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"Wherever there stands the implication that man can
do something which directly and automatically guarantees that
God will perform a desired action in response, there is "religion". Thus, when a man makes a
wax doll, pokes it full of pins, mutters incantations, and
believes that God is thus
put under obligation to punish his enemy,
this is a "religious" act. But
likewise, when a specially endowed holy man utters a formula over bread and
wine and believes that God
thereby changes them into divine substance which ineluctably has an ameliorative
effect on those who partake, this is a "religious" act." - Vernard Eller
"A meeting of five faiths to reconcile their
differences points up the propensity of
religious groups to ignore inhuman
behavior in the name of religion
and pontificate on the goodness of
God. Their communique stated, "A blessing to all
creation, religion is a constant reminder to
humanity of the
divine spark in every person."
The statement goes on to decry how "horrific
acts" are justified in the name of religion. When haven't horrible acts
been justified in the name of religion? Since the
beginning of recorded time, evidence shows
that religions have always
performed horrible acts in the name of religion.
Human sacrifices, animal sacrifices,
wars, pillaging and
ethnic cleansing are mostly events
related to religious differences.
Religion have always been a way
for wily, hypocritical leaders using
superstition to intimidate people and
extort riches from them." - Wallace Danielson
Many people are under the false
impression that imperial Christians
never practiced human sacrifice. Imperial
Christians burned many people at the stake
making a sacrifice to god of the
demon that supposedly possessed the
individual burned. (I will never understand how you can kill a
spirit/demon
by killing flesh.)
"Religion has it's
prehistoric origin's in man's
desire to discern some purposeful agency in
the workings of nature." - Niall Ferguson, professor
of history at Harvard University
All religions are attempts by
man to understand, categorize and quantify
Religion is defined as:
The
life or condition of an
individual in a
religious order.
A monastic or
religious order subject to a regulated mode
of life.
A personal or
institutionalized
system grounded in such
belief and
worship.
A cause, principle, or
activity pursued with zeal or conscientious
devotion.
A set of beliefs, values, and practices
based on the teachings of a
spiritual leader.
Belief in
and reverence for a
supernatural
power or powers regarded as
creator and governor of the
universe.
Specifically, conformity in
faith and life to the
precepts in the Bible, respecting the
conduct of life and
duty toward God and man; the
Christian faith and practice of the
imitation of Jesus as an
expression of the love we
feel for Jesus.
The outward
act or
form by which
men indicate their recognition of the
existence of a god or of
gods having power over their
destiny, to whom
obedience,
service, and
honor are due; the
feeling or expression of human love, or
awe of a inconceivable power, whether by profession of belief, by observance of ritual, or by the
conduct of life; a
system of faith and
worship; a manifestation of
piety.
For example:
Ghost dance - A
religious
dance of the North
American Indians, participated in by both
sexes, and looked upon as a rite of invocation the
purpose of which is, through
meditation and vision,
to bring the dancer into
communion with the unseen
world and the spirits of
departed loved ones. Originated about 1890 in the
doctrines of the Piute Wovoka, the Indian
Messiah, who taught that the time was drawing near when
the whole Indian
race, the dead
with the living, should be reunited to
live a life
of millennial happiness upon a regenerated
Earth. The religion inculcates
peace,
righteousness, and
work, and holds that in good time,
without
warlike intervention, the
oppressive white rule will
be removed by the higher powers.
Religion, as distinguished from theology, is subjective, designating the
feelings and
acts of a group of
men which relate to
God; while theology is objective, and denotes those
ideas which an
individual entertains respecting
the God whom the
individual
worships, especially his
systematized concepts of God.
As distinguished from morality,
religion denotes the
influences and
motives to human
duty which are found in the character
and will of God, while morality describes the duties to
mankind which true
religion
influences.
As distinguished from
piety,
religion is a high
sense of moral obligation
and spirit of reverence or
worship which affects the
soul of man with
respect to the God, while
piety, which first
expressed the
feelings of a
child toward a parent, is used for that filial sentiment of
veneration and love which
humans owe to the
Father and
Creator of all.
As distinguished from
sanctity, religion is the means by
which sanctity is achieved, sanctity denoting primarily that
purity of heart and
life which results from habitual
communion with
God, and a sense of
God's continual
presence.
Ancient Greek
religion emphasizes the fragility
and difficulty of human
existence.
The Ancient Greek
gods deify the
forces of nature
which include the forces of
human emotion.
Ancient Greek polytheism enables human
beings to establish their
true place in the world and offers a realistic opinion of what
humans may reasonably expect in living their
lives.
Mortals can never aspire to full knowledge, and they cannot
control the events of their lives.
