That was a good try, but Langan is operating from some inaccurate presuppositions that, similarly to how physicists lacking a comprehensive Unified Field Theory end up with competing views of how the universe works that cannot be reconciled from their present level of understanding, he is creating an unnecessarily tangled mess of incompa…
That was a good try, but Langan is operating from some inaccurate presuppositions that, similarly to how physicists lacking a comprehensive Unified Field Theory end up with competing views of how the universe works that cannot be reconciled from their present level of understanding, he is creating an unnecessarily tangled mess of incompatible perspectives. I'm not going to try to dissect it all for the readers right now, but ONE of his fundamental errors is not understanding the relationship between religion and spirituality. He is conflating the two, where the REALITY is that they are so different as to actually have almost nothing to do with each other.
In a nutshell, the non-physical dimensions of Reality are both outside of (or "beyond") three-dimensional time-space and are the SOURCE of the denser, lower-vibrational physical universe that we operate within in our physical bodies, and that non-time-space level is what we can label "spiritual". Religions, on the other hand are just attempts at explaing or describing that non-physical Reality, but it CANNOT be described or explaned WITHIN the context of time-space. It just simply doesnt "fit" here. Therefore ALL attempts to describe it or talk about it in any way are futile and quite meaningless. That is the problem with religions. They have all arisen as attempts to describe that other reality by people who have had some level of direct experience of it, and we, as human beings CAN directly experience that other-dimension because it is the ESSENCE of the non-physical-part of us that is what our consciousness, or awareness, "comes from" and is "made of". Self-awareness/consciousness is not physical. It does not come from the brain. It does not arise out of neurons and neurotransmitters. The brain is just the interface or "translator" between the physical and the non-physical.
This is the tremendously huge mistake that allows monsters like Schwab and Harari to even begin to conceive of human beings as mere mechanistic objects to be controlled, preyed upon, and abused, and transformed into some kind of dehumanized "transhuman" cyborg slave. It is absolute proof that those people are as stupid and ignorant as anyone who ever lived! Ignorant MORONS!!! They can only believe that nonsense because they are completely disconnected from what they are, their essence. Evil is IGNORANCE of Reality, of what is true. Just as darkness has no "existence" of its own, but is only the absence of light. Evil is the absence of connection to Source, to Self. And that is a confusing and painful place to be.
The good thing is that since they understand nothing about Reality, they are absolutely bound to make endless fundamental errors. And they do. That is why those people like Klaus Schwab are constantly doing such stupid things!
Religion is just descriptions of people's experiences of that reality, but again, the spiritual dimension cannot be conceived of or described in physical terms. It doesn't work; it will never work. The two things are vastly more different even than a cookbook and the prepared food on your plate that you can actually eat. Or a map on your cellphone and the road you are driving on. One is but an indication of, a two-dimensional representation of something. Religion is no more than a "shadow" of the Greater Reality. It is NOT Reality. It is NOT Real. That is why there are tens of thousands of different religions, and adherents of every single one believes that their way is THE RIGHT WAY. Does this make sense? Can they all be "right"? Is ONE of them THE Right Way? No. None of them are! None can be. They are made-up attempts at describing the indescribable. EVERY religion IS WRONG!
What IS Real is our connection to that non-physical Source Energy ot vibrational Reality, because that is what we are made of. But no one can "get there" through the limited mental processes of everyday thoughts that operate on the surface of our awareness. Only by quieting the endless chatter of our physically- time-space-oriented mind can we move our pure consciousness back to its Source and have an expansive, transcendent experience. That beyond-physical awareness is connected with by focusing on the silent gap BETWEEN our thoughts. Then it is sort of like being turned inside out, and you discover that what you are is much, much bigger on the INSIDE! And that connection is the source of all the good things that spirituality realized people have spoken of through the ages: Love, Peace, Bliss, Joy, etc. It is really all the same thing there. Just different facets of it.
The only exception I would make to your comments is this re religions vs. spirituality: their original and primary purpose is to unfold a pathway, a map, a guidebook for the internal journey that must be made to access the non-physical dimensions of reality while still in the body. It does have to do with raising and refining the individual's vibratory level/frequency into a more open and universal awareness beyond time-space in preparation for the eventual departure from the much more dense consciousness of bodily existence. However, most religions have become artifacts - institutional structures which are bureaucratic rather than transformational. The devolution from original messenger to message to monument seems inevitable as the Greater Reality, as you call it, is not a transmissible realization.
