This is a wonderful question, thank you! You will not believe how priviledged I’ve been. Apart from my mother, the most beautiful people I’ve met have all been people I’ve cared for within work. Over the years I’ve cared for adults suffering from dementia, Autistic children, children who are terminally ill, children who require care and support due to their parents suffering from mental illness, and many more. It has been an absolute honour to spend time with such beautifully strong and admirable people. In fact, looking back on my life, it would seem that in many cases they helped me more than I helped them. I would even go so far as to say that they saved me. Isn’t that brilliant? Take care lovely. xxxxxxxxxxx

I have a very ambivalent relationship with religion. I always have. There are a few aspects to it which I just adore, but overall, I think it’s too much about people who claim to have the one true way of life shown to them by a supreme being of beings, thus setting them apart from and above everyone else. This is mostly about organised religion. This too often leads to strife and, without being able to back it up, I think that most lives taken throughout the last at least 4000 years have been done so in the name of religion. I can’t stand such things. I find it totally senseless and bereft of meaning. Especially since the advent and progress of the sciences, I find religion and in particular religious scripture to be a sorely lacking and increasingly untenable way of describing the why’s of the physical world.

I believe – and I’m well aware that this is a belief not too unlike those that religious people have – that through reason and by applying your mind and empathy you should as a person be able to find that a life based on love, respect and kindness is indeed better than any alternatives. For this to happen religion shouldn’t as much be a group thing but it should be intensely private. It should form the very core of you and be the product of a life spent searching and not as a result of being told what to do by others. I know this puts a lot of responsibility on the shoulders of everybody, but I do think that we should all learn to rely on ourselves and each other, and not eschew responsibility saying that it is the will of the Gods.

This is a mighty big question though and one deserving of a treatise entirely to itself, so I’m afraid I might not be able to answer it well enough in so little space. You should ask about specific things I’ve said if they seem weird or confusing. Thanks for the question! xxxxxx.

Well finding God is often done within a specific religious setting where He is sort of predefined in certain scriptures and such. I’m not big on organised religion and thus have a slight aversion to finding God, for example, within a Christian setting. I’d rather talk about finding the Divine, which I think is something everybody should do. Not that the Divine needs to be something purely spiritual in nature - it just needs to be something which transcends this world. It can be values such as honour and love, or a certain moral code that you choose to live your life by. That kind of soul searching is a good thing. But, let’s assume that God is indeed an entity. In this case I then think that the journey to Him is more important than actually finding Him. It’s the many paths we tread and travel that teach us and I think that when we feel we’ve personally been taught a truth, we feel closer to God. He is thus the sum of all truths, all of which may differ for each individual. Personally I believe that there is a God out there for all of us. A goal at the end.

I definitely don’t think that everybody needs to find Him or even consciously engage in that sort of activity in order to be happy though. For many it happens bit by bit just through living. I do however believe that most people would do well to more actively try to find what values and truths are close to them, mostly in order to structure their lives more and through that hopefully become happier and more fulfilled.

Thank you for your question :-)!