Traditional ancient Greek polytheism
religion proposes a mode of
life in which mortals must try to align themselves with
the will of the gods as best
as they can.
The will of the
gods is
known through the tales that are told of their nature and those tales
are moral tales that
forewarn the listener to the pitfalls of being carried away by
emotional extravagance.
Shamanism refers to a range of
traditional beliefs and practices concerned with communication with
the spirit world.
There are many variations in shamanism
throughout the world, though there are some
beliefs that are shared by all forms of
shamanism:
The
spirits can play important roles in
human lives.
The shaman can control
and/or cooperate with the spirits for the
community's benefit.
The spirits can be
either good or bad.
Shamans engage various processes and techniques to
incite trance; such as: singing, dancing, taking entheogens, meditating and
drumming.
Animals play an important role, acting as omens and
message-bearers, as well as representations of animal
spirit guides.
The shaman's
spirit leaves the body and enters into the
supernatural world during certain tasks.
The shamans can
treat illnesses or sickness.
Shamans are
healers, gurus and
magicians.
panentheism - the correct
definition
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the
earth." - Genesis 1:1
Then God said, "I'm not going to breathe life into
men and women endlessly. No one will live for more than one hundred twenty
years." - Genesis 6:3
"Ask the animals, and they will teach you, or the
birds of the air, and they will tell you; or speak to the Earth, and it will
teach you, or let the fish of the sea inform you. Which of all these does not
know what the hand of the God has done this? In God's hand is the life of every
creature and the breath of all mankind." - Job 12:7-10 "For this
reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat
or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not
life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the
air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your
heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of
you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried
about clothing? Observe how the wildflowers grow; they do not toil nor do they
spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself
like one of these. If God cares so wonderfully for wildflowers that are here
today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you. Why do
you have so little faith?" - Matthew 6:25-30
Panentheism is commonly
misidentified as a combination of theism (God is the supreme being) and
pantheism (God is everything) but this is incorrect in that panentheists
believe that God is not everything but that God's emanation is within
everything.
God is the holy, sovereign,
omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, self-existent, eternal, immutable, the
perfect creative animating and motivating force of all that exists. God
animates the universe in a continual and never ending emanation. This does not
imply that God changes it simply states that in fact everything else, with the
exception of God, does change which we know to be true through observation of
God's Creation.
The Bible presents God as holy (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation
4:8), sovereign (1 Chronicles 29:11; Nehemiah 9:6; Psalm 83:18; Isaiah 37:20),
omnipresent (Psalm 139:7-10), omniscient (Job 28:24; Psalm 147:4-5), omnipotent
(Job 42:1-2), self-existent (Exodus 3:14; Psalm 36:9), eternal (Psalm 90:2;
Habakkuk 1:12), immutable (Psalm 33:11; James 1:17), perfect (Deuteronomy
32:3-4), and infinite (Job 5:9; 9:10). None of these attributes of God are
incompatible with believing God also motivates and animates
Creation.
Subatomic particles do not have an independent, continuous
existence, but come in and out of existence billions of times every second.
This has an important theological implication in that Creation did not end in
the past, but is continually flowing forth. Countless times every second, every
subatomic particle in the entire universe is being re-created. God must think
it is worth the effort!
North American Indians were and still are
largely panentheistic, conceiving of God as both immanent in Creation and
transcendent from it.
Panentheism is a theological component of Hasidic
Judaism and Kabbalah.
Several Sufi saints and thinkers, primarily Ibn
Arabi, held beliefs that were panentheistic.
Many interpretations of
Hinduism can be seen as panentheistic and the first and most ancient ideas of
panentheism originate in the Bhagvad Gita.
Valentinian Gnosticism claims
that substance was created by emanations of God.
The panentheism concept
of God is closely associated with the Logos as stated in the 5th century works
of Heraclitus in which the Logos pervades the cosmos and whereby all thoughts
and things originate.
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ
behind me, Christ in me,
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ on
my right, Christ on my left,
Christ in breadth, Christ in length, Christ in
height,
Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me,
Christ in
the mouth of every man who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
"One of the wildest aspects of mystical Christian
thought lies in the simple truth that God is everywhere. And if God is in fact
everywhere, then God is in all things, and all things are in God." -
Biblical
Panentheism
A
mystical core exists within all religions, Eastern and Western.
This
mystical core is directly
related to human
dreams, emotional needs and
emotional experiences.
Human subconscious reality is
symbolically expressed within this
mystical core in each
religion in ways that differ only as to
culture or sub-culture.
Each
religion has an element of truth in that
the subconscious symbolic spiritual
archetypes spring directly from
human dreams,
emotional needs and emotional experiences.
The essential elements of religion conceptualize spiritual
reality as common among all
men.