"re religions vs. spirituality: their original and primary purpose is to unfold a pathway, a map, a guidebook for the internal journey . . . "
Not exactly. Religions are always a leftover artifact of people who had a strong connection to that vibrational frequency. Religions happen later or much later after the real thing, long enough that the experience someone actually had is just heresay and the people hearing about it didn't get the real message that it is something that has to be directly experienced and not just thought about or written about. Yes, people can get inspired when they hear that such a personal experience is possible and learn that it is something precious to be sought. But as you said:
" . . . most religions have become artifacts - institutional structures which are bureaucratic rather than transformational."
They are ALL artifacts. And the main organized religions are, unfortunately, ANTI-spiritual! The are falsely promoting themselves as "THE WAY" to get to heaven or whatever. They prescribe all kinds of studies, rituals, listening to sermons or whatever, praying in special ways, wearing a special garb, going on pilgrimages to "holy places", eating a certain way, etc. NONE of those things get anyone anything spiritual. ALL of them are, or usually are, just time-wasting distractions that KEEP people from the DIRECT experience of a higher vibrational state. Also, when people have that direct connection to Source energy they don’t need any "intercessor" or "intermediary" religious institution, so the organized religion loses "paying members". They don't like that! Priests and pastors like to get supported! Church organizations therefore teach that anything except THEIR WAY is bad, apostacy, heresy, the work of Satan, etc. A few centuries ago people would have been tortured to death or burned at the stake to "save their soul"! Even today, if you are Muslim and turn away from their idea of the "true religion" they will KILL you, according to Shria law!
Old. New. It's irrelevant. All religions are just codified attempts at explaining something that cannot be explained because it is beyond/outside of this space-time dimension. But we can access it vibrationally/experientially because that is what we (our consciousness) is "made of". Thinking about it just gets us nowhere.
A quick dictionary definition of “religion” does not seem to warrant such vilification:
From Oxford Languages: “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
From the Bible: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless. Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. James 1:26-27
There is nothing wrong with “religion” per say. It has everything to do with spirituality because it is evidence that we are spiritual beings. It is the outworking of our beliefs.
As recorded in the book of James 2:26 God says, “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”
I think the real problem is that people come up with teachings and traditions that contradict the dictates of God Himself. Jesus often challenged the Pharisees who came up with their own additions that went against what God said. As recorded in Matthew 15:3-9 Jesus said:
“Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?
“For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.’
“But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, “Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’
And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition.
“You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you:
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.’ ‘But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
Within the context of Judeo-Christian teachings, a core problem (again, all as a result of ignorance) is that humans have reversed the idea of we being "made in the image of God" and have instead made God IN THE IMAGE OF MAN! So they ascribed all of the human qualities of anger, jealously, desire for revenge or retribution, desire for adulation, etc. to their concept of God. But to be fair, some of the qualities attributed to Jesus are also applied to God: love, compassion, forgiveness, etc. Those are pretty diametrically opposed to the qualities of the "Old Testament" God. But when people are raised in a religion they tend to accept the beliefs "as Gospel" (pun intended!) and seldom question the contradictions. After all, the Church (temple, priest, etc.) Knows Best, right? Because that's what they were told by authority figures.
This seems to be a popular take on the Jude’s-Christian God. But does God not have the right and ability to reveal Himself to mankind the way He chooses?
You are right that we should not hold the teachings of human church “Authorities” as origins of truth and use their teachings as parameters for how we practice our faith. But we should go to the source of truth that God has given all of us access to. When you study the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, the God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament as revealed in Jesus are one and the same.
God "is one and the same" (but always expanding/evolving), but BELIEFS about God are more or less limited to the the finite human intellect.
God didn't write the Bible. It is just one of many attempts to record both cultural mythology (including Origin Myths), and experiences of people having various spiritual experiences, including Near Death Experiences, Shared Death Experiences, spontaneous visions and dreams or visions brought about through the use of psychedelics ("accuracy" being highly questionable), out-of-body experiences (questionable if they occurred as elements of dreams or in a near-asleep state such as those of Robert Monroe's), through hypnosis in our present era (the accuracy of which is also questionable depending on the skills of the hypnotist or hypnotherapist), or through meditation.
