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If asked, and it did not include a specific denomination or set of religious beliefs, most people would say – yes, they believe in God. They would add that this does not mean the traditional Christian God with the long white beard sitting on a throne, but God – the real one!
I would say, even those who claim to believe in the traditional Christian God don’t really believe. As many of those who claim to believe in Mohammed or Jehovah, don’t.
One of our perennial questions about God is -if there is a God why is there so much evil and destruction in the world? And that is the easiest question to answer – although we generally don’t want to hear, or read, or even come close to the answer. Keep that in our deepest subconscious where we don’t have to deal with who we are and how we are living our lives.
Who is God? The only comment I can make about that is – God is!
We have created many trappings around God, none of which we really believe, but we will die defending the right and truth of what we have created, or what our ancestors created and/or contributed to and passed on to us declaring their creation as eternal truth – and called it God, God’s Kingdom, heaven and more.
One small test of our belief system:
If God exists then death as we describe it and believe does not exist.
If God exists then there is another existence which we sometimes describe in our religions, but in which we do not believe because basically we don’t believe in God. We have created religions with saints and martyrs and heaven and hell and we have peopled our religious universe with a terrain which is amazing and in which we really don’t believe. And when the chips are down, we don’t believe in any of the supernatural world that we created and put forth as our religious belief..
We have and still fight wars over our religious belief systems. Isn’t that what is going on with ISIS and other groups in the Middle East and isn’t that what went on with the Christian Wars and all the other wars which we based on religious beliefs that we outlined, but didn’t ever really believe? We constructed them but knew they were nonsense when we were playing God in our creation and construction time. If what we created was really God and of God there would be no need to fight over who was right, who was wrong because God would speak to all of us. But we turned a deaf ear to God’s voice and ignored whatever God had to say because we wanted to control and wanted God out of the way.
Our strongest need seems to be the need for control and the best way to control is to set up a structure with an entity we call God at its head and put everybody under that structure demanding they conform to the behavior system which that structure promotes. We enforce our system by killing, maiming, ostracizing and shunning those who don’t fit and won’t act the way the religions we developed demands. Our religious beliefs are clearly not of God because they are full of fear. They control, grow, and use fear to keep the generations that come after us under the control of our kind – our group.
How do we give ourselves away! How can you look at us and know we don’t believe in the God we espouse? We have limited ourselves to what we can see, feel and touch! We have eliminated everything else because we don’t want anyone to come along to contradict what we have created – especially not anyone of God.
Instead of being a part of God’s universe, we have created a parallel universe that we inhabit; believe in; work towards building. This parallel universe has a god at its head who is really a thinly disguised man. They say there was a religion eons ago where the god was a thinly disguised woman. In Israel, there are the remains of a Synagogue whose altar has carved into it a Mr. & Mrs. Jahweh.
I’ve met a few people over the decades who believe God is – who know in ever fibre of their being that there is a God – that God exists. Generally, the rest of society holds them at arms length and has a difficult time taking them seriously. These are the people who have seen God. Or they have talked to those who have died. Or they have died themselves and been resuscitated. Or they were born with the gift of seeing more than what exists in this physical world. They are incredible people to be around – especially since the one thing they all seem to lack is the ability to judge other human beings. They also don’t seem to be able to see human beings as the only beings on this planet who are spiritual, above everything else.
It is so exquisitely beautiful to see beyond the limits we impose upon ourselves and each other because we need to control everything. It is painful to be around people who declare themselves superior to others and to the rest of the world because of their cultural religion. To give that up brings us into another reality where very few humans seem to be able to live.
To see the good and the bad in another human being and still love them is special. It is where God lives. To give that up to set ourselves up as an imitation of God is such a sacrifice and such a paltry way to exist. But we have done that, probably for as long as we have been on this earth.
What makes me think that fighting, killing, maiming, torturing others because they don’t believe the way I do is going to please my God and make me one of the martyrs when I die? What makes me believe that I am doing something other than moving away from God as I insist that my religion is better than. What makes me believe that God doesn’t want those people to live the lifestyle they have chosen? What makes me call someone else’s lifestyle sinful and call on the religion I created to justify my call? What makes me unable to see that maybe God lives that lifestyle, as well as others?
Is that my God bringing down that heavy judgment or my culture/class/ group – the people I hang-out with who make me feel better than everyone else – the people who define what is right and what is wrong – the people who have demolished their own ability to see beyond the physical and into God’s world because they might lose control if we all kept that ability?
Will we ever come to our senses one day or will we realize how wrong we have been when we are at that moment of death! Hell must be that moment when the realization of what we have done brings us enormous, almost intolerable pain- an eternal pain – born of the regrets when we realize at that moment that we cannot change how we have lived and we realize the preciousness of the gifts we gave up to take on the self-absorbed life we have lived limited to our own kind. It is the moment when we realize we really did not believe in God throughout our lives; – when we realize we substituted our own belief and our own religious construct for a beauty and incredible world that we could have lived in and been a part of; – when we see our human sight drop away and in spite of how we have lived, we feel the love of a God who forgives us our iniquities and pardons our weaknesses. When at that moment, our last human feeling is the one which wishes, if only we could have done the same! And at that same moment we realize what a poor imitation of God we have been and what a pathetic religion we have created out of our own need instead of having opened ourselves throughout our lives to what should have been.
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Tags: bed & breakfast, Bettina Homes, Bettina Network Hedge Schools, Bettina Network's Lifestyle Community, breakfast table talk, Spiritual Reflection, Theology, Ubuntu