All human life is
spiritually
interconnected through the subconscious
symbolic spiritual
archetypes that
express subconscious human reality in the
mystical core of each
religion.
All
human souls are
motivated at the most basic spiritual level to
participate spiritually as well as
materially in life.
All human
beings deal with the forces of
reality spiritually
in much the same way, even though there
are cultural and
religious differences.
The
seemingly infinite myriad of
physical forces that exist in
reality can be broken down and seen as the
interaction of four basic universal forces
of energy which binds all inanimate substance in
the universe together.
"God" is the name
given to the Creator of this energy, the
Creator of these
four basic universal forces and the
Creator of all substance.
In the
mystical core the
Creator binds all substance together and grants inanimate
substance life.
In
the mystical core, where common
subconscious symbolic
spiritual archetypes reside, all
things are seen as connected to all other things.
Individual
human intellects are
beginning to understand the "inter-connectedness" of all
things and they see that
science and
spirituality are ultimately
harmonious.
Intuition, rationalism, skepticism, and the
scientific method in
combination and properly balanced raises
awareness which in turn
awakens the
consciousness to the reality of our common subconscious symbolic
spiritual archetypes and the
mystical core of our souls.
This
awakening of
consciousness allows a shifting of
control over the
expression of
spirituality from
religious authority to the individual.
Free souls no longer need an
intercessor to
God.
This
enlightened manner of reflecting on the
mystical core of reality to understand the essence of reality brings
awakening to and
human
understanding of
reality. This
awakening moves individuals
towards personal
responsibility as well as personal empowerment.
The ultimate
awakening to
reality occurs when we personally
experience the revelations of the
infinite
eternal power of the divine spark that resides within
each and every human heart/soul.
From the ultimate
awakening we find
infinite compassion as we walk hand in hand with
God in the Garden of
Paradise on the perfect evening at the end of
the perfect day.
Nothing has ever emerged spontaneously in
human culture from
an absolute vacuum.
A religion has never suddenly appeared
and been accepted by any large number of people.
All
religions start from an older
religion which is transformed in
an attempt to better fit the current conceptual
understanding of
God.
The
Hebrew
religion was built upon the
beliefs of the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten as well as the
myths and
religions of the
Sumerians, the
Canaanites and the followers of
Zoraster .
Christianity is built upon the
Hebrew
religion.
Islam is built upon the
Christian and
Hebrew
religions.
Vedic Sanskrit is a classical language of India and is the
liturgical language of Hinduism,
Buddhism,
Sikhism, and
Jainism.
An example of a
modern religion that has
transformed Christianity to fit its
precepts is Mormonism.
A new testament appeared, the book of Mormon,
and Christians were converted into Mormons.
To traditional Christians this new
testament appears as a fictional account of the adventures, or the life and
times, of Jesus, the
Holy Spirit and God but to Mormons the book of Mormon is the
word of God written by Joseph
Smith.
The individuals that first accepted Mormonism were
Christians before they became Mormons.
Christianity and Mormonism are
nearly the same, only the Mormon's have the book of Mormon.
Christianity and
Islam is nearly the same only
Islam has the Qur'an.
Judaism and Christianity are nearly the same only
Christianity has the
New Testament.
Although Christianity has two main
branches Catholicism and
Protestantism they both use basically the
same testament that was decided upon by the
Roman Catholic Council of Nicaea in
325 AD.
Protestants take the
early Christian writings the
Roman Catholics claim are
not heretical and accept them
wholeheartedly but get a slightly different message from them.
Protestants never stop to ask the question of
whether the books contained in the Bible tell the whole
story or whether they have been edited,
corrected, redacted, combined, added to, re-edited, re-corrected and
corrupted by the very group that neoevangelic
Protestants or
literalists condemn as a "cult", the
Holy Roman Catholic Church
of scribes/priests/monks, management and of course the chief executive officer,
the CEO or Pope.
The difference between main stream
religion and "cults" is basically
the degree of acceptance by the culture in which the
religion exists although many
religious "authorities"
condemn any religious viewpoint not their own as
heretical and groups that hold such views
as "cults."
All of the aforementioned
religions have come from a
already existing popularly accepted
institutionalized religion and
that is why they have large numbers of adherents.
Religious "cults" that are
not based upon existing
religious
traditions typically do not survive through
several generations.
A good example of a "cult"
that was not based on existing
religious
traditions and that had very few followers is
Heaven's Gate. Heaven's Gate religious founder Marshall Applewhite
had only 38 followers follow him through "Heaven's Gate" to hitch a ride on the
comet Hale-Bopp in 1997.
See
Myth
See Mystery
See
Religion
See
Original Sin
See
Rene Descartes
See
The Golden Rule
See
In the Beginning
See
Separation from Nature |
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