The Bible has been both highly edited to magnify the teachings (and manipulations of) of the Catholic Church, and wronly interpreted because those without direct spiritual connection do not understand the parts of the Bible that try to describe it. For instance, the "Name of God" or "Word of God" is the vibrational frequency of God itself. But Christians who don't understand that believe that the BOOK is the "Word". Which proves that they don't understand their own Bible, because it does NOT say "In the beginning was the Bible, and the Bible was with God, and the Bible was God". (from John 1:1) Thats is pure nonsense! But that is the logical result of calling the physical book the "Word"! But since they have no idea what the Word is, that's the best they can come up with.
That is the viewpoint that many people hold in New Spirituality but scholars have differing views as to how to authenticate ancient documents. And people have differing views as to how to authenticate truth.
Becoming familiar with the translation process and with the original languages that texts were written in, as well as studying ancient cultures helps to make things clear. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls among other archeological findings prove the reliability of the preservation of the Ancient texts.
As much as people enjoy trying to "figure it all out", all that stuff is just "wheel spinning". There is no such thing as "New Spirituality" or any reality to any other mental constructs or imaginations about the non-physical. Our minds that are grounded in this limited, physical reality simply cannot process that which is outside of space-time! It doesn't work. That Greater Reality doesn't "fit" here. We can conceptualize what one dimension is by imagining a single "point" in space, and we can conceptualize two dimensions by imagining something flat like a piece of paper, and of course we can easily relate to normal three-dimensional objects, but just try to extrapolate that process to imagine four dimensions. Good luck! Maybe brilliant mathematicians can represent it mathematically; I guess that is what they do, or try to do, but that level of math makes no sense to me. Our three-D-oriented minds cannot visualize something in four dimensions as an object, and that is probably because anything that we can make a mental image of also belongs to 3-D. No "physical" object can exist in 4-D. This is just an example of the limitations of our mental processing. But we have the same limitation trying to mentally relate to the non-physical that we experience as spirituality. Religions are only crude attempts and cannot "get there".
All they can do is say,: "There is something that is beyond this physical reality, and you can tap into it. It is what you return to after you separate from your physical body, and it is wonderful. You have experienced all that before and you will again. You are a spiritual being just "wearing" a body, and nothing here in the physical dimension can harm what you really are in any way. You are Safe. You are Loved. You are Cherished by the infinite Consciousness that you came from and that no matter what happens here, you will go back to that Source. And you will still be You. There is no place where you can get "lost". There is no "hell" unless you, through your confusion, temporarily sidetrack yourself in such an experience, because we have free will as aspects of the Creator, and are free to make even "bad" choices and we, along with the effect of resonance frequencies that we attract as creators of our reality, shape energy into experience. But it is all learning experiences. And as we learn, we become more discerning about what it is that we really want to experience, what we want to attract to ourselves. We learn that Love is the highest vibrational reality. That loving and caring for our fellow souls on our journeys is the most satisfying. That being in a physical body is a gift and that while we are here we can experiece things that cannot be experienced on the Other Side. We understand that Life has immeasurable value, and that it is the Grand Adventure.
If a religion doesn't remind us of those things, then it has no value. Too many (most?) religions are self-serving control trips that use negative emotions to coerce people into going along with them: fear, guilt, shame. They become formalized, self-perpetuating organizations that cause a great deal of emotional/psychological harm to their adherents.
Master Teachers who remember very clearly what they are and powerfully express the frequency of Source energy can raise the frequency of those around them through resonance. This serves as a reminder to people of Where they came from and how to maintain a higher vibrational state themselves. Many religions are the after-effect of one of these Teachers being here, but the Experience of that energy won't come from any book or sermon. And formal religions that teach all kinds of ideas about heaven and hell, and have all their rules and regulations and things the adherents must memorize and actions they must perform are just distractions and a waste of time. They take people AWAY from the pure experience of Source that can only be connected with internally and without the thought process.
Bottom line, if a religion points people towards connection with their essence, great! But that's all it can do. Just saying "look insude to find it" is the most a religion can do. After that, the person has to go there to find what they are looking for! People like to study the Bible or other religious texts. What they want isn't in there. All that time they spent reading, instead they could have been connected with the vibration of their Source energy and getting "blissed out".
You sound like the politicians that are trying to gaslight me and vilify what I have come to know in my search for truth about the vaccines and the fine Freedom fighters who have helped me in many ways.
