The following is an excerpt from my eBook, A Handbook For The Spiritual Journey:

You are your own authority regarding how to know what/whom to believe. All of us are. If we are willing to keep walking around what makae sense to us, looking it over, reflecting on it, examining it, poking it, prodding it, digging around in it, holding it up to the light and thinking about what we think about it over time, we will become increasingly aware of inconsistencies, incongruities and incompatibilities. One thing will contradict another. The practice of “taking things on faith” came into vogue to relieve us of the trouble of squaring up to mutually exclusive beliefs, e.g., “God is love and will send us straight to hell if we don’t believe it is so.”

At some point, we have to ask, “How can this, which makes sense to us, square up with that which also makes sense to us?” Something will have to go for things to fit better together. Original Sin, for instance, must go to make room for what we know about the evolution of the species. There was never a time of innocence and purity. Snakes never talked. There was nothing like Paradise anywhere ever. There was no Fall. What we think in one place doesn’t mesh with what we think in another place. We have to throw out some things in order to make room for other. What goes? What stays? Who decides? Who says so? WE DO! Based on what? Our. Own. Personal. Authority.

We know what we know without knowing how we know. Our faith is in ourselves, in what we know to be so because we know it in our body, and our body does not lie, except in the case of drugs, sex and alcohol, and all that we want which we have no business having. No?