Spirituality Vs. Religion 5 – Mind-boggling Inconsistencies

“When I was young, and they packed me off to school, and they taught me how not to play the game.  I didn’t mind, if they groomed me for success, or if they said that I was just a fool.  So, I left there in the morning, with their God tucked underneath my arm, their half-assed smiles and the book of rules.  And I asked this God a question, and by way of firm reply, he said, “I’m not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.”

 So, I told my old headmaster, and to anyone who cares, “Before I’m through I’d like to say my prayers.”  Well, you can excommunicate me, on my way to Sunday school, and have all the bishops harmonize these lines.  “I don’t believe you; you had the whole damn thing all wrong, he’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays.”  Wind-Up lyrics by Jethro Tull.” 

 All throughout history, there have been religious leaders that have had nothing but the finest of intentions and lived according to their commitments of compassion and Love (Just think of saints like Saint Francis of Assisi).  Then there are those who saw religion as merely another tool to power and control. I recall this comment from somewhere: The road to hell is paved with good intentions…did they think there was a shortage of bad ones?  Religion was meant to be the repository and vehicle to pass on the teachings of the great spiritual masters, but when fundamentalist beliefs take control, then dogmatic doctrines become the norm and adherence to set doctrines becomes mandatory.  Our free will becomes subjugated to the closed minds of authoritarians who cannot accept any variations from their belief structures.  Many of the clerics following the ‘faith’ may have had wonderful intentions, but at the end of the day, they too had to follow the ‘rules.’ I know many clerics that have genuine social help as the cornerstone of what they do.  Yet, when all is said and done, I see that the fundamentals of the faith are still deeply flawed since they are still derived from the orthodox teachings.  Think only of historic institutions like the Spanish Inquisition and the many zealous missionaries that accompanied the soldiers out to conquer the New World, and you see how good intentions throughout the ages and even up to today became an excuse for doing inexcusable and deplorable things.  Indigenous cultures overall have particularly suffered at the hands of missionaries determined to bring the ‘savages’ to the church.  (Another post of how these savages were probably more advanced spiritually than the civilized world coming soon.) The Gnostic teaching taught that God was to be found internally within oneself.  The orthodox church told everyone that God was to be found externally and his message could only come through his ordained intermediates. Gnostics teach that we are born perfect and divine and our task is to recognize our divinity through our creation called life.  The orthodox faiths teach we are born imperfect and can only achieve salvation through acceptance of the doctrines.  The guilt trip seems to be a central component of the orthodox system to make us behave!

In recent post I gave A STORY that had reincarnation as a theme and how most of the world’s religions embrace this idea.  To me reincarnation makes sense for many reasons.  Getting born at random with the odds of being in the ‘right’ Christian home to promote the ‘right’ beliefs and obedient behaviors, so that you appease this God who demands you obey him, even though he tells you that you can exercise free will as long as it is to his pleasing, otherwise you go to hell for all eternity…so God is a totalitarian dictator??  You get one shot at being good, regardless of the circumstances, and if you don’t get it right…pain and anguish for an eternity.  While it might scare you into trying to be good, I think for many it would simply be a resignation that if one is going to hell, then they might as well live it up for the short time they were alive and do whatever evil they wanted.  But reincarnation is such a common belief, you have t wonder why the early Church went to such lengths to bury the belief?  Look at the various philosophies concerning reincarnation and you get a picture similar to ‘My Story’ of one that talks about spiritual evolution through learning during cycles of incarnation in a physical form.  There is NO HELL, except that which we create for our learning in the physical form.  I discussed in an earlier post the idea that this world of physical solidity is but a learning simulation for us to transition to a higher dimension as we evolve back towards the source.  All is Love and all our learning is to understand that by experiencing what Love is not.

I think I was in Sunday school at about five years of age, and even then, I thought about the Contradictions of the old and new testaments god.  The new testament God I liked just like the teaching of Jesus we were given – Love everyone regardless, be Compassionate to all, treat everyone as you would like to be treated.  I liked this Golden Rule God. As for the Old testament God…well, as I sat writing this post,  I thought about trying to describe everything about how this God entity is described in the Old Testament and crazy at it might seem, a picture of Donald Trump kept coming to my mind.  Think about all the personality traits we ascribe to Trump and you are talking about God in the Old testament.  Who was this old testament God?  Now that is an interesting story that gets us down another deep branch of the rabbit hole – another future post.  It’s an eyebrow raiser for sure.  Meanwhile, back to more modern goings on at the obey me or go to hell schools of religion.

In the Gnostic texts, reincarnation is discussed at length by various writers interpreting the teaching of Jesus (e.g. Secret Books of Mark and John, the Book of Thomas, Sophia).  It was a central point of Gnostic Christianity, before Gnosticism was driven underground by Constantine.  It was hard to squash completely, so in 545AD, the Roman Emperor Justinian made public acknowledgement of reincarnation a crime punishable by death.  The more one reads the Gnostic interpretations, the more one starts to see the Buddhist and Hindu philosophies matching up.  Follow that line of philosophies along historical sources and it gets fascinating as you start seeing the stories of the bible (Old and New) and gnostic teaching, being given in ancient Sumerian records from over 2000 years before Christ!! And even from the Mystery teachings of the ancient Egyptians traceable prior to the first dynasty (over 3000 BCE), if not earlier.   So, if we are reborn many times to learn about our divinity, what is the purpose of our personal life journeys? In a nutshell, we are here to practice our highest spiritual intentions in the midst of the apparent harsh contradictions that life brings to us (or do we bring them to ourselves?).  To Be Continued…..