I am sure that the mental, spiritual and emotional experiences that you have are real and satisfying to you. But to deny the reality of the spiritual freedom, restoration, joy and love that I experience from walking with God, since I have been reconciled with Him--a personal Creator, who made Himself known and sought me out and saved my life through the death, resurrection and forgiveness of Jesus is rather arrogant.
You said, "People like to study the Bible or other religious texts. What they want isn't in there. All that time they spent reading, instead they could have been connected with the vibration of their Source energy and getting "blissed out"."
There is no such thing as "New Spirituality"? How about New Age or Gnosticism? One of the distinctive features of this religious belief system (loosely defined as it may be) is the abhorrence of labels. I mean no disrespect but the long cloud of narrative you sent me is Gnosticism which has been around for a long time. Another distinctive feature is that it incorporates teachings and practices from any religious system. So you can pick "Christ Consciousness", redefine Jesus as whoever feels comfortable to you, collect a smattering of verses from the Bible or from Hindu writings, from the Kabbalah, from Quantum Physics or from wherever. You can take that route to wherever it leads.
But you have not studied what the whole Bible teaches or learned about how it was preserved--so you can disbelieve it, you can take verses out of context to make them mean what you want them to, but you cannot explain what it means, or say that the God that is revealed in its pages is not real. Please stop gaslighting me.
You are reading my words through your own filter and missing the point. The point is that the ONLY thing that matters is your connection to God, the Infinte, Source, the Creator or however you want to label it. What you experience IS the point of everything a religion SHOULD be inspiring people to do, but instead it takes people away from the pure experience and down endless rabbit holes of beliefs and dogma. Same thing with whatever the Gnostics believed. NO religion is the experience of God. Only the energy itself, and that is what God is= energy. The highest vibrational frequency in the universe. And you CANNOT open the pages of a book and have it come pouring out! It is not in there!
That was a good try, but Langan is operating from some inaccurate presuppositions that, similarly to how physicists lacking a comprehensive Unified Field Theory end up with competing views of how the universe works that cannot be reconciled from their present level of understanding, he is creating an unnecessarily tangled mess of incompatible perspectives. I'm not going to try to dissect it all for the readers right now, but ONE of his fundamental errors is not understanding the relationship between religion and spirituality. He is conflating the two, where the REALITY is that they are so different as to actually have almost nothing to do with each other.
In a nutshell, the non-physical dimensions of Reality are both outside of (or "beyond") three-dimensional time-space and are the SOURCE of the denser, lower-vibrational physical universe that we operate within in our physical bodies, and that non-time-space level is what we can label "spiritual". Religions, on the other hand are just attempts at explaing or describing that non-physical Reality, but it CANNOT be described or explaned WITHIN the context of time-space. It just simply doesnt "fit" here. Therefore ALL attempts to describe it or talk about it in any way are futile and quite meaningless. That is the problem with religions. They have all arisen as attempts to describe that other reality by people who have had some level of direct experience of it, and we, as human beings CAN directly experience that other-dimension because it is the ESSENCE of the non-physical-part of us that is what our consciousness, or awareness, "comes from" and is "made of". Self-awareness/consciousness is not physical. It does not come from the brain. It does not arise out of neurons and neurotransmitters. The brain is just the interface or "translator" between the physical and the non-physical.
This is the tremendously huge mistake that allows monsters like Schwab and Harari to even begin to conceive of human beings as mere mechanistic objects to be controlled, preyed upon, and abused, and transformed into some kind of dehumanized "transhuman" cyborg slave. It is absolute proof that those people are as stupid and ignorant as anyone who ever lived! Ignorant MORONS!!! They can only believe that nonsense because they are completely disconnected from what they are, their essence. Evil is IGNORANCE of Reality, of what is true. Just as darkness has no "existence" of its own, but is only the absence of light. Evil is the absence of connection to Source, to Self. And that is a confusing and painful place to be.
The good thing is that since they understand nothing about Reality, they are absolutely bound to make endless fundamental errors. And they do. That is why those people like Klaus Schwab are constantly doing such stupid things!
