truth-over-tradition.com

Religion is retrospective. Religion looks backward to the faiths of our fathers. We inherit religion from the graves of a thousand dead men. So few who call themselves “religious” have actually stopped for a moment and asked themselves, “Where did I get this thing? Where did I find it? Was it an infusion from the sky? Did an angel swoop down and breathe the life of Judaism into my spirit?” If a man will only open his rational mind but a second, he will find that the resounding answer is no. Many would like to believe that they alone have searched the universe and have autonomously discovered the answer to the great cosmic riddle —but not so. You inherited your religion, sir. You inherited your religion, madam. Your religion is the belief of another, who himself took it from another, who took it from still another, and another, and another, and another. Your religion is not yours. It is a family heirloom. Religion is like a hand-me-down suit from a grandfather who lived in antiquity.

Religion is a popular delusion. It is a social custom. It is a societal fad. Religion is capricious. A woman’s religion is merely the result of where she was born and which clique she chooses to join. Those born in Pakistan will be Muslim, those born in Israel will be Jewish, and those born in America will be Christian. And so, on the whim of that one geographic criterion, humans are assimilated into the dominant religious group of their nation, of their region, of their parents, of their peers. And thus, they take on the madness of the crowd. Like horses and cattle, humans are herd animals who adopt the religion of the pack. Humans adopt whatever sacred belief will least upset the mob.

Religion is proprietary. It is a pre-fabricated template. It is not to be toyed with or touched. It is someone else’s goods. It is a patented widget. Religion is a corporate enterprise, a system in which priests, mullahs, and rabbis have defined the nature of the universe and sell that ready-made product to you. They have turned over every rock and rooted out every weasel in the universe and ascribed to him some edict, proclamation, or law that explains his every move and his every behavior. Thus, religion is like an Apple computer: you take it out of the box, plug it in, push a button, and it works. Someone else has done all the thinking. Someone else has done all the work. Therefore, again, religion is not you own. Religion does not come from you; it is given to you. Not only have we inherited it from our ancestors, not only have we adopted it from the group-think of our societies, we have accepted it as it is already written and we have left it as it is already defined. Therefore, religion is another man’s trick, a turnkey philosophy used for power, money, and world domination.

Religion is dogma. Dogma is a set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. When one signs on to an organized religion, he subjugates himself to the mind of the church and opens a box from which all the griefs of the universe spring. To be religious is to be a slave to the dominant paradigm. The universe is already fully understood. The songs and the symbols are already formed. There is no need to question, hesitate, or think. All that is left for you is to fall into line.

Spirituality is introspective. It is immediate. It lives in the here and now and looks to the ground at our feet, to the sky over our heads. Spirituality is a personal connection with the divine presence. It comes from within, and it bows not to authorities and past traditions. Spirituality is not the echo of our dead ancestors and is not inherited from anyone. Spirituality wells up from the deepest part of your own essence and is as individual to you as your own fingerprint. Spirituality is authentic, organic, and true. To be spiritual is merely to listen to the voice of nature, to the voice of the universe, to the voice of your own intuition, to the voice of your own god.

Spirituality is not cliquish or regional. Spirituality is open, accepting, and non-biased. It is merely found in those who feel the great divinity within nature and within themselves but do not wish to infect that indefinable thing with dogma, hierarchy, patriarchy, and the lust for power. Spirituality fills the void between Atheism and Religion. Because spirituality is absent of all rules, laws, proclamations, and structure, there is no chance for indoctrination by culture and group-think. The proselytizer’s tool bag is empty.

Spirituality is an open-source philosophy. There is nothing to have been pre-fabricated except a broad definition: the belief in one indefinable and omnipresent god who is the cause and/or the substance of the universe and who can be experienced through intuition, communion with nature, meditation, contemplation, and prayer. For one, god might simply be nature. For another, god might be an entity who both exists within and transcends the universe. Those who define themselves as “Spiritual, But Not Religious” are often more comfortable in contemplating the universe as a mystery than they are in filling it with belief systems such as eternal reward, reincarnation, karma, miracles, angels, demigods, etc.

Spirituality is devoid of dogma. Indeed, the central-most aspect of spirituality is its lack of doctrine. There are no creeds, no oaths, and no membership cards. Spirituality does not try to explain the universe. Those who are spiritual simply want to live within the universe and be free to experience and connect with the divine presence in their own individual ways. And because spirituality is not infected with ideology and the madness of crowds, no great shaman, no priest, and no prophet can wield it as a tool to dominate humankind. Spirituality requires us to think and feel for ourselves.

Where there is Religion, there is dogma. Where there is dogma, there is divisiveness, intolerance, hate, and hierarchy. Where there is spirituality, there is uncertainty. Where there is uncertainty, there is openness, acceptance, love, and equality.

By: Colin Shanafelt

Thirty-four million Americans have given up on organized religion, according to the most recent American Religious Identification Survey. Yet for many of these dropouts — from churches, synagogues, temples and so on — spirituality is still a vital part of their lives.

How else would you explain the phenomenal success of Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (soon a major motion picture), or the writings of the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra, and others like them? Just because people are fed up with organized religion doesn’t mean their appetite for spiritual things has been swallowed up, too.

I know because I was one of these millions who dropped out of active involvement in organized religion. But unlike the majority of the other 33,999,999 dropouts, I was a religious leader when I did.

