Religion. One of two subjects that should never be discussed in a bar, especially if you are playing pool for money, drinking more and losing more. The other is politics which in my mind is a race of political idiots out to screw up America and t6o stretch is out even more, could be considered a religion but that's a conversation best left in a bar over a pool game while losing money.

Did you know there are over 4,000 recognized religions in the world. These religions consist of churches, congregations, faith groups, tribes, cultures, and movements. There are nearly that many different versions of religious texts. For example: 73 books of the Catholic Church canon, and the 66 book of cannon of most Protestant denominations, to the 81 books of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewa Ahedo Church cannon. Compound this with 14 versions of the Bible, The Quran, and literally thousands of preserved manuscripts from different sects around the world.

Yet there is one sect people want to berate, belittle and humiliate. Atheism.

Why is that? Nothing better to do with your time than point the blasphemy finger at someone who choose not to believe there is or was, a supreme being?

News flash; the 7th Circuit Court sometime back made a ruling that is enforced by law. In short, the courts have held that the establishment clause is equally applicable to the nonreligious and even the anti-religious. As the 7th Circuit stated, “[A]theism may be considered, [only] in this special sense, a religion.” So, as you can see, even an theist has a place among the masses.

What does all this mean?" Easy. People believe in something that gives them a positive and/or moral uplift in their life.

Witho0ut belief, you might as well find that bar and lose money playing pool.

Religion without magic is real beauty. Religion without ritual is true devotion. Religion that ignores omniscience is true God-given ambition. Religion that fears not omnipotence partners with the Divine. Religion that defies the rules of men goes to a place where they don't matter. Religion without hate is love.

I have a lot to say on the matter, so I'm going to try to keep it simple- though keeping it simple isn't my strong suit. Maybe a list format instead of one of my usual tangents...

-I believe that all religions and spiritual practices have pretty much the same goal in mind but follow different paths to get there. Bickering over the details is silly when the ultimate focus is on understanding that there are forces bigger than yourself whether it be a higher power or simply your own community.

-People are so stuck to their idea of holy texts and practices that they don't stop to think just how much influence man and his whimsy has played into the formation of their belief systems. Question everything. Think critically.

-Many New Age people are in denial- they're just practicing rehashed, more palatable versions of old practices. They're often guilty of the same dogmatic and often dangerous ways of thinking. It's no coincidence how many cults are formed around New Age philosophy.

-People in the West fetishize the East as if Eastern countries and religions don't have their own issues with secularism, oppression, and hypocrisy. On a related note, many of the practices Westerners become obsessed with are considered antiquated to a lot of people living in those countries.

-I do not believe in a god that is defined within the parameters of things like gender, ethnicity, etc as a force as great as what's described is likely outside of the realms of simplistic/binary definitions.

-I do believe in concepts like the divine feminine/masculine, but not in the sense of devotion to a god or goddess. That comes from more of a place of mental/emotional empowerment than it does any sort of specific being.

-I don't believe in a one true god, as I think connection with the self and the universe (however you may define it) is a deeply personal thing and no one can define that for you. I also find proselytization pretty gross for that same reason.

-Religion, a belief in a savior, a perceived purpose, etc doesn't give you an excuse to suck as a person and not do the inner work to maybe suck a little less. New Age people are especially guilty of this, but they like to point fingers at organized religion. I consider myself a spiritual "outsider" for this reason.

-Organized religion is not necessary to be a well-rounded, conscious, kind, and connected person. But it does provide a foundation for many people to get to that place of "oneness" with themselves and the world around them. This seems especially helpful for those in recovery.

-I don't discount the idea that a higher power could be a conscious, highly involved being, but I personally take the approach of the deists- that is, a largely neutral force that sets things in motion (either through intent or pure circumstance, I haven't really decided nor do I particularly care) and steps back and lets it run.

-As silly as it sounds, I think the concept of "The Force" as outlined in the Star Wars series isn't totally out of the question either. Again, a neutral energy source that just "is" and serves no purpose to any singular person or idea but can be connected to and channeled.

-I believe that all spiritual figures were likely real people who "got it" and have been turned into legendary figures over time.

-There are lessons to be found in all beliefs and practices, but we have to remove the elements of fear, arrogance, and ego to be able to accept them for what they are regardless of if they resonate with us or not.

-Faith is not true faith if you are afraid to have it questioned.

