The Good News is…God Loves You!!!

 

The Bad News is…God Hates You!!??

 

Christianity teaches that God created us and loves us as children, but there’s one small complication – God also hates Sin. Unfortunately, we are told, we happen to be full of sin. We are so full of sin that we are sin incarnate. Judged on our own, there is nothing worthy or redeemable about us. The fact we were born this way and had no say in establishing the scheme of things is irrelevant.

 

By simple transference, God hates Sin + We are Sin = We are on God’s Eternal Shit List. The Bible teaches that God sends those on his Shit List to a fiery, eternal fate roasting in Hell. So much for parental love.

 

So, what is the so-called Good News all about? Supposedly, through the blood sacrifice of a God-Man, we can have our names removed from the Shit List and then God will love us again. It’s not automatic, of course – we must join an acceptable church and live according to their subscribed model of behavior.

 

If God’s love really works that way, it raises enormous questions about the definition of love, and the psychological aspects of loving and hating at the same time.

 

Christian teachers often invoke the parental metaphor in describing God’s relationship with us. Children make mistakes, often defy parental authority. Parents invoke corrective or punitive measures, hoping the child will return to the desired standard of behavior.

 

The metaphor fails because no loving parent would threaten death and total rejection if the child failed to measure up to expectations. Parents that do would be deemed extremely abusive and probably insane.

 

The point here is that the model of parental love ascribed to God is an abusive one, based on highly conditional love and acceptance. Believers who subscribe to this, experience a dysfunctional concept of love, just as children of abusive parents do.

 

Did God really say that?

 

The amount of material attributed to God is truly astounding.

 

A voice speaks from out of a burning bush, and a new religion is born with vast numbers of complex rules and threats of judgment. This religion is still around and is used as a pretext for racial superiority and to foment wars and conflicts.

 

An angel appears in a cave and dictates the outline of another new religion, with new rules and threats of judgment. This religion spreads and shapes the destiny of many nations. Many wars are fought by invoking the name of this religion’s God.

 

A man is blinded by a light while traveling, and another religion is born, supposedly supplanting all the previous ones. This religion takes root and has supreme influence over Western Civilization for the next two millennia. As with the previous mentioned examples, this religion invokes the Almighty in proclaiming its authority and in promulgating wars and conflicts.

 

Of course, I speak of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. As do countless lesser examples, each claims to speak for God as the sole, authorized representative. Most began with a founder’s epiphany, a “supernatural” experience.  Evidence of their authority rests on written documents, known as scriptures. Did God really author them? The faithful are asked to simply believe that God inspired the Holy Scriptures – The “Word of God”. That is taken as an article of faith in what become highly circular reasoning.

 

The skeptic is struck by the fact that each major religion claims to speak for the one, true, almighty God. The claims are mutually exclusive, and logic therefore implies that the majority of religions must be patently false. If most were false, what would distinguish one that was true? There is a theoretical possibility that an Almighty God could choose to speak through a single representative, but not likely that the message would be divisive and partisan, and in that respect, appear like all the others. In reality, none stand out, and all are essentially like the others.

 

So what is the source of inspiration behind the world’s major religions? Here is a clue: All share a common trait, in that the image of God just happens to reflect a human projection of what God should be. Thus, God is said to be jealous, angry and judgmental. God has a tremendous ego. God’s version of love depends on whether we do things His way. God is portrayed as wanting to control us, and this just happens to coincide with the type of control that religious leaders have in mind for us. Rather suspicious, wouldn’t you say?

 

The bottom line: The God revealed by religion is a human creation. Religion is then found to be composed of human inspiration. Religious leaders project their own traits into their model of God, and wrap their own desires for control around the authority of the “Almighty God”.

 

What is God really like?

 

Who can really claim to answer this? By definition, God is vast and infinite. Are humans able to perceive on the vast scale of infinity? If someone indeed has a personal encounter with God, can the resulting perception be extrapolated, so as to state, “this is how God is…”?

 

We must also ask, what drives the need to create religion and project God?  This will be examined in the following chapters.

