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!
Gaslighting again. I understand what you are explaining. I just disagree with you. I spent some time on that path as well.
Opening the Scriptures opened up my relationship with the living God who will walk with me all the way into eternity. If you can’t accept that, then we better leave things as they are. Agreeing to disagree.
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!
You're not really helping the collective with your words here. You have become another religious authority.
Gaslighting again. I understand what you are explaining. I just disagree with you. I spent some time on that path as well.
Opening the Scriptures opened up my relationship with the living God who will walk with me all the way into eternity. If you can’t accept that, then we better leave things as they are. Agreeing to disagree.