I'm over the proposed word limit. Fight me. Or pray with me. Maybe some transcendental meditation? I hear the temple opens at five...

Whenever the religious require of their beliefs as a ground, they will almost always divide out a sort of private spirituality from the official instance of Religion, which much unlike anything private, is a bodied and unabstracted organization of faith.

Faith-based apologists of this kind tend to use religion in a way very similar to a cabinet of curiosities: at random, as an empty fashion for delight and surprise, and with an emphasis that it is a place to recur whenever the dreary facts of life and death need a cheery lift.

Naturally for them, it is harder to defend an institution than it is a carefree and unassertive spiritualty, which acting as a conceit is more like a gentling comfort than anything which recalls a religion. Straight away, then, there is a benefit to whoever avoids the taint of institutional faith, brought upon by its own oppressive histories and archaic principles that seem unconscionable to the modern mind—one is reminded here of genital mutilation, the proscription of contraception among the poor and diseased, and not least of all, the tortious self-abnegation and rending guilt that are its primary mainstays.

And yet, somewhat incidentally, it is still to these religious organizations that people refer in their pseudo mystical colorings of private faith; and more, it is at least to one that they are answerable altogether for the premise of their religious notions. Particularly those of God and Heaven – two possibilities that are unsurprisingly never foregone in all the various styles of private faith. Possibilities, of course, that account for the fear of belonging to one’s own authority, and the fear of death.

To my thinking, there is something rather important in this tendency to disassociate from the institution of faith by personalizing what are somehow its most agreeable parts. Fastening aspects of them together nut and bolt, one is left with a most pleasant construction, though never quite unlike the original, even if indefinite and arbitrary. And what is obvious to the irreligious observer, is that this preferred spiritual alternative is prepared more so by the ever-advancing scrutiny of secular norms, than by any purposive and deliberate religious reasoning.

However, what spiritualism does not consider, is that there is an indissoluble connection between the ideas of the Church—which it likes to borrow—and the doctrine of the Church—which is conveniently left behind, together with its functions, its officialdom, its rites and sacraments. It is not so easy as the proponents of this movement may hope to abstract out the one from the other: God from the Trinity, Christ from the Great Commission, Heaven from baptism and Redemption from scorched flesh. This is because the order in which these things find their place is according to their mutual influence and heritage—their legitimacy and power are gained in cooperation with each other and are only ever fully explained by their interaction; not, by any inherent quality or unique existence of these causes on their own. God grows out of religion, just as religion itself is an enactment of God. To separate them haphazardly is a sort of insistence by spiritualists that it is possible to have an instant Holy Truth without consideration of what in actuality that is, where it comes from, or what forms of legitimacy attain its basis.

All religions may be equally false or equally true, that is not entirely the point; whichever, their beliefs are meaningful in so far as they are a source and emblem to their entirety, the individual parts which bear the whole. We would say the same of art or history, for instance, that they are reliant, as we recognize them, on the mechanisms of narrative and context. To extract out this or that for its own sake (God, Heaven, the Good Works, Eternity) when it has been conceived and substantiated by further concepts which each instruct the other, is no more illuminating than revealing the plains of the Savannah in a captive lion or extrapolating the Napoleonic Code from the Battle of Waterloo.

Nonetheless, we can count them together for now, public and private religion, as they are more or less the same in my judgment that either will produce inordinate evils of honest and ordinary people.

***

It is remarkably easy to commit all manner of acts when you believe God is on your side.

The subtlety is not that irreligious men and woman are without excuse for evil, that is to say, there are other substitutes for human wickedness when religion is absent—though the bare fact of this does nothing to redeem religion—rather, that the causes of faith-based violence are their own, themselves structural elements of belief that spring directly from divine permission; forces that could only ever be furnished by the self-abandon and moral superiority readied in someone who thinks himself the embodiment of holy law. A deranged and unwell man may practice a formidable cruelty upon the world—one for which irreligion could not cause nor religion prevent—but only religious certainty can make educated and prosperous ‘freedom fighters’ pray over concubines of seven-year-old Yazidi girls before raping and sodomizing them in the name of grace and God.

That is public religion, and to go further with the demonstration is an exercise of little value—the full extent of cruelty and barbarism it inspires, the insipid prejudice it cultivates, and the continuously fractured sects and offshoots it breads are all easily knowable to anyone who is interested, and so, beneath enumeration here.