Religion is just descriptions of people's experiences of that reality, but again, the spiritual dimension cannot be conceived of or described in physical terms. It doesn't work; it will never work. The two things are vastly more different even than a cookbook and the prepared food on your plate that you can actually eat. Or a map on your cellphone and the road you are driving on. One is but an indication of, a two-dimensional representation of something. Religion is no more than a "shadow" of the Greater Reality. It is NOT Reality. It is NOT Real. That is why there are tens of thousands of different religions, and adherents of every single one believes that their way is THE RIGHT WAY. Does this make sense? Can they all be "right"? Is ONE of them THE Right Way? No. None of them are! None can be. They are made-up attempts at describing the indescribable. EVERY religion IS WRONG!
What IS Real is our connection to that non-physical Source Energy ot vibrational Reality, because that is what we are made of. But no one can "get there" through the limited mental processes of everyday thoughts that operate on the surface of our awareness. Only by quieting the endless chatter of our physically- time-space-oriented mind can we move our pure consciousness back to its Source and have an expansive, transcendent experience. That beyond-physical awareness is connected with by focusing on the silent gap BETWEEN our thoughts. Then it is sort of like being turned inside out, and you discover that what you are is much, much bigger on the INSIDE! And that connection is the source of all the good things that spirituality realized people have spoken of through the ages: Love, Peace, Bliss, Joy, etc. It is really all the same thing there. Just different facets of it.
The only exception I would make to your comments is this re religions vs. spirituality: their original and primary purpose is to unfold a pathway, a map, a guidebook for the internal journey that must be made to access the non-physical dimensions of reality while still in the body. It does have to do with raising and refining the individual's vibratory level/frequency into a more open and universal awareness beyond time-space in preparation for the eventual departure from the much more dense consciousness of bodily existence. However, most religions have become artifacts - institutional structures which are bureaucratic rather than transformational. The devolution from original messenger to message to monument seems inevitable as the Greater Reality, as you call it, is not a transmissible realization.
"re religions vs. spirituality: their original and primary purpose is to unfold a pathway, a map, a guidebook for the internal journey . . . "
Not exactly. Religions are always a leftover artifact of people who had a strong connection to that vibrational frequency. Religions happen later or much later after the real thing, long enough that the experience someone actually had is just heresay and the people hearing about it didn't get the real message that it is something that has to be directly experienced and not just thought about or written about. Yes, people can get inspired when they hear that such a personal experience is possible and learn that it is something precious to be sought. But as you said:
" . . . most religions have become artifacts - institutional structures which are bureaucratic rather than transformational."
They are ALL artifacts. And the main organized religions are, unfortunately, ANTI-spiritual! The are falsely promoting themselves as "THE WAY" to get to heaven or whatever. They prescribe all kinds of studies, rituals, listening to sermons or whatever, praying in special ways, wearing a special garb, going on pilgrimages to "holy places", eating a certain way, etc. NONE of those things get anyone anything spiritual. ALL of them are, or usually are, just time-wasting distractions that KEEP people from the DIRECT experience of a higher vibrational state. Also, when people have that direct connection to Source energy they don’t need any "intercessor" or "intermediary" religious institution, so the organized religion loses "paying members". They don't like that! Priests and pastors like to get supported! Church organizations therefore teach that anything except THEIR WAY is bad, apostacy, heresy, the work of Satan, etc. A few centuries ago people would have been tortured to death or burned at the stake to "save their soul"! Even today, if you are Muslim and turn away from their idea of the "true religion" they will KILL you, according to Shria law!
Your suppositions about Christianity are incorrect.
This is not about the old religions but a new one. The bifurcation wilk make old ones obsolete
Old. New. It's irrelevant. All religions are just codified attempts at explaining something that cannot be explained because it is beyond/outside of this space-time dimension. But we can access it vibrationally/experientially because that is what we (our consciousness) is "made of". Thinking about it just gets us nowhere.
Just like your religion that is trying to explain stuff using words here, right?
A quick dictionary definition of “religion” does not seem to warrant such vilification:
From Oxford Languages: “the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods.”
From the Bible: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless. Pure and undefiled religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world. James 1:26-27
There is nothing wrong with “religion” per say. It has everything to do with spirituality because it is evidence that we are spiritual beings. It is the outworking of our beliefs.
As recorded in the book of James 2:26 God says, “For just as the body without the spirit is dead, so also faith without works is dead.”
