Avoiding The Poison
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There is a sickness that festers and poisons everyone it touches, when we place
religion before love. When we claim God in our lives is a doctrine in a book,
rather than the love in our hearts that we share with each other, we have lost
God and installed a human idea in God's place. That idea may even come from a
book all about God and Jesus Christ, but the book is not God nor is it Jesus
Christ, and neither are the ideas we get there.God is expressed in this world as love. We can see this because we can see that
love heals us in ways that only God could. Religion has little to do with it.
To me, the "good news" is not a religious doctrine or the written words of any
biblical text. The "good news" that the bible speaks of is the reality in our
lives that love will save us from the pain, misery and destructiveness that
occurs when we become lost in pursuing a self-centered view of existence. The
good news is not that there is salvation through religious Christian theology,
but that God's love is real and working through us to heal us and save us from
ourselves.Religions are just man made sets of doctrines, traditions, and rituals that
people can use to help them become free of the pull of that destructive form of
self-centeredness. They're just tools. They aren't magic formulas that have to
be adopted and obeyed before God will deem to free us from ourselves, as so
much of Christianity sadly infers.Christ is God's love in the flesh. To be a Christian is to become Christ like.
That is to offer our flesh as a vessel for God's love to work through us.
Religion may aid us in this endeavor, or it may become an obstacle. The way to
tell is to keep focussed on the love. Let love be the deciding factor, the
qualifier, not our religious theologies. As Christians our job is to keep
learning how better to share our love with others so that God may heal them
through that love shared, not to become better followers and practitioners of
religion. Sadly, too much of religious theology seeks to proclaim itself
superior to God's love. It seeks obedience rather than love, controls rather
than nurtures, destroys rather than builds up.Unfortunately, the authoritarian mechanisms that many religions offer to help
us with basic discipline early on in our spiritual journeys tend to become
stifling and oppressive to those who have moved past the need for such
elemental discipline, and can be truly harmful even to beginners if they happen
to be of a more free and "artistic" temperament. And also unfortunately, these
authoritarian religious mechanisms tend to attract administrators who have less
than loving motives for desiring such power and authority. Where there is power
there will be abuse.The bible says, "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling". It
doesn't say to do it alone, however. I know I can't really learn about the
healing power of love by myself. Love needs to be shared to be fully
realized, I think. Yet it's important to remember that love is not about power
and authority, either. Being with others does not require authoritative pecking
orders or groundswells of moral judgmentalizing, as so many religious
organizations seem to believe. And I personally will not participate in them.
But it depends on where we are in our journeys, I guess.Peace,
Dave