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Thoughts On Churches and Religion

Churches are buildings with people in them. It's the people inside that make the difference. I have been in some very oppressive and judgmental churches and I have been in some churches full of love and forgiveness.

But anytime more than 5 people are in a room you will get a cross section of shame, ignorance, beauty, fear, and hope all squashed together like snot in a Kleenex.

People made up religion from old stories that they stole from other cultures and used them for their own. Most occasions it would used to maintain control and keep the townspeople all thinking the same way. Sometimes that has led to peace. But most times it keeps people ignorant of the true relationship with the universe which is independence from collective hogwash.

God is in you and of you. You couldn't be godless if you wanted. You can only be dumb and unquestioning. My problem with many church goers is their inability to ask larger questions. They just take the stories and phrases from the bible as truth, not realizing that metaphors lose all reflective power when perverted into real life occurrences.

Moses parted the RED SEA? C'mon! Noah built an Ark for two of every animal? Yeah, sure. That sounds real.

But when understood as a parable or a metaphor it becomes something larger. It has power. We give away our power when we turn it over to a deity.

And that is why many of these people are Republican. They like father figures and authority. Their stories shape their willingness to give over to these authority figures. Democrats love God too. Our whole Nation is addicted to God. But not the kind of God that brings much peace in the world. They love their consumer toys and convenient lifestyles more than the discipline of keeping love inside their every waking thought and deed. They love those that think as they do put stop short of sharing with others that do not think the same.

Many beautiful and caring people go to church every Sunday. But church or bible study does not make them virtuous. The inner voice that knows of karma and kindness teaches them what they need to know. God in the bible is a God for warring tribes of the old lands. Yahweh was just one of many Jewish gods competing for their attention. He was not even that popular.

But many so called Christians do not know squat about history because they only read the books that support their beliefs. So they just keep passing the ignorance down from one generation to the next.

The world is a much more grander and complex place. You cannot shove life and it's meaning into nice little boxes without losing the magnificent.

In my mind they are losing the beauty of the forest because they only have reverence for one bush in the landscape.

They turned Jesus into a holiday character. A product.

Become a rebel of all dogma and superstition and fall in love with life again.

That's what Jesus did.

Responses:

Agree, as you might guess with your sentiments here. Belief in God always fell under the heading of obedience for me until I found that belief outside the context of religion. Then it became a source of joy and a wish to expand that consciousness, not because somebody else said I should but from within. Meditation has also helped enormously in developing that.

Not that I'm much less vapid than I used to be but at least now I know better.

I think the most important thing is that we all have God within us to develop within ourselves and to look for in others. Religions point people toward religion first instead of to God directly. It's kind of self-preservational, I guess.

Some of the most generous, kindest people I know claim to be atheists. It's not whether they have faith in God that matters. It's through the good things they do, God gets into the world. They're doing Godly things whether they believe in God or not

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