I think the real problem is that people come up with teachings and traditions that contradict the dictates of God Himself. Jesus often challenged the Pharisees who came up with their own additions that went against what God said. As recorded in Matthew 15:3-9 Jesus said:
“Why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?
“For God said, ‘Honor your father and your mother,’ and, he who speaks evil of father or mother is to be put to death.’
“But you say, ‘Whoever says to his father or mother, “Whatever I have that would help you has been given to God,” he is not to honor his father or his mother.’
And by this you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition.
“You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you:
‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from Me.’ ‘But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men.’”
Right on!
Within the context of Judeo-Christian teachings, a core problem (again, all as a result of ignorance) is that humans have reversed the idea of we being "made in the image of God" and have instead made God IN THE IMAGE OF MAN! So they ascribed all of the human qualities of anger, jealously, desire for revenge or retribution, desire for adulation, etc. to their concept of God. But to be fair, some of the qualities attributed to Jesus are also applied to God: love, compassion, forgiveness, etc. Those are pretty diametrically opposed to the qualities of the "Old Testament" God. But when people are raised in a religion they tend to accept the beliefs "as Gospel" (pun intended!) and seldom question the contradictions. After all, the Church (temple, priest, etc.) Knows Best, right? Because that's what they were told by authority figures.
This seems to be a popular take on the Jude’s-Christian God. But does God not have the right and ability to reveal Himself to mankind the way He chooses?
You are right that we should not hold the teachings of human church “Authorities” as origins of truth and use their teachings as parameters for how we practice our faith. But we should go to the source of truth that God has given all of us access to. When you study the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation, the God of the Old Testament and God of the New Testament as revealed in Jesus are one and the same.
God "is one and the same" (but always expanding/evolving), but BELIEFS about God are more or less limited to the the finite human intellect.
God didn't write the Bible. It is just one of many attempts to record both cultural mythology (including Origin Myths), and experiences of people having various spiritual experiences, including Near Death Experiences, Shared Death Experiences, spontaneous visions and dreams or visions brought about through the use of psychedelics ("accuracy" being highly questionable), out-of-body experiences (questionable if they occurred as elements of dreams or in a near-asleep state such as those of Robert Monroe's), through hypnosis in our present era (the accuracy of which is also questionable depending on the skills of the hypnotist or hypnotherapist), or through meditation.
The Bible has been both highly edited to magnify the teachings (and manipulations of) of the Catholic Church, and wronly interpreted because those without direct spiritual connection do not understand the parts of the Bible that try to describe it. For instance, the "Name of God" or "Word of God" is the vibrational frequency of God itself. But Christians who don't understand that believe that the BOOK is the "Word". Which proves that they don't understand their own Bible, because it does NOT say "In the beginning was the Bible, and the Bible was with God, and the Bible was God". (from John 1:1) Thats is pure nonsense! But that is the logical result of calling the physical book the "Word"! But since they have no idea what the Word is, that's the best they can come up with.
That is the viewpoint that many people hold in New Spirituality but scholars have differing views as to how to authenticate ancient documents. And people have differing views as to how to authenticate truth.
Becoming familiar with the translation process and with the original languages that texts were written in, as well as studying ancient cultures helps to make things clear. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls among other archeological findings prove the reliability of the preservation of the Ancient texts.
As much as people enjoy trying to "figure it all out", all that stuff is just "wheel spinning". There is no such thing as "New Spirituality" or any reality to any other mental constructs or imaginations about the non-physical. Our minds that are grounded in this limited, physical reality simply cannot process that which is outside of space-time! It doesn't work. That Greater Reality doesn't "fit" here. We can conceptualize what one dimension is by imagining a single "point" in space, and we can conceptualize two dimensions by imagining something flat like a piece of paper, and of course we can easily relate to normal three-dimensional objects, but just try to extrapolate that process to imagine four dimensions. Good luck! Maybe brilliant mathematicians can represent it mathematically; I guess that is what they do, or try to do, but that level of math makes no sense to me. Our three-D-oriented minds cannot visualize something in four dimensions as an object, and that is probably because anything that we can make a mental image of also belongs to 3-D. No "physical" object can exist in 4-D. This is just an example of the limitations of our mental processing. But we have the same limitation trying to mentally relate to the non-physical that we experience as spirituality. Religions are only crude attempts and cannot "get there".