The religion of a private kind, the one I have called Spiritualism, is perhaps more relevant, as the spiritual moderates which Secularism has produced over its long campaign do not see themselves as identifying any longer with these institutions of religion; institutions that are the de facto origin of their faith, wherefore they may still carry the same germs of passion and infallibility born of the very essence of belief.

Faith impairs the most basic moral functions. This poisoning of conscience among the faithful is apparent in the attitudes they exhibit towards their fellow man and the world alike.

The mark of someone who lives naturally by unencumbered principles, when witnessing the atrocities of the world or the suffering of those who inhabit it, is that he bears them by a great expense—the difficulty not so much in learning to justify them as in holding them for a time with a pain he feels is owed of himself. This inborn human need to recognize and incur the injustices of the world—to not let them pass entirely in vain—is what constitutes a basic moral sense. Yet, the faithful will suffer mankind’s misery less nearly, never long to cast it out of hand with divine ordinance, to explain it away through faith, and what is worse, lend it an air of righteous happening as that of God’s will. They will look on the dying, the sick, and the immiserated with a pious concern, their sense of righteous deliverance fully upon them, comforted and expecting to comfort the same, by what they see as the stamp of some Holy Order; they will cast down a beaming smile and say, ‘have faith.’ Even if this is only ever done inwardly—which it is not—whenever such a person calls on their faith in these circumstances, they dull the glancing edge of their due sympathy. To tell ourselves in a gesture of self-soothing that the responsibility and the debt of suffering lies elsewhere, somewhere in a holy and eternal place, that it is, in a sense, not ours, is to ascend at once the utter heights of complete indifference.

If we have alighted on a murmur of indifference in the mouths of the faithful, then we have not yet heard their full canto of apathy: Vicarious Redemption. The idea that forgiveness is with God, instead of the victims of harm themselves.

I cannot imagine anyone with even the most rudimentary sense of right and wrong to adopt such an egregiously unfeeling and obviously cruel detachment towards his fellow human. Someone who in carrying out an injustice, takes his forgiveness in the half-mutterings of a prayer and the self-flattering praise of the Lord. The barbarity of it speaks more for itself than ever anyone could; that we should be let to unburden ourselves of the rightful afflictions of a guilty conscience without amends to those we have brutalized—for they will receive the grace of God on their own terms. It is such a belief to instruct us away from our pre-existing and better sense that knows the subject of cruelty is our fellow man, who we have made pitiful and wretched, and for whose forgiveness we cannot seek beyond the measure of ourselves and this life. What it replaces with a human accountability for actions that cannot always be relieved is the need to put to rights a grievance perceived by a petulant and spiteful deity.

The belief in Vicarious Redemption among the spiritualists is not always spelled out so formally, again taking the concepts they like covertly, in unofficial terms, you can find it in the ghastly entreating, ‘ask God for forgiveness’, or ‘God loves everyone who tries to be a good.’

The intimate extension of all this is that faith causes any employment with the present and very real urgencies of this world to be exchanged in favour of its fatalistic enthusiasm for the afterlife. ‘Take no care for the morrow’, is the slogan of its eschatological drooling.

What degree of terrestrial preoccupation can be expected from someone who believes the ultimate manifestation of the human is not of this life; is not of the body but the soul? Again, it is not as simple as might be argued to care for both the human and spiritual realms together. In the truest sense, it is an either-or; a belief in the one that negates the importance of the other. If heaven is taken to be the literal result of death, then by the fact itself, it renders inconsequential the incident and moment of human life. To want there to be an otherworld, to wish it so, and most definitely when fervently believed to preach it to small and ignorant minds, is to profess the ultimate aim of life in death. Regardless if in this way dying is not outwardly celebrated, or if life is taught as a supreme value, and all of it fits together in a cuddly sentimentality whose only real purpose is to support us at our end; still, for all the seeming innocence of it, it impoverishes the beauty and sadness of a transient life, while encouraging us to hope for something else, to look and dream in the arms of oblivion.

I see very little way around this, only the dishonest and reprehensible claims from spiritualists to deny this is what their beliefs suggest and that in the subtle prejudices that become attitudes, and the attitudes that become behaviours, they are unpossessed of a nihilistic cause.

The garden soil was still moist from the early morning rain when the sun began its ascent. Its warmth tugged at the dampness, filling the air with the wistful smell of manure. Every row in the garden was evenly spaced at a foot and half. Within each row, a head lettuce had put down roots every 12 inches.

