GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines:

To live out goodness, fairness, and love

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GOD-centric to GOOD-centric

In 2011, I wrote GOD-centric which I intended to be the first in a trilogy to include GOD-centric Interior Spiritual Disciplines and GOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines. In 2016, I am writing GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines. Something went awry.

In 2011, I was in love with my God who had supported me during a challenging childhood and to whom I felt strong allegiance; but, I also had intellectual doubts and was chagrined by the major religions' portrayal of God. I asked myself: "What must be true about God for you to worship God?" I decided that God must be always loving, good, and fair. I could not worship a God that was sometimes unloving, immoral, or unfair and certainly not the vain and violent God so often described in the bible. Since each major religion failed to reflect an always loving, good, and fair God, I proposed a GOD-centric loving-good-fair filtering for religions to purify their teachings so that God's true light would shine more brightly. Crickets.

Since 2011, I have faced the fact that natural evil slays my desire to believe in an always loving, good, and fair God. My wanting an always loving, good, and fair God to exist does not make it so. Love, goodness, and fairness remain my ultimate concerns so I have thrown in that extra "o" and transitioned from GOD-centric to GOOD-centric. Now, choosing to be centered in love, goodness, and fairness is an act of will rather than convergence since there is no eternally loving, good, and fair God with "whom" to converge. Even so, I still think that most people genuinely believe in love, goodness, and fairness and still need that common language to communicate, cooperate, and bond with each other no matter their religious, ethnic, or national traditions. GOD-centric or GOOD-centric, we good people still share the same ultimate concerns.