WhatToAsk.mem

[Clearing Archive Roboposter]

The online version of this article can be found at
http://www.sgmt.at/WhatRelE.htm . It contains links
to various definitions and related articles.




WHAT TO ASK OF A RELIGION 
Copyright (c) 2004 by Heidrun Beer - all rights reserved



Why Religion? 

Although there is a growing percentage of people who don't 
feel a need for religion - they do have ethics and they do 
have spirituality, but they can live without any rituals -, 
there is a whole bunch of obvious answers to the question 
"Why religion?"

"My mother talked me into it with her lovely tales of sweet 
Jesus" - that answer is good for many generations. Believing 
in sweet Jesus equals being in a cozy union with Mummy, 
in the childhood environment where everything feels so soft 
and smells so nice. How could one be wrong if the other is 
so pleasant and they always come in a package? (By the way, 
there would be nothing wrong with Jesus if the Christian 
churches were still teaching his genuine message - see the 
work of Laurence Gardner.) 

Religious concepts like hell or heaven built into early 
childhood education are strongly imprinted on a child and it 
would not be wise to fight them at a later point in life. 
They might fall apart if challenged by logical thinking, 
but basically mental training can succeed without 
questioning them.

"I was kept in it by the power of group agreement and the 
fear of losing my peers" - another good answer. Nobody wants 
to be out there in the jungle of life without a powerful group 
of peers to back him up. And unless the whole group of peers 
decides to start questioning the religion in which they have 
been brought up, the chances are small that anything will change. 

Asking the question "Is tradition correct" or even "What would 
be a better alternative?" is a very dangerous thing to do for 
anybody in a group. He even might get something better than 
the group's tradition, but at the same time he would lose his 
group. A very hard choice to make.

"My mother sent me to Quran school so I would get to eat at 
least once a day, and there my religion was beaten into me 
with brutal force" - not a good answer but very convincing 
when there is nowhere to escape to! And the less materials 
I get to read that would provoke me to do some independent 
thinking, the more liable am I to satiate my hunger for 
information with inadequate teachings. How do I know that they 
are inadequate? We will come to this in a moment - when we 
define what to ask of a religion, and count all the religions 
that fulfill these requirements, the inadequate ones will 
become visible at once.

"My teachers told me so": a very good answer. After all, 
what are teachers for? Why would I distrust them? Haven't 
they been appointed by society, and aren't they paid by society 
to teach me everything I need to know? If among 100 correct 
informations they give to me there are 5 incorrect ones, 
isn't that an acceptable ratio? Yes, it would be an acceptable 
ratio - if the 5 incorrect informations were not key 
informations that set my course into a destructive direction. 

Now, why would religion be inadequate, incorrect or destructive 
in the first place?


In The Beginning, There Was The Word... 

...and the word was misunderstood. Read here in how many ways 
the word "God" has been misinterpreted by human beings, and 
how the ancient extraterrestrial astronauts who have created 
the species of "homo sapiens sapiens" (modern man) in a petri 
dish have made themselves the object of our worship, instead 
of properly teaching us the truth about our (and their own) 
roots in the Supreme Being, the truly divine parent that evenly 
embraces as its offspring all of existence.

It is totally logical that religions which are based on a 
misunderstood concept of God can not have the potential of 
teaching us true spirituality, and that they can not help us 
to improve our connection to our spiritual parent, the Supreme 
Being. 

The word religion comes from the latin "re-ligio", which 
translates to "backwards connection". In modern terms, genuine 
religion is about our connection to our divine origin, or the 
root that we have in our spiritual parent, often without being 
aware of it, because the teachings of father, mother or priests 
have misled us to look for our connection to God in the wrong 
direction - somewhere outside, far above the clouds, instead 
of deeply inside ourselves.

Any religion that teaches or trains us to perceive and use this 
precious line that connects us with God like a flower is connected 
to the soil through its root, is a valid religion. Any religious 
teacher who explains to our children how God is the living root 
of every being, every sun, rock, plant or animal - and of course 
every human -, and how we can learn to be more aware of our 
connection with God and how we can better honor this connection 
with God in everybody else, is a honest religious teacher who is 
worth our listening time.

Existence sprouts out of God like a tree - from one root there 
extend many branches, some of whom are neighbours while others 
are directly opposed to each other. Any religion that explains 
this model and shows how God is at the common root of even the 
most opposed individuals, is a valid religion. If it teaches 
respect and tolerance, it is a valid religion. Jesus Christ has 
already stated that what we do to our smallest (least important) 
"brother", we are actually doing to him. In his own words, 
he says that whatever we are doing to somebody else, we are doing 
directly to God. Any religion which explains this principle 
is a valid religion.

