Howdy Y'all,

First some introduction - in the spiritual sense.

From the Orkut days (that's school for a 1983 born), I've identified as spiritual not religious and fancied myself an anonymous monotheist for sometime - albeit with the body of a Muslim (that's the religion of my father), the mind of a Hindu (my mother's religion) and heart of a Christian (I was first drawn to Christ through the hymns we used to sing in '95 / '96, later the musical JCSS and the Philip Pullman Book *1 as an adult)

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Man_Jesus_and_the_Scoundrel_Christ

I was always wary of dogma, something I inherited from my mother's side and this can be seen as far back as this 2005 essay / appeal *2

2 - https://imran.yieldmore.org/religious-appeal/

Fast forward to 2013, when I had time to put Pirsig's Static vs Dynamic Quality into perspective and the acceptance that if religion had made the "devout people I knew better persons for their faith", I wrote this about Islam * 3 and 5 years later - realized I was a pluralist - how can any path but lead us back to the universal cosmic love...

3 - https://imran.yieldmore.org/islam/

Even science is beginning to think there must be a consciousness pervading the universe, a potential that manifests in creation as kinetic.

If these poles exist, they would be what #OldIndicWisdom (I no longer use the term "Hindu") calls the Purusha and Prakriti (Witness and Nature)

Problem is - the word "God" in the Abrahamic faiths, refers to only 1 thing - The Cosmic Origin seen as a Patriarchal Lawmaker and Judge. Whereas on this subcontinent, we use it at 5 distinct levels *4.

• 4 - https://imran.yieldmore.org/god-in-india/

I'll leave it to Shashi Tharoor *5 to make a point for it.

• 5 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=330hPz8iLi4

I do run an Institute for the Development of Effective Applications of Spirituality - which for now is a bunch of gleanings and ponderings scattered across a number of pages and articles. More on that later.

Thanks Lee Wimberly for so warmly letting me in. As a pluralist my tendency is to take the opposite tack to the other person :) - that comes from the deep-rooted understanding that "All roads lead to Rome," and that notion that a spiritual democracy means hearing the "other guy" shout at the top of his lungs - the exact opposite as you would (paraphrasing Michael Douglas at the end of "The American President".

Happy to update / edit any of my articles to include your comments and my replies to those, or to rewrite if a revised / fresher perspective has happened since my writing of those.