When I think about organized religions, especially the western ones, and I compare them to the way I perceive God, it looks to me something like this:
Many, maybe most, not all, who subscribe to the organized bunch generally seem to have some, if not in the very unfortunate cases all, of their thoughts on the matter written for them somewhere in some book, or thought into their minds, without a direct experiencing of what it is they think they believe. I have trouble believing something in a book, no matter how old it is or how many people buy it, because, I have read a lot of books. What is on a page, and what I can feel with my hand, seldom mesh. Mother Goose and Grimm is nice in its way. Porridge is better than starvation, and when one falls down a hill their likely-hood of death does increase. But, on a whole, I’m able to perceive that a story is not necessarily written to be congruous with my life as I am living it. It may contain a good example of something. Maybe make me think of something that does have an actual, real world, application. But on a whole, a story is a story, and when I’m not a crazy person, I can usually leave it in the book it came and walk away happily.
But when one can’t tell the difference between a story in a book, and the life they are living, there seems to me to be a problem. When a person takes the words of some man, or woman, and believes that the validity of their life rests solely in the words written by a human being, they have stopped seeking their own individuality and have stopped seeking their own connectivity to the divine form the perspective of their own unique individuality.
So, since everything, from my perspective, is God, and since every person is given the capacity to choose, if they choose to use that capacity, I see a metaphor for two distinct approaches to God. In this metaphor one has no choice but to serve the divine. One may be serving the adversarial aspect of the divine, HaSatan, but nonetheless, no one has choice but to serve wherever they are best suited to serve, within the context of an Omni-Divine universe. That being the case, the choice lies in this: In one version, in which one lives out the words of a book as though it were their own perspective, one chooses slavery to a God they choose never to want to have a direct interaction with. In the other version, one chooses to serve God and take their orders directly from a living entity creating existence in real time.
Because they think that stepping outside of their book and having a real relationship with God is too scary, one would bow their eyes below the light of the divine and see its light cast only on a man-made representation of the world. In the other version, one serves actively the creation of the world as it exists and is being made to exist by the light provided; their eyes resting where the intention of creation is at hand.
Not that one can’t derive good inspiration from some words passed down over the ages, but at the point in time in which one has been conned into being afraid that someone believing something different is damned to Hell, they seem too over-joyfully to begin creating that Hell amidst us on Earth in order to save us from the very thing they are so anxiously afflicting upon us living folk. At which point the desire for death to “go to Heaven” or in different terms “make it stop” suddenly becomes all too clear.
The alternative seems to be to eat our food with bits of salt. While understanding what we are creating in some moments hinges on once glancing and cognizing a handful of words in a book, it is the results we live outside that book that is the real test of the validity of our capacity to serve all creation in all its form. And may we be able to serve all its forms well, for appearance may deceive, but a kind action from one’s own hand never lies.
TTFN


Oh my brotha! Testify! Love it dude!