God and Religion

Many people that I speak with on this blog site and in my travels seem to equate God and Religion. Many more are turned off on God or even the idea of God; based on their personal experience with religion. I thought it might be good to let you know what I believe and perhaps what Science of Mind generally believes on this subject. I cannot speak for the entire Science of Mind movement, but I believe that my views are in the mainstream of Science of Mind thought.

God has little or nothing to do with religion, and religion has little or nothing to do with God. That may sound strange but consider this: God did not create religion. We know this because there are so many religions. New one's appear almost daily. If God were creating a religion, wouldn't He or She create just one so that all Her children might worship Her in the same way? Seems logical but we know that God supposedly works in "mysterious ways", doesn't He? Not my God, perhaps yours does.

That takes me to the next point. We know that God did not create religion because each religion has a different concept of who and what God is. No two religions really agree on the nature of God. Even Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which purport to worship the same God, have very different views of who and what God is and how God interacts with humankind. They do not agree on the afterlife, on God's personality or the exact way God created man. It gets even more interesting as we move East. Buddhism really does not have a concept of God, as the Western world knows God. Hindus worship God in many diverse forms and guises. So we can see that there are as many versions of God as there are human cultures.

Let's consider that we have sects and denominations. Every religion has sub groups that often differ widely on their view of the same religion. Ask a Baptist and a Catholic what their view of Christianity and the nature of God is. World's apart and yet they are both Christians. Ask a Reform Jew about his view of Judaism and then speak with Hasidim. Very, very different, but both are sects of Judaism.

The huge schism between the Sunni and the Shia sects of Islam has been highlighted as the world watched those two very different branches of one religion play out their 1500 years feud on the world stage. The very essence of Islam and its foundation take on a much different flavor depending on whether one is a Shia or a Sunni.

If we look to religion to learn of God, we may be looking in the wrong place! We may find fellowship, a moral code to live by, a dietary code and a set of rituals and ceremonies but we may not learn much about God. We will be taught the view of God of our religion or our sect, but what we learn is only someone else's experience of God, heavily filtered by prejudice, culture, and custom. We are borrowing someone else's God, we have yet to discover our own.

To experience an authentic God, you must open your heart and soul to God and begin a personal dialogue with the Great Soul, the Intelligence that creates all that is. You must discover your own Divinity through a friendship and conversation with the Infinite Mind that is God. You must feel God, you cannot know God in your mind. God lives in your heart or He lives not at all.

You must be open to strikingly different ideas of God and shockingly different truths than that which your religion or culture has fed you. We are all indoctrinated by our culture, our priest, rabbi, imam, or guru. Not one man or woman on this planet can tell you THE truth about God; they can only pass on to you THEIR truth about God. There is NO absolute truth about God, except that there is one.

We all build a God that fits us; who we are inside is reflected in the God we show to the outside world. Stern judgemental people have stern judgemental Gods. Loving, sweet people have loving, kind Gods. People who live solely in their mind and intellect have either no God at all or a mechanistic clock winder type of God. We have experienced these version's of the Diety on our planet haven't we?

In many religions we find a kind of institutional bi-polar disorder. The Old Testament of Christianity and Judaism portrays a rather stern, often harsh and bloody God who can, on occasion, be most kind and comforting but who is just as often a warrior God who utterly destroys the enemies of HIS people, takes the land, treasure and lives of otherwise peaceful people who have not yet become acquainted with Jehovah. He is certainly not the God of all humankind, just the God of Israel and Judea.

This tribal, angry God co-exists within Christianity with the New Testament God who is love personified, who so loved the world, all of the world, that He sent his only Son to be sacrificed to save all humanity, or so the story goes. The New Testament tell us the Christ came to give us a New Covenant with God. Does that New Covenant not supersede the old one? Why do we still work under the old contract with God when we have a newer and more loving one? How can both God's be real and authentic?

They cannot, they are versions of God separated by nearly 3500 years of history and cultural evolution. Christianity probably has the most pronounced case of bi-polar confusion of any major religion. Who is the real Christian God? The Christian is left to pick the one he or she relates to; the one most like himself and so we have hundreds of different sects of Christianity, all reading the same Scripture and each drawing totally different conclusions from it.

In Islam, one sees a similar case of confusion. Begin to read the Koran and Sura (chapter) after Sura is filled with a loving, rational, benevolent and merciful version of God. We see a God who has a direct and constant relationship with each of his children, is always available and always kind, loving and merciful. Even the Christian and the Jew are to be called "People of the Book" and are to be accorded courtesy and are not to be reviled. Jesus is accorded a status as a Prophet of God, second only to Muhammad and "peace be upon him" is to be said with His name. In this period of the Prophet's spiritual journey, he hoped that Judaism, Christianity and Islam would become one and unite the world under one God and one common faith. It was not to be; he encountered treachery, violence and literally had to fight for his life.

But from Sura Nine on, the tone changes to war and battle and conquest. Infidels are to be met with "fire and sword" and the idea of Jihad and the Holy Martyr is further developed. As Muhammad is attacked and almost killed and has to fight for his own survival and that of his followers; a different Islam appears in the later Suras of the Koran. Much like the Christian Bible and its Old and New Testament, it is hard to reconcile the beginning and the ending of the Koran.

I will develop this theme further in the next post. I invite my readers to ponder what I have said here and what your heart and mind tells you. Let's each of us begin the journey to finding the authentic relationship with God that will fill our hearts to overflowing, that will bring every good thing into our lives and the lives of those we love; if we believe. You get what you believe and what you expect. What do you believe about God and what do you expect from Him? Think about it.

Log on seven days from today, we will discuss this again in more depth.