On the other hand: Any religion that favours only one group or 
nation of humans and presents other parts of humanity as inferior 
or even enemies, is a partial religion. Its spirituality is 
incomplete, if it exists at all, as it is based on old 
misunderstandings of the word God, and most probably developed 
out of the contract made by one extraterrestrial astronaut with 
a "chosen people" whom he would help against their enemies 
in exchange for their services in his army - instead of being 
a body of wisdom and tradition that helps an individual to 
discover and refine his connection with his spiritual origin 
in the Supreme Being. 

A well known example of a religion that is based on such an 
exclusive contract between one group of humans and one ET 
astronaut is the Jewish religion. There is ample evidence 
of its adventures in the Old Testament. Of course such a service 
contract would require a people to serve only one master; 
but this master is a mortal person, not the Supreme Being, 
and serving only one ET astronaut is absolutely not the same 
thing as believing in only one God (the Supreme Being). 
It would be a big mistake to confuse such a national contract 
with a generic, basically non-historical religion that teaches 
all-inclusive spirituality. In fact, using the same word 
"religion" for both concepts is probably the one error where 
all the trouble starts.

Truly spiritual religious teachings must contain information 
about God embracing the most opposing extremes. No matter what 
their historical writings, their traditions and rituals, 
first and foremost they must explain the Supreme Being's 
unlimited all-inclusiveness. As soon as we encounter exclusive 
concepts - one of the most prominent examples would be the 
concept of a devil or satan, but also the idea of an "infidel" 
or "gentile" or "pagan" -, we know that this religion is not 
teaching all of the truth. It might still teach parts of the 
truth. It might have a good set of laws that regulate conduct, 
or good ideas about nutrition, or some useful mental training 
tools. But as it has not understood God's all-inclusiveness, 
it is only a fragment and must be seen as such. On the tree 
of life that grows out of God as its common root, it would be 
just a branch that does not explain the concept of the whole tree.


Why Not Just Forget All About Religion? 

Now, if everything is growing out of God in the same way, 
couldn't we take this fact completely out of our talks and 
considerations?

In fact, there are some life forms who exist beautifully 
without ever saying a prayer or contemplating the line, 
or root, that connects them with their spiritual origin. 
They are so firmly embedded in the Supreme Being that there 
is no need to waste time or energy on a philosophical 
discussion of whether or not God approves of them.

If you have ever watched an ant hill or a bee hive, the 
certainty (or should we call it faith?) which is expressed 
by the busy lives of these insects is stunning. They don't 
need to search for God, they are God - one of his many 
branches - in beautiful bloom. Why reflect on something 
that is omnipresent and self-evident? We may call these 
animals unconscious, unaware, not "in the know" - but why 
should they know about their god-parentage if they demonstrate 
it so effortlessly all day round?

Leaving any mentioning of God away because God is omnipresent, 
so much that it would be redundant to keep mentioning him, 
works as long as everybody either doesn't have enough 
consciousness to make individual decisions, or makes only 
decisions that are fair towards everybody else. In other 
words, people can only afford to forget about God if they 
are either absolutely unaware or absolutely decent. 

Ants and bees play fair. So do the other animals, even if 
some of them have to eat the others because this is part 
of their genetic design (and it keeps the planet from 
overpopulating). With human beings, it is a different matter. 
They have invented a game called "mudslinging" and developed 
it to perfection. Opponents or competitors are first covered 
with mud and then pronounced dirty - which makes it perfectly 
OK to do away with them as "necessary" (from the viewpoint 
of the transgressor).

We have seen it so many times that we should have learned 
all about it by now, yet the pattern is still in full bloom 
and no end of it is in sight. Women are of an inferior gender. 
Jews are of an inferior religion. Colored people are of an 
inferior race. This projection of inferiority onto a group - 
often not even a minority - is the mud that is immediately 
afterwards used to pronounce them "dirty" or worthless enough 
to make it allright to suppress or exploit them, or even 
wipe them out entirely.

The same game is being played in the area of spirituality, 
religion, or in one word: around the God-parentage of every 
human being, no matter to what religion he or she belongs.


The Art Of Mudslinging 

We all have seen the Catholic priest or Buddhist monk who 
walks around surrounded by an enormous pride about the fact 
that he is a blessed child of God. He is blessed and 
"in the know" and we are the unwashed who have to feed him 
and pay for his shelter just because we don't have the 
divine blessing that he has.

Well, this is not what really happens. The truth is that 
this guy is a mudslinger who first throws a handful of 
"you are godless!" mud at us, and then holds his hand out 
to us to fill it with food or coins or a church tax, because 
he was smart enough to adorn his own head with the label 
"I am blessed by God (while you are not)!" The truth is 
that we are not godless at all. Our very existence is 
rooted in God, whether we think about it or not. Even the 
atheist's existence is rooted in God - he is just part 
of the atheist branch on the tree of life.