All they can do is say,: "There is something that is beyond this physical reality, and you can tap into it. It is what you return to after you separate from your physical body, and it is wonderful. You have experienced all that before and you will again. You are a spiritual being just "wearing" a body, and nothing here in the physical dimension can harm what you really are in any way. You are Safe. You are Loved. You are Cherished by the infinite Consciousness that you came from and that no matter what happens here, you will go back to that Source. And you will still be You. There is no place where you can get "lost". There is no "hell" unless you, through your confusion, temporarily sidetrack yourself in such an experience, because we have free will as aspects of the Creator, and are free to make even "bad" choices and we, along with the effect of resonance frequencies that we attract as creators of our reality, shape energy into experience. But it is all learning experiences. And as we learn, we become more discerning about what it is that we really want to experience, what we want to attract to ourselves. We learn that Love is the highest vibrational reality. That loving and caring for our fellow souls on our journeys is the most satisfying. That being in a physical body is a gift and that while we are here we can experiece things that cannot be experienced on the Other Side. We understand that Life has immeasurable value, and that it is the Grand Adventure.
If a religion doesn't remind us of those things, then it has no value. Too many (most?) religions are self-serving control trips that use negative emotions to coerce people into going along with them: fear, guilt, shame. They become formalized, self-perpetuating organizations that cause a great deal of emotional/psychological harm to their adherents.
Master Teachers who remember very clearly what they are and powerfully express the frequency of Source energy can raise the frequency of those around them through resonance. This serves as a reminder to people of Where they came from and how to maintain a higher vibrational state themselves. Many religions are the after-effect of one of these Teachers being here, but the Experience of that energy won't come from any book or sermon. And formal religions that teach all kinds of ideas about heaven and hell, and have all their rules and regulations and things the adherents must memorize and actions they must perform are just distractions and a waste of time. They take people AWAY from the pure experience of Source that can only be connected with internally and without the thought process.
Bottom line, if a religion points people towards connection with their essence, great! But that's all it can do. Just saying "look insude to find it" is the most a religion can do. After that, the person has to go there to find what they are looking for! People like to study the Bible or other religious texts. What they want isn't in there. All that time they spent reading, instead they could have been connected with the vibration of their Source energy and getting "blissed out".
You sound like the politicians that are trying to gaslight me and vilify what I have come to know in my search for truth about the vaccines and the fine Freedom fighters who have helped me in many ways.
I am sure that the mental, spiritual and emotional experiences that you have are real and satisfying to you. But to deny the reality of the spiritual freedom, restoration, joy and love that I experience from walking with God, since I have been reconciled with Him--a personal Creator, who made Himself known and sought me out and saved my life through the death, resurrection and forgiveness of Jesus is rather arrogant.
You said, "People like to study the Bible or other religious texts. What they want isn't in there. All that time they spent reading, instead they could have been connected with the vibration of their Source energy and getting "blissed out"."
There is no such thing as "New Spirituality"? How about New Age or Gnosticism? One of the distinctive features of this religious belief system (loosely defined as it may be) is the abhorrence of labels. I mean no disrespect but the long cloud of narrative you sent me is Gnosticism which has been around for a long time. Another distinctive feature is that it incorporates teachings and practices from any religious system. So you can pick "Christ Consciousness", redefine Jesus as whoever feels comfortable to you, collect a smattering of verses from the Bible or from Hindu writings, from the Kabbalah, from Quantum Physics or from wherever. You can take that route to wherever it leads.
But you have not studied what the whole Bible teaches or learned about how it was preserved--so you can disbelieve it, you can take verses out of context to make them mean what you want them to, but you cannot explain what it means, or say that the God that is revealed in its pages is not real. Please stop gaslighting me.
You are reading my words through your own filter and missing the point. The point is that the ONLY thing that matters is your connection to God, the Infinte, Source, the Creator or however you want to label it. What you experience IS the point of everything a religion SHOULD be inspiring people to do, but instead it takes people away from the pure experience and down endless rabbit holes of beliefs and dogma. Same thing with whatever the Gnostics believed. NO religion is the experience of God. Only the energy itself, and that is what God is= energy. The highest vibrational frequency in the universe. And you CANNOT open the pages of a book and have it come pouring out! It is not in there!
R u aware of how many genius iq people prometheus society found that were wasting their time as u put it? Read their fire article. Outsiders by grady
Agreed! (I also have been having trouble getting the “like” button to work. (?)