Worship
While you may develop a personal style of worship as a tradition and share it with others or share in a style made a tradition by others, you violate the 3rd Explicit Prohibition if you require it of others or else refuse to accept them as Basicans without it.
While prayer is permissible in a place that is public, its purpose is not display to the rest of the populace. Prayer done as public display is false prayer.
If you maintain an altar, it is a workspace, a school desk, a telephone, an area of calm and respite. However, as with the Basica, it is not an object of worship. When it becomes an object of worship, you put it in competition with God.
You control neither all circumstances nor the ultimate fate of any person or thing, as you cannot claim that kind of ownership of them. Do not pretend or intimate such ownership and control by drawing them into your statements of commitment. Such promises carry no extra weight, as is known by anyone who has once seen a failure to keep one play out. Your commitments should be meaningful. Therefore, simply do your utmost to keep your intentions and actions honorable, including by keeping your word. God will do with you and your life and fate as God will do. You can no more guarantee a prediction of this fate than you can guarantee a prediction of the moment and manner in which the world will end. The Basican Consecration Ceremony, remember, does not swear upon anything or claim that failure to meet any requirement will bring on any dread consequence. It states an informed, intentional, freely chosen commitment, and it carries out a process that opens the way to a transformation and a new direction.
The most fundamental rules of how to live as human beings have not changed since the beginning of humankind. But what is your understanding of the rules? Are you using them only to separate yourself from others whose wording or whose expression of worship are different from your own? Then you are a war monger.
Play fair. Show care and courtesy. Be true. Live joyfully. Harbor love in your heart. Ignore neither the forest for the trees nor the trees for the forest. Keep your mind on God. Above all else, this is how best to worship.
Articles Set 4
Alphabetical List of All Articles
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