RELIGION IS A CRUTCH!!!!!

Thousands of years ago when man first walked the Earth,each individual was completely in tune with nature and lived in harmony with the world around him. We had the ability to commune with the spirit realm without the benefit of a "priest".
When we started to contend with, rather than work with, nature, we gradually lost that ability. But we missed it. So we found people who had not lost their inate abilities yet and prevailed upon them to intercede on our behalf. This also conferred a measure of power on those who we beseached for help and through the corruption that the power caused, religion was born and the formerly spiritual people named themselves "priests" and held themselves to be somehow more worthy than the commoners, and that they and only they could lead one to 'salvation'. They kept the people ignorant and illiterate for the fear that they may be found out to be the charlatans that they are if the people were allowed to have a little knowledge or to be able to read. The churches were often more powerful than the monarchs who ruled the lands and were successful in making it a crime for any non-priest to learn to read or to possess any printed word other than the bible. They even controlled the kings to the extent that to own a printing-press was punishable by death!
You would be very hard-pressed to find any similarity between a bible of today and one written a thousand years ago. It has ben re-interpreted so many times and has had it's message bent to so many different wills over the centuries that I somehow doubt that it would be even remotely recognizable to those who wrote it.
We must take back our power from the priests and rediscover our own path to salvation.
Jesus Christ was one of the greatest teachers ever to walk the Earth but his words have been so twisted as to obscure their meaning.
Do these 'priests' actually believe their own dogma? I think not. When Jesus said "Suffer the little children to come unto me", it was not an invitation for sex. When he said "In my Father's house, there are many rooms" he did not mean six bedrooms and four bathrooms, he meant that there was room for all, not just those who believed in whatever crud was currrently being forced down their throats.
Can any thinking person truly believe that the native North Americans (to use just one example), were damned to suffer the eternal flames of Hades, just because Christopher Columbus hadn't yet done them the 'favour' of discovering them and then bringing in the black-robes to save them?
Christ was about knowledge, not the suppression and control of knowledge.
Find yourself a Greek dictionary and look up the word 'Demon', it means knowledge. So when the 'priests' were casting out demons, they were suppressing knowledge from the masses.Anyone who possessed knowledge that the church didn't want to be generally disseminated, was said to be possessed by a
'demon'. And they were right, just not in the way that they wanted the general public to believe.
If there is an 'anti-christ' it is ignorance, not some guy with 666 tattooed on his head.

Amen!
Suppressing knowledge is depriving us of God, the Universe and of Ourselves and that is a sin!

It's funny how "once upon a time" always starts with everything perfect. I wonder how long that moment lasted, in time.

Perhaps it has always been true that some individuals are better weavers, some are better growers of things from the land, some are better artists with metals, some are better poets, some are better inventors, some are better teachers, some are better crafters, some are better musicians, and some are better attuned to the energies of God.

You may not be a poet, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't talk. It also doesn't mean you should try to exterminate the poets (as has happened in history in many lands). You may not be a priest, and there may actually be other human beings more attuned to that realm than you. That doesn't mean you shouldn't pursue your God connection. It also doesn't mean you should seek to wipe out the priests.

If all of us who ever rejected anything and spoke of it disparagingly actually had to live with those temporary choices for the rest of our lives, we'd really be up to our asses in alligators. Some things we violently reject we later begin to see the deeper truths in.

Love,
Maria

I'm with Maria on this one. While I too see clearly the many ways that religious doctrine and influence have been used corruptly to serve the ends of political power and control through the ages ... and still today in the "holy" wars and militant fundamentalist movements rampant in the world ... that's not what religion is about. Religion is about reconnecting with our spiritual source, and is the oldest calling of humanity. That religious institutions, like essentially ALL human institutions, have been used to further the ends of dominance and control, speaks of the greed and corruption inherent in the lower materialistic realms of consciousness, not of the nature of religion.

To condemn religion for the corruptions it has hosted is the same error as condemning America for the existence of the CIA, or condemning science for the atomic bomb. Evil encroaches on all human endeavors while we yet live in a world characterized by separation and an "us and them" mentality, and its very nature is deception. Evil uses what we value to seduce us: our religious quest for spirit becomes the platform for physical domination, our democratic quest for freedom becomes the avenue of authoritarian control. Light attracts darkness. The brighter the light, the deeper the darkness it attracts.

And the insidiousness of the pattern is that the anger, hate and condemnation that we feel for the darkness does not diminish it but feeds it! This is a VERY difficult concept to grasp ... in fact grasping it fully implies a "conscious evolution" to a higher state of awareness that is not trapped in duality ... but it is critical if we hope to reach that new age consciousness as a world community. The enemy is not religion or science or America or any of the human activities or agencies that have been used for corrupt purposes: it is the human propensity to separate ourselves into "us" and "them," and to hate "them."

And as long as we do that, it doesn't matter whether "them" are priests or dictators or socialists or capitalists or people with different colored skin or different languages and customs, or the rich and powerful or the poor and militant. We create our reality by the thoughts we feed, and thoughts of anger and separation create a world such as the one we now experience so frighteningly on the cusp of oblivion.

Love your enemy, resist not evil, turn the other cheek ... these are not messages from the corrupt controllers. They are messages from spirit, from God, from higher s-Elf, about the only way out of this trap. And they shine through every religion and spiritual practice, whether guided by priests or shamans or received directly in meditative communion with the All. What we feed with our thoughts and feelings is what lives within us; and what lives within us will one way or another express in our outer experience ... and if that's separation and rejection ...

Tough to grasp, and tougher to practice. No way around it if we want to change the world.

Love,
Greg

No way around it. . . I'm reminded of a poem by someone named Lenore Kandel in which she apologizes to mass murderers & that sort for not being able to love them yet, despite her desire for enlightenment. . .

Now I am a Libra Rising, and I get it. . .I am very good at not passing judgments on global issues, concepts, things like religion, science and other forms of expression, but I am not so good at feeling this way for sometimes certain individuals, unless I stop looking at them as indiciduals & start looking at them as 'representatives' and then I can seem to cease directing anger & venom at them mentally!!!

I can do it globally but not always personally, isn't it supposed to be the other way around??? First you manage personally, then globally comes. . .

odd, isn't it?

But I am on that path & trying to be as ever conscious as possible. . .this is a great discussion. . . I am with Maria & Greg on this, but also agree that knowledge is for sharing, not suppressing. . . although just look at how exciting it is now that the knowledge is returning. . . if it hadn't been suppressed we wouldn't have the joy of rediscovery. . .so. . .maybe it is worth it after all. . .

In Love,
Jenn

..."Love your enemy, resist not evil, turn the other cheek ... these are not messages from the corrupt controllers. They are messages from spirit, from God, from higher s-Elf, about the only way out of this trap".. that WAS the message of the Jesus of the bible,but many who diss it,dont even "see" it... yeah baby!

Austin!!! You are quoting scripture????

(cute, Aries )

Luv,
Rainbow~