If you haven’t read the previous post, titled “The Miracle of Contradiction: Your path to God is Our Path to Peace.”  Go read it now.  It contains important context for this article.

Taking it from the top….

There is a beautiful problem that exists when you have a thousand page plus holy book with multiple authors.  I hope it’s not too difficult a request to ask you to acknowledge the existence of contradiction in your holy text of choice.  I don’t have to know what book you ascribe to, to tell you that it’s there.  This is a problem because it immediately loses credibility as “the holy word of god” as though the creator and sovereign of the universe wrote you an instruction manual itself…

The problem, but also the reason that it is beautiful, is that with so many stories, and so many interpretations of so many directives from so many very different individuals, you essentially end up with a book that effectively says everything!  It says don’t kill, then you get a story about God commanding someone to murder.  You are commanded to stone adulterers to death, but then a story about the son of God himself walking this guidance back, revoking your authority to make that call.  It’s all very confusing, except in one capacity.

I talk about this path, and I believe it so.  I am further seeing this path for it’s parts, and unfortunately I see the majority of the world stuck in part 1.  This part is defined by unquestioning faith and adherence to what you are told to do, with no conscious questioning or analysis of the directives itself.  There is no true inspection of your faith and so your relationship with god is not yours at all.  It is an entirely passive interaction in which your relationship with god is only as deep and thorough as your handlers allow it to be, and unfortunately none of them are good shepherds.

Since the inception of religion, I have only  one example of a religion whereby it’s adherents are encouraged to walk their own path, to find their own truth and reject anyone that would claim to be a central authority, with some manner of monopoly on the interpretation of the will of god.  Just saying that out loud makes it sound completely absurd.  “I am the only man in all the universe that has access to discuss the will and intention of God directly with the source.”

No.  This is an absurd proposition.  Instead I can think of a number of quotes, directly from Christ himself in which he encourages his followers to be their own shepherd.  To be their own master and to claim their own sovereignty over their relationship with God.

That first question, indeed the strength to circumvent your imposed faith, and question the authoritative claims of your religions leadership is the door that leads you into stage 2 of your path.  Stage 2 is that where you refuse to accept external control and dictation.  Where you harness the courage required to take hold of your relationship with God because the facade that you’ve been fed, quite predictably, proved to be just that; a facade!

But I want to go back to stage one, because there’s some poetry there that I’ve only just understood.  When you read from this book that effectively says everything, you are not building your religion.  You are building a mirror.

There is simply no person in all the world that possesses the mental resources that would be required to read, memorize and process every part of every story in the bible in a way that would result in a unified and coherent understanding of it.  It’s just not possible. But it doesn’t need to be.

No, we read this book and we build our perception, unaware that our comprehension and memory are being guided by the invisible hand of our own ego.  We have these biases that we’ve collected over a life time and these sneaky little ideas creep in to every story and cause us to attach ourselves to those stories and directives that resonate most deeply with our already held beliefs.  We are allergic to contradiction, but we are so susceptible to the reinforcement of our beliefs.

And so the pinnacle of stage one is this condition where we are left with a religion of ourselves.  Where our beliefs consist almost exclusively of the notions that only served to reinforce our existing bias.

At stage 1, our religion is a mirror.  You spend an hour telling me everything you know about God, and I can tell you everything about you.

For example, how could the prince of peace have his message distorted for use by hate-groups such as the KKK or the Westboro baptist church, a christian group who would tell the world that “God hates gays” and “Soldiers must die!”?  We don’t understand because when we read the bible, we only heard a message of love and compassion and service.  This is good news for you.  But the creator of that church, no doubt was a hateful man, filled with prejudice, who picked up a holy book, read it’s contents and walked away have only heard and remembered a message of hate and prejudice.

So I ask you to examine your religion.  Make no mistake it is not the same as anyone elses.  But take a good look at your beliefs and know that they likely have no bearing on god.  Only you.  And if you have the power and the courage to then question yourself, there may be some hope of moving on, to truly take the next step in your relationship with God.