A gardener stood beside the rows of head lettuce, harvesting them one by one. From his vantage point, every head lettuce looked the same. Each was equally unremarkable as he grasped it, severed it with his machete, and tossed it into the cart behind him.

In fact every head lettuce had some sense of recollection. It wasn't a feeling or image, nor was it a thought. Instead, it was like a vapor that collected in the severed stem, a flow of energy or information tinged with memory and purposed to assess the damage, the only possible conclusion being that the damage was too extreme to repair.

Ultimately, each head lettuce yielded to its fate and dissipated into the surrounding expanse, where, for a brief moment, in passing, its vapor touched the hands and face of the oblivious gardener. And then, for the head lettuce, there was no then. No blackness, no vacuum, no time, no logic, no empty set, no nothing.

Before i begin my discourse in to the question of religion, i shall quote a long forgotten poem, which in many ways, demonstrates both the quest to be enlightened, and the dangers and hardships that arise along the way:

Itsy bitsy spider

Climbed up the water spout.

Down came the rain

and washed the spider out

Out came the sun

And dried the spider up

Itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.

I struggle to restrain myself, from shedding a tear, yet i do not know why am i so moved?

Is it the innocence of the voracious predator, marred by  outrageous misfortune ?

Is it myself i see, in my feeble attempts at “climbing” , in searching for greater levels of understanding this world, yet facing calamity and ultimate failure?

Is it the delving into the psyche of the MISFORTUNATE arachnid, attempting to reconstruct their inner doubts, fears and hopes?

What was the spider looking for?

Why was he climbing this water spout?

Then i come to the question of the rain, that terrible tempest that cast that feeble eight legged creature (or perhaps less, considering the vicissitudes it has survived)  into the depths of the underbrush, to be beset by unimaginable dangers and pains, as the deluge raged and threatened to sweep it away.

How many spiders have gone this way and did not live to see the break of the sun as the wrathful clouds parted?

This event , like all events does not exist only from a singular perspective. The spider is but a portion of a greater tumult that had happened that day, it is observed by the poet, who neglects much of the other workings in this brief description. What of the other creatures? What of the bird in the tree? What of the slug? What of the earwig, the centipede, and the dung beetle? Their experience of things may be as consequential as that of the spider, and yet their ordeal is forgotten.

Thus we come to the question, of who is this poet? Is he a heartless, perhaps amused narrator, relishing the adversity and anguish of others? or Is he moved by the suffering around him, yet chooses to focus on a sole example-and if so, why was it the spider that was chosen and not the others? Is it the word of god that through divine inspiration or an act of miracle, caused this event to be forever transcribed in the great body of words known as literature?

When we look at the “question of religion“ , we are lost. We are lost in a sea of items. We could grasp at one, and lose the many. We could hold on to some structures that we observe and experience and yet fail to answer the questions in a satisfying way. Doubt is great.  And in the end we just go extinct.

If god was great? Would she allow our doubts to be great?

I have often wondered of such paradoxes. It is much more troubling to me to consider the ambiguity of the state of enlightenment , then to consider some immature paradoxes such as “could god create a boulder that he could not lift with all her strength?

The spider, perhaps has emotional motives. He seeks to climb the water spout, to find a place where he could find comfort, from all the misery it sees around. It knows that the “up” takes it to higher grounds, places where shadows are not cast, where predation is relatively rare. But it could be that the spider perhaps symbolically seeks that illusive clue, that irrational spark that will explain this life that its leading. Religion without a philosophical facet to it is just ritualistic behavior. The doubt and the wonder are the flower of this ancient seed.

Ah truly a flower it might be. Blooming brilliantly and fragile to troubles and arguments.

And  like with annual  plants, the flowering heralds the begging of the end of the life cycle. Many thinkers have met theology and with its meeting-abandoned it as it is part of their life.

I have oscillated greatly in  my life, spiritually speaking. I came from a place, were there was little formalized faith, where rituals of religion were mostly confined to food and its joys. These were vestigial rituals, held on for identity’s sake and not for furnishing one with a belief in a creator. Indeed, the question of god, of the afterlife, of the reason for things was seldom discussed, and if it was so discussed, it was done critically, or even scornfully.

I acquired spiritualism during my life and lost it, regained it and cast it aside. Holding a belief is something that is hard to do consistently. There is no immediate need to be religious. No one checks if at a certain time you hold this belief or that. It is also not something that can really be akin to a habit, like brushing your teeth or doing the dishes.

