I have no problem with organized religion.
Okay, well, maybe I do… I little. I mean, personally, I certainly still struggle with my own issues born from an upbringing in a relatively fundamental Christian home that made me feel small and afraid and broken, but I’ve largely worked my way through many of them.
I personally don’t find the need for organized religion at this point in my life.
My relationship with my creator, my source, my GOD, is a personal one, and I don’t require any authority, beyond myself, to access it. I understand who I AM, and I AM eternally grateful for the gift of this miraculous human life.
My religion didn’t teach me these things. Religion didn’t teach me to look within, but eventually, I discovered the answers inside myself on my own, through my own, personal relationship with my creator.
I find that religion is more focused on dogma than on a direct experience of God. I believe all dogma exists because of something mystical that happened at the foundation, the root, of their dogmatic teachings… The mysticism at the heart of every religion was born from a direct experience of God.
For me, bypassing religion, allows me enjoy my own direct experience of God.
I believe everything we need is already inside each and every one of us, but I also understand that some only know how to access their personal relationship with their God with the help of their religion. For many, it’s all they know to do. It’s what many us are taught, and a lot of us spend our lives assuming it’s is the only way.
Organized religion IS, indeed, one way, but it’s most certainly not the only way.
Sometimes religion IS, truly, helpful in guiding people towards finding their own truth, and sometimes it scars and hurts and damages people, irreparably. Sometimes it pushes people away, instead of drawing them in. Sometimes it is shaming and critical, instead of loving and forgiving.
Like everything in this physical world, I can find good aspects and I can find bad.
There are unconditionally positive, loving, helpful, hopeful, and life-affirming things happening in churches and mosques and temples and other holy buildings hosting holy meetings with holy people, everywhere, everyday.
There’s also negativity and hatred being preached. There is hell, fire, and brimstone. There are other groups of “holy” people who have bonded-together in unified hatred and judgement of their fellow human beings.
Our paths are all infinitely unique, and I can’t claim to know which path is the “right” path for you or for anyone, for that matter.
I can only, very clearly, see for myself that there is really only one of these two perspectives that reminds me of Jesus.
Jesus, the man, worshipped by churches at both ends of the organised-religion-spectrum, was created as an example—a metaphor for life—he illustrates, precisely, perfectly how to be a spiritual human+being.
He points us towards love, not fear.
I’m not, nor was I ever, Catholic, but I love this new Pope.
I believe Pope John Francis is the first awakened Pope of this new, enlightened spiritual age, and it certainly shows. 🙂
“In ideologies there is not Jesus: in his tenderness, his love, his meekness. And ideologies are rigid, always. Of every sign: rigid. And when a Christian becomes a disciple of the ideology, he has lost the faith: he is no longer a disciple of Jesus, he is a disciple of this attitude of thought… For this reason Jesus said to them: ‘You have taken away the key of knowledge.’ The knowledge of Jesus is transformed into an ideological and also moralistic knowledge, because these close the door with many requirements. The faith becomes ideology and ideology frightens, ideology chases away the people, distances, distances the people and distances of the Church of the people. But it is a serious illness, this of ideological Christians. It is an illness, but it is not new, eh?”