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Foundationism


Foundationism as presented in the science fiction television series Babylon 5 is an Earth religion, one of several that appeared around the time the Centauri made first contact with the Earth Alliance in 2156.

The intent behind the new religion was to get back at the roots of all the Earth religions, past the doctrines to the core of each belief system to find out what they have in common, and proposes that they are more similar than most would have thought. It further asserts that the core message of existing religions often get lost when politics and money and nationalism get in the way of things.

One of the core tenets of Foundationism is that God is too big to be defined by words and that the closer one gets to defining God, the further away it gets. A principle Foundationists have been known to compare with Zeno's paradox.

Foundationism also teaches its followers that if they are not careful, a person can (metaphorically) lose themselves in the world; by becoming more busy with things than with themselves, spending their days and nights living someone else's agendas fighting someone else's battles and doing the work they are supposed to be doing, but every day there is less and less of that person in it all. Until one day the person comes to a fork in the road and because they are distracted and not thinking, they lose themselves. They go right, and the rest of them, the really important part of you, goes left. The person will not even know they have done it until they finally realize that they do not have any idea who they are when they are not doing all those things. To deal with this crisis of self, Foundationism adopted the Australian Aborigines rite of passage known as "Walkabout". The person having discovered they have lost themselves would leave everything and start walking and keep on walking until they (metaphorically) meet themselves. The person would then sit down and have a long talk with their "self", about everything they have learned and felt until they run out of words. The last part being vital, on the principle that the truly important things can not be said. If the person is lucky, they will look up and there is just them. Then they can go home.


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