And yet, you come back to it again and again. Or i do at least. There are times where i look upon things and see connections that are mystical and unexplainable. Connections that defy science, the imply destiny and plan.  Life is simply to crazy to just allow for science to explain it. even if i am aware of the gravitational curve of spacetime, or the reproductive cycle of angiosperms, i will need to fortify my being with a way to deal with the fact that things are so unexpected, and weird. I try to live my life reconciling the fact that tomorrow i may stand as ambassador to a hostile race of space flamingos. I fear that you mock this, scenario, but i assure you that it is not much stranger than things that happened. And that does not even begin to deal with dilemmas or with anguish.

And so , i strive to give the world a rational structure, but one that allows some unknown mystical connection that surpasses it all. yet as i observe these things, i immediately come to the realization that it is I who is experiencing these things, and not the things that are objectively connected. It is a subjective conclusion, and as such can not be imparted or hold meaning to others.

Yet here we go to the itsy bitsy spider again. Its ordeal is relatable, it seeks enlightenment, it seeks comfort , it falls in the storm, it raises once more through the lucky/providential event of its drying. We feel sympathy for the struggling spider. Knowing all too well the path it had gone through. The painful and wondrous arc that it had lived through.

The story of the spider also raises deeper questions. Why was it that an ardent, hopeful spider had to meet such a disaster?, after all, wasn’t it seeking to climb the water spout?  Was the break of the rainfall part of some grand plan, perhaps like the one of the biblical Job, who lost his entire family, his fortune and his health. Is that a lesson that we all must learn, and if so, why is it that this lesson is NOT learned, or is it that it is unlearnable ? Why do the fortunate not know of their fortune or disregard it? Why do many who had been “taught” still remain “unlearned”?

We can ask of god, Wouldn't there be a better way to settle this cosmos, and to impart the wisdom that we are potentially capable of , could there be a method that would be not as chaotic, tortuous and confusing?

I will not give much thought to rituals or organizations. That is a subject of sociology AND NOT theology. Cathedrals and circumcisions, prayer mats and incense are just props and stage directions on an artificial theatrical show. The witnesses and the partakers may act in goof faith, or may act in fear, or may act with greed or may act in heroism, of course, cruelty and waste are also commonplace aspect of these structures. But these behaviors are not confined to these institutions and so they prove , at least to me that religions are human constructions that POSSIBLY were created with some spiritualism in mind, and with good intentions, but with every other product of humans, it is far from any perfection of a way of life, which it presumes to have.

The spider did not need a mosque or a synagogue to attend. It needed no sermons or sacraments. It just climbed the water spout.

And that is all it had. If it achieved some understanding, if it felt, even fleetingly the heart of the creators then it attained it on its own.

I particularly take the spider’s quest t be meaningful . spiders are mostly solitary creatures. They may live in large congregations, yet they never rely on others for sustenance. And yet ,evidently they can aspire. They can hope .

And here, lastly is the truth of this poem. The spider aspired for something. The poem does not say that the spider lived happily ever after. It was subject to death and decay. Neither any otherworldly miracle transpire; the spider, once it had reached  the water spout, did not suddenly grow wings and take to the air. Nor did it compose a symphony or record the realizations that came to it. That was not something it was capable of.

Even with philosophy, even with art and music and literacy. The outpouring that could happen, will not be on its own the final influence that will bring comfort in the other. Only when the other is open and willing to be enlightened , shall it possibly become so. The free will, the agency of belief is often confined to a state of mind that is changeable and reversible.

At most, or better put, AT BEST, we could be the beneficiaries of these reports of subjective experiences, that also happen to be open momentarily to the possibility and in need of the existence of a creator, and being thus, we are able to find some tenuous web of things, as one constructed by an ambitious spider, that sustains us.

Heroes win. Villains die.

Leaves of your story just move forward despite how clingy or rude it can be. It’s neither you nor I, who has got the mere potential to decide what our own life should be. It’s all about something invisible making the path for that possessiveness to be a great lie.

Even without living a good quarter of my life, I have roller coasters of strange yet consistent notions about life inside my little brain. Unlike elderly thoughts, age doesn’t matter when it comes to drawing the absolute picture of life.

Isn’t it a fact that we don’t try to understand ourselves even until our death? Most people rely on tight emotions and feelings throughout their lifespan though they have no space for personal understanding.

