The Fruitsaladist Manifesto

I am a Fruitsaladist. Well, I may be a fruitcake case but now I want to introduce myself as a Fruitsaladist. So please allow me to introduce what is Fruitsaladism...

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I simply did not know how to answer when my son's Anglican school asks me about my family's religion. But now I can answer that we are Fruitsaladists!

Well, I can say I am a Christian because I was baptised by a Lutheran pastor at 17. But I now keep a lot distance from Christianity in the past decade because this Jesus religion is getting increasingly creepier. So now I rarely identify myself as a Christian. So I cannot answer to the school that my son is a Christian.

I do not feel like teaching my son about God or Jesus. After I found out an advertisement of a movie about the discovery of Noah's Ark (claimed by fundamentalist Christian scholars) in his school textbook, I started to talk a lot about evolution with him. (The goose bumps that the movie ad gave me is a good piece of evidence of evolution, isn't it?) I feel the need to protect him the creeping wave of fundamentalism.

Well, my wife is a Theravada Buddhist but rather agnostic because of rampant corruption among some Buddhist monks in her native country. She is very disappointed by Buddhism as an institutional religion. So we rarely talk about Buddhism at home.

But it does not mean that I am not religious. I am very religious and believe in the healing power of religion. I am simply very unhappy with many institutional religions' desire to monopolise truth. I know Jesus is my great teacher but so is Gautama Buddha. Buddhism helped me improve my depression a lot. (My depression is rooted in my father complex. So I could reject his control over me by converting myself to Christianity, a religion with almighty God. But I could not solve my father complex by simply replacing my biological father with the almighty Father in the Heaven! So I had to kill God to free myself.)

I know I can tap into the healing power of other time-tested religions. I believe that the goal of every religion (at least in the modern/postmodern context) is to bring peace among people. But a religion does not fit all unlike a free size T shirt. Everyone has a different spiritual need and the right to explore more than one tradition to find the right solution for himself.

I guess many intelligent people of the world today feel the same way. Although they do not like institutional religions or do not want to subscribe to particular religion, they feel religion could bring them peace of mind.

Here I would like to introduce the idea of Fruitsaladism. It is a mixture of any religious or philosophical ideas and practices for the peace of mind. I am not going to provide you with the only right recipe. There can be as many recipes as the number of Fruitsaladists in the world. Each spiritually eclectic person can propose his/her own recipe and share with others.

So Fruitsaladism will not build a strong institution. But I think it is nice to make a loose network of the world's Fruitsaladists to share our experiences of personal spiritual journeys with each other.