time because you work on a very powerful assumption that God is almighty, perfect and all-loving, and so on and so forth.

The concepts and ideas in religion works only when you think within that particular sphere. Like in mathematics, 1 + 1 = 2 only because maths defines it so. It works in the field of mathematics. Applying maths in the real world brings maths to the world (or brings the world into math, however you look at it), and this helps explaining the theory we put forward. 1 cup of coffee in the morning and another in the night makes 2 cups a day, only because we apply that part of mathematics - bringing laws and principles from the field of mathematics into coffee-counting.

What happens when you try to set religion into everything you observe in real life? Christianity has a certain emphasis on sacrifice - that is, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for all of mankind. And somehow, such ideas when applied in real life, gives us a certain perspective to look from. We then see what went wrong, where the sacrifice was and what for, and we try to even come up with an eventual benefit for us.

Question: What if we have no obvious benefit from a problem we face?
Answer: We come up with one.

Applying the principle that God is an all-perfect being means that his actions cannot be bad in nature, and any 'bad' must be accompanied by a great of equal or even greater good. And if that condition in any situation is not met, does it mean that we end up making-up a good to resolve the bad?

Question: What if we cannot even come up with one no matter how hard we try?
Answer: We go back further into the 'law of nature'.

The law of nature? Simple. That we are all sinners. We are all sinners from the start and everything we have now is from the compassion and goodwill and kindness of God.

Isn't it simple how it all works? It really becomes like maths. If X - Y gives a negative answer and you don't like it, throw in a Z (= Y) to make it X, or just declare that X > Y. And really, X is nothing more than your definition and interpretation of God and religion. The net effect can never be bad, it always is good. Why? Because we don't work from a starting point. We work backwards to the starting point, given that the end result is always good.

Isn't this the case? Setting our perception of the world to fit the preconceived notion that this is a perfect world created by a perfect being?