The reason is not an unbound secret at all. Simply, we don’t let our souls accept it.

Well, it’s a practised system of living according to someone else’s will. Aren’t we trying to live a life full of lies and pretend just to be truthful at this stage of comedy?

Sometimes, you tend to console or hurt others while being totally the opposite of your character. Isn't this life a mystery? A sickening point to pull your brains out...

~my views on life seem to be vivid. what're your opinions on life?

until next time,

vinnie_writes

Since this claim is widely discussed in both archeology and secular history, what would it mean if someone could conquer death? Have you examined the evidence and did you find it persuasive? Among the religions, this claim in its exquisite detail is quite unique. Before you can talk about Christ, you need to explore it. If not, you have little to say. But should you find it persuasive, what then? Perhaps it's better to close the mind.

The rain ran down the trolley’s windows as it swept through the city. He had his new clothes on with a backpack by his side. The self-awareness was devastating. Not only did he notice every gaze and look in his direction, but was haunted by a series of memories that in retrospect had been attributed to his own contemporary consciousness.

A guy in khakis and jacket patched with logos of the local sport team, jumped on the seat beside him.

‘Can you believe the Raiders beat the Charges by three points! And on fucking Christmas eve.’ Said the man, leaning in but not making eye contact.

‘I don’t watch any sports, sorry.’ He said, pulling his bag closer.

‘Are you kidding me?’ Said the man. ’I don’t know what your life is like, but football, it connects everybody. You can be anyone, anywhere in the States, and that common thing of play stirs deep within us those old Gods. That feral infant - leaping, screaming, crying in primal youth! Every moment is full at the coliseum of fair competition. Do you know how many wars were prevented because of sports?'

He shook his head.

‘Man, you got to pick up a book, go read, or something.’ Said the man.

A dude in joggers in white and blue moved from the back to the front of the cart.

‘Hey, yo! You catch that game? Can you believe it?’ Said the man.

‘That piece of shit coach should have been hung from the goal post by his guts,’ Said the jogger spitting to the side in disgust,

‘Damn right.’ Said the man.

Let me first preface this by stating that I in no way mean to offend anyone by my statements. I respect all beliefs and I do not feel that anyone has to believe the same way that I do. This is simply my own observations.

I do have an extensive and prolific background in Christian Biblical Studies. However, that isn’t the only Religion I have studied although it was in my formal education.

The more I learn the more I understand the more I detest

the dishonesty of man.

If one looks at all religions one can see they all have a common theme about them ; fear, a ruling power or party, and mindless people who are too lazy or afraid to study anything other than what those in power tell them is proper.

There is always “a Prophet” who the Angels or God speaks to. That’s fine. I can understand and believe that until the commands God is saying start to contradict his previous statements and commands. Then one has to wonder “Ok is God saying this is is this so called Prophet saying this to gain something for himself?

Im angry at the audacity of

“The Early Church” for removing written texts they thought were irrelevant to keep in the Holy Book, yet clearly people today would gain knowledge or at least more understanding of what those people at that time already knew.

Im also angry that the Vatican has deemed itself the gatekeeper of all things religious or of religious nature.

Why does this group of men have so much power? We no longer need them to tell us what the Book says so why?

Do you think you need them for exorcisms? If so let me remind you that Jesus Christ was not a Catholic yet he called out Demonic spirits from the living.

I find that Islam and Judaism are kindred spirits in religion, although they will never admit it.

Where they part ways is when Mohammad the prophet asserts himself. Ok honestly I don’t like this guy, I have many Muslim friends, I respect you. I don’t agree with this guy he incited violence against anyone who wasn’t in Islam. A Jihad. Even today the extreme Islamists follow his teachings, not the word of God.

Ok so here’s where I tie all three together. At their core they all believe in God. That’s the good thing.

But folks, God is not nor was it ever a religion. All of the ancient civilizations have texts that speak about a creator, about love, how we have the love of our creator within ourselves and that energy/life force is with us always.

Meditation, using your energy to make life better for everyone around you that’s just good morals but it’s also a way of worshipping the spirit within

because it raises your “vibes” and makes life better all the way around.

In the beginning that’s what religion was meant to do. Man corrupted it.

Again please take no disrespect from my words because I am very sincere. I’m just trying to write this logically and not be emotional about it.

You have my deepest gratitude for reading and most sincere apologies if I in any way offended anyone.