[Please note: The “journey” to Realization has seven, clear-cut steps that must be taken in an exact order. The third step requires that persons first play a religious role or a spiritual role. Both must be transcended to continue, but either (or both) can serve as a step; however, it is far easier to move beyond a spiritual persona than a religious persona.]
F.: [Continued from yesterday] Do the other claimed “advantages” of your religion outweigh the effects of the normalization of co-dependency, premeditated murder, and genocide? Realization is the process of purifying the consciousness and eliminating the warped “mind” that results from the kind of programming that leads persons to normalize the abnormal. For those who can be objective, is there anything more abnormal than conditioning children (and adults) to unquestioningly accept as “normal” such concepts as co-dependency, premeditated murder, and genocide? Is there any other entity or institution that is as widely respected as religion that offers such teachings? Hate groups such as the Nazis and the KKK endorse murder and genocide, but few give them the respect and credibility that religion receives.
Certainly many claim that they have found peace via their religion, but the history of religion is not a history of peace but is a history of personal arguments, broken relations, and religious wars that have killed more people than all other sources combined except natural causes. Members among the three religions of Abraham are busy killing each other at this very moment. Christians talk of unity and togetherness, yet they are divided into 10,000 denominations or splinter groups. Towns with populations that are so small that they cannot fill one church nevertheless have twenty churches in their boundaries. Jews are divided into contentious sects. Islam has subdivided into sects, and Sunni Muslims and Sh’ite Muslims have been killing each other for centuries. And members of all three have been killing members of the other two groups for more than a thousand years. Yet you want to speak of “advantages.” Certainly many religious people like the advantage of being able to “start over with a clean slate” after having abused or used persons all of their lives. Escaping all responsibility without making amends or restitution to any of those harmed would certainly seem to be an “advantage.”
But more germane to the suffering of persons in this relative existence is this: what is the price when worshippers become godly…when they become like that god that murdered thousands and killed billions and is still credited with killing thousands and thousands of people to this day? What is the impact on life in this relative existence when people are driven by religion's duality of "good-bad" which leads persons to be dominated for life with a preoccupation with the second duality ("acceptance-rejection") that emerges from the first? How are those two dualities that are perpetuated by religions (and many philosophies and ideologies) at the root of so much rigidity, anxiety, judging, imagined separation, suffering, misery, internal conflict, outer conflict and fighting, and war? You are invited to set aside the well-intentioned theory behind the institution that you are defending and witness the actual practices and results, both historically and now. Can you do that? If you cannot, then you will never transition your religious persona and complete the other four steps to Full Realization. Please enter the silence of contemplation. [To be continued]
Certainly many claim that they have found peace via their religion, but the history of religion is not a history of peace but is a history of personal arguments, broken relations, and religious wars that have killed more people than all other sources combined except natural causes. Members among the three religions of Abraham are busy killing each other at this very moment. Christians talk of unity and togetherness, yet they are divided into 10,000 denominations or splinter groups. Towns with populations that are so small that they cannot fill one church nevertheless have twenty churches in their boundaries. Jews are divided into contentious sects. Islam has subdivided into sects, and Sunni Muslims and Sh’ite Muslims have been killing each other for centuries. And members of all three have been killing members of the other two groups for more than a thousand years. Yet you want to speak of “advantages.” Certainly many religious people like the advantage of being able to “start over with a clean slate” after having abused or used persons all of their lives. Escaping all responsibility without making amends or restitution to any of those harmed would certainly seem to be an “advantage.”
But more germane to the suffering of persons in this relative existence is this: what is the price when worshippers become godly…when they become like that god that murdered thousands and killed billions and is still credited with killing thousands and thousands of people to this day? What is the impact on life in this relative existence when people are driven by religion's duality of "good-bad" which leads persons to be dominated for life with a preoccupation with the second duality ("acceptance-rejection") that emerges from the first? How are those two dualities that are perpetuated by religions (and many philosophies and ideologies) at the root of so much rigidity, anxiety, judging, imagined separation, suffering, misery, internal conflict, outer conflict and fighting, and war? You are invited to set aside the well-intentioned theory behind the institution that you are defending and witness the actual practices and results, both historically and now. Can you do that? If you cannot, then you will never transition your religious persona and complete the other four steps to Full Realization. Please enter the silence of contemplation. [To be continued]