 

The Mystery of Life

 

We are born into this world naked, cold, and crying. Mom’s comforts soothe the immediate trauma of birth, but soon we must deal with the dichotomy of life; pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, contentment and scarcity. We get hungry between feedings. We get too cold or too warm but sometimes, it feels just right. We soil ourselves and then get cleaned up and dried. We have needs, and hope they will be met, but experience times when they are not.

 

The worst part is not having a clue who we are or why we are here; this is the real trauma of being human, and the root source of all fear. By the time we reach adulthood, many have experienced a fleeting realization that we came from a better place. Most live with a gnawing sense of having lost something or of needing something intangible.

 

The sense of loss and intangible desire for something higher are factors that make religion attractive. A common aspect of the human condition is the desire to touch the infinite. Born-again Christians speak of personal epiphany and transformation and of fulfilling their inner desire to find that lost part of themselves. Converts to many other religions report similar experiences.

 

What is this lost part of ourselves that we seek? What are we really looking for?

 

Gnosis

 

Deep inside, we all know the answers to our questions. As part of our birthright, we have access to all wisdom and knowledge. For various reasons, this appears hidden to us most of the time, but it is always available. We don’t need religious authorities to explain it to us. We don’t need to depend on some prophet’s epiphany; we can each have our own.

 

Gnosis is the process of contacting a higher part of yourself and discovering that you “know” the answer to what you seek. There is universal archetypal knowledge that anyone can access. We are not as helpless and clueless as we had assumed ourselves to be.

 

The following is a summary of life wisdom as gleaned by the author through gnosis. It is not expected that the reader will accept this unquestioningly, but rather seek your own gnosis. You already possess the ability to do this; you simply need to remember.

 

Wisdom

 

Everything is one. Everything that exists is, collectively, God.

 

God is love and joy and light.

 

God loves to experience the glory of existence, and so exploded outward to form physical universes, galaxies, stars and planets as well as a myriad of higher dimensional realms.

 

God divided into countless souls in order to take on the illusion of individuality to thereby experience interaction. Some of those souls have chosen to incarnate on Earth as humans. This is our true nature – we are each a portion of the Divine, and collectively are God.

 

Before incarnating as humans, we carefully selected the life parameters needed to fulfill our objectives. We chose our parents and the time and place of birth. We arranged “contracts” with the souls we would interact with throughout life – spouse, siblings, family, friends and employers, even adversaries.

 

Prior to birth, we each “bathed in the river of forgetfulness” so that we would not remember our divine nature and origin. The value in human incarnation results from being divested from such knowledge, as well as the overall life plan and major events planned. By this the soul is able to accomplish its purpose, whether it be to experience some aspect of human emotion, or to learn from adverse conditions not possible on a higher plane.

 

Physical existence allows for experiences to be conducted within the illusory restriction of space and time. This permits causality and other conditions not possible in the higher dimensions.

Essentially, life is all a drama, and the physical universe is the stage. The people we interact with are actors, selected before birth. The scripts were developed before birth, but the element of free will still allows for some surprise. We get caught up in the drama and take it so seriously, but on the other side we will laugh with our soul group members as we reminisce over our experiences together.

 

Creation

 

We are all creators. It’s in our nature to create. Outside of this dense dimension, creation literally takes place at the speed of thought. Every thought you have brings something into being; whatever you can visualize takes form instantly. Within this dense dimension, the manifestation of our thoughts takes place quite slowly, and fortunately so. Most of us are unaware of our creative ability, and go through life on “autopilot”, creating our reality unconsciously.

 

We can easily learn to create consciously. We can mold our reality to our liking. By aligning ourselves to higher energy and vibration, we can eliminate many of the negative aspects in our reality. All we need do is stop creating them.

 

The illusion of separateness

 

There is only one consciousness in the universe. I am that consciousness.  You are that consciousness. We have embraced the illusion that we are separate entities. This was done so that God could better experience itself. We are all, collectively, the nerve-endings of God. Our mission is to seek out every experience imaginable. We create worlds and dramas and passionate emotions. We make mistakes and learn and evolve. Eventually, we become highly evolved masters. We have a deep desire to reconnect with Source. Eventually, we will, and the illusion will cease, and all will be one…until the next time…