I grew up in the church, the son of a Southern Baptist minister. When I graduated from college, I went to seminary, and after several years of study, I began my career as a professional minister. It wasn’t long, however, before I discovered that the church was more lost than the world it was trying to save.

Go into many churches today, and instead of finding an institution interested in saving the world, what you may find is an institution vastly more interested in saving itself. For example, people go to church to find God. Instead of finding God, however, followers are often saddled with a catalogue of “do’s” and “don’ts” as onerous as the US tax code. They are told what to think, how to believe, as well as how they’re supposed to live.

In many places, the church is still the most segregated place in America. Where I grew up, some 40 or so years ago, many of my neighbors attended the Baptist church my father served. That is, if they were white Baptists; the black Baptists had a church of their own. Or they attended one of the other three mostly-segregated churches that occupied one of the four corners of Main Street. Today, however, your neighbor is just as likely to be black as white, or Muslim as Christian. Maybe people are leaving the church because they’d prefer to live in the real world — the desegregated one.

Then, there are those church leaders who seem obsessed with having the biggest church, the largest crowds and the most expensive campuses. While 40 million people died of starvation in the last decade, churches spent $10 billion on campuses.

Perhaps some churchgoers departed because they’d rather their charity actually make a difference in the world.

If you went to church looking for relief from the stress and burdens of living, you might have found more of the same, only dressed as beliefs and dogmas, rules and expectations Then, there’s the debating, disagreement, and division that goes on between churches, as well as between people in the same church. I call it the “We’re right! You’re Wrong!” syndrome: each group insisting that their beliefs are right, which by implication means that everyone else’s beliefs are wrong. “We’re in; you’re out!” “We’re the chosen ones; you’re not!” Maybe those who came looking for some sanity in life are leaving the church to preserve what little remains.

What about the seemingly endless clergy scandals? It may be several years yet before we know the full impact of this demonic debacle. I suspect that scores of people are just plain fed up with an institution that would “condemn gays and lesbians for coming out of their closets,” as someone characterized it, “while hiding clergy pedophiles in its own.”

Some 15 or so years ago I, like millions of others, dropped out of active involvement in the church. Soon thereafter, I began wondering where to go to find God. For a few years, I went nowhere. I just wandered around in a kind of spiritual wilderness. Then, one Sunday afternoon, completely unexpectedly as well as outside the church, I had a deeply profound spiritual awakening. I describe it in my book, The Enoch Factor.

Among the many realizations to which I awakened was this: “You don’t have to go to church to know God.” For reasons too obvious to mention, this isn’t the kind of message the church, or any religion, wants spread around. But it’s true nonetheless. There is no religion, not even the Christian religion, holding the title deed to God. God’s grace is not limited to a select few. The moment any religion believes it is, you can be sure that religion knows nothing of God.

If there is anything Jesus, and the Buddha, made abundantly clear it is that the wind blows where it will. You can hear it, see its effects, and feel its power, but you can never contain it. In other words, the moment I stopped trying to find God, God found me. I love the way Deepak Chopra once framed it: “God is not difficult to find; God is impossible to ignore.”

Even the title to this article, “Finding God After Religion,” seems to imply that there’s something you must “do” to know God. But the real truth is this: there is nothing you need to do to know God. You know God already. The mistake that virtually all religions make, including Christianity, is to confuse beliefs for faith and, as a consequence, condition people to think that there are things that they must do, duties that they must perform, etc., for God to be pleased and her presence to be known.

Finding God after religion? Remember the following: In Eastern thought, there’s something called “the law of least effort,” or “do less and accomplish more.” If you will give up the “doing” and, instead, just enjoy “being,” I think you’ll make a great discovery. The psalmist said, “Be still and know … ” In my own experience, I have found that when I’m present (and that’s my spiritual practice), I’m immediately in Presence, the real and sacred sanctuary of God.

What more would you want? What more would religion ever give you?

Written by Steve McSwain

I recently read about a woman who needed to clean out her fish bowl, but could not find a container in which to place her two goldfish. So she filled up her bathtub with a couple inches of water and placed the fish in the tub. After cleaning the bowl and returning for the goldfish, she found them swimming in a corner of the tub in a circle no bigger than the fish bowl.

Compare yourself to the fish in the tub. Do your fears and habits and the patterns of your life keep you swimming in a small circle?

Or do you live dangerously, exploring the potentials of your existence?

Margaret Stortz says, “It takes a lot of courage to release the familiar and seemingly secure, to embrace the new. But there is no real security in what is no longer meaningful. There is more security in the adventurous and exciting, for in movement there is life, and in change there is power.”

When making a new decision about your life, Osho advises, “… don’t choose the convenient, the comfortable, the respectable, the socially acceptable, the honorable. Choose something that rings a bell in your heart. Choose something that you would like to do in spite of any consequences.”

Dangerous ideas? For sure. You could screw up big time. Or you could find yourself walking down a new path of aliveness.

If you’re swimming in small circles and life isn’t as fulfilling as you want it to be, consider your level of aliveness. Aliveness is excitement, enjoyment in doing what you do. It’s that blood-pumping exhilaration, challenge, joy, stimulation, and pleasure that makes life worth living.

If you’ve traded freedom and aliveness for security, there is no time like the present to consider adding some joyous new challenges to your life.

(article written by Dick Sutphen)