The little priest or monk is a gangster who makes us pay 
for our own stupidity, because if we really knew about our 
own God-parentage (if we "really had faith", as Jesus would 
say), we would just laugh about his audacity and leave it 
up to him (or, unfortunately, to other victims of his 
mudslinging) to support his lazy existence. Of course he 
will say that his existence is devoted to teaching you, 
yes you, everything about how to find God, and this is 
how he earns your donations: but what he actually does 
is the opposite, he tries to talk you into believing 
that there are people or parts of the world where God 
is not, so that they depend on his eager efforts to lead 
them back to God - unless, of course, he teaches and trains 
you how to find an all-inclusive God inside yourself, in 
which case a few coins might be given to him, not because 
he earned them but as a general gesture of friendliness.


Some Mathematics 

We have done something we thought to be clever. We have 
simplified (as in simplifying a mathematical equation) 
our social relations by taking the self-evident "Child 
of God" label out of it. We don't mention it anymore 
because everybody else has the same label. It would only 
complicate life if we kept saying "Iris, child of God, will 
marry Robert, child of God, and they are planning a family 
with four offspring, children of God." It's much simpler 
to say "Iris will marry Robert and they are planning 
a family with four offspring". That everybody in this 
picture  is a child of God doesn't need to be mentioned 
because what else should they be? If there is nothing in 
the whole universe that is not rooted in God? 

It would be the same as saying "2 apples plus 2 apples 
are 4 apples". Nothing is wrong with that, except that it 
could be simplified by leaving away the "apple" label and 
saying "2 plus 2 is 4". Until, of course, some smart crook 
figures out that he could have an advantage from pronouncing 
some of the apples non-apples, after first pronouncing 
all non-apples inferior. Then all the apples that he has 
pronounced non-apples have to lower their heads in shame 
and serve the few remaining apples who have been clever 
enough to think of such a sophisticated way of getting 
support without doing any work for it.

He is counting on the lack of brain cells in the people 
he is trying to delude. How can there be a non-apple in a 
world where everything is an apple? Of course we have big 
and small apples, red and yellow apples, sweet and sour 
apples - but a non-apple apple is an impossibility. Maybe 
we are just in an intermediate state of our evolution - 
not really unaware anymore, but also not really aware yet. 
As a species, we will reach maturity at the moment where we 
realize that a godless child of god is an impossibility in 
just the same way as a non-apple apple. As soon as we have 
followed up on this insight by eliminating the bad habits 
from our daily lives that are based on considering others 
godless, we might even be considered adults by the rest 
of the universe.

Until then, we better wear a label on our forehead that 
publicly pronounces us an apple - or in our case, a child 
of God. It is much more difficult to declare somebody godless 
(and shoot bullets at him or bomb or nuke him) if there 
is a label on him that says "John Doe, child of God", than 
to just wipe out a random number of "John Doe's". Not that 
he wouldn't be a child of God without that label - but until 
everybody has realized that (and with all the deeply embedded 
misteachings that might take a few centuries), we better 
make sure that it cannot be forgotten.


What To Ask Of A Religion 

What we have to ask of a religion follows from the points 
discussed above. No matter what a religion's traditions 
and rituals are, how they call their God or deities, 
what kind of statues they are carrying through the streets 
and whether they are burning incense or joss sticks; no 
matter what bodyparts they demand to remain covered, 
and what food they allow or forbid, and whether they 
grant a man one or four or twentyseven wives - first 
and foremost they must be asked to teach the truth about 
every living being's God-parentage to those who want to 
know, and of course to the children.

And they must be asked to carefully explain the difference 
between ancient astronauts and the Supreme Being.

And they must be asked to purify themselves from all 
the human fallibility and arrogance written into their 
national "religious" contracts that is bordering on 
fascism in some cases. 

This is not an impossible task. If every living member 
of such a religion honestly reviews his understanding 
of God and the tree of life that is growing out of God, 
we have a chance that future generations will learn nothing 
of the errors and the lies anymore which have polluted 
the body of information of these religions in earlier 
centuries.

With all these necessities fulfilled, the various 
religious traditions on this planet can be enjoyed 
like any other colorful folklore that is a contribution 
to the richness of God's creation.





Heidrun Beer

Workgroup for Fundamental Spiritual Research and Mental Training

http://www.sgmt.at

http://www.RecastReality.org

Sun Jul  1 13:01:21 EDT 2007

================ http://www.clearing.org ====================
Fri Dec  7 06:06:02 EST 2018 
ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/pub/archive/heidrun/WhatToAsk.mem
Send mail to archive at lightlink.com saying help
================== http://www.lightlink.com/theproof ===================
Learning implies Learning with Certainty or Learning without Certainty.
Learning across a Distance implies Learning by Being an Effect.
Learning by Being an Effect implies Learning without Certainty.
Therefore, Learning with Certainty implies Learning, but 
not by Being an Effect, and not across a Distance.