posted November 18, 2008 12:12 AM
"We are born into a hostile world, run by a God who has things He wants us to do and things He wants us not to do, and will punish us with everlasting torture if we don't get the two right."Our first experience in Life is separation from our mother, the Source of our Life. This creates the context for our entire reality, which we experience as one of separation from the Source Of All Life.
"We are not only separate from all Life but from everything else in Life. Everything that exists, exists separate from us. And we are separate from everything else that exists. We do not want it this way, but this is the way it is. We wish it were otherwise, and, indeed, we strive for it to be otherwise.
"We seek to experience Oneness again with all things, and especially with each other. We may not know why, exactly, yet it seems almost instinctual. It feels like the natural thing to do. The only problem is, there does not seem to be enough of the other to satisfy us. No matter what the other thing is that we want, we cannot seem to get enough of it. We cannot get enough love, we cannot get enough time, we cannot get enough money. We cannot get enough of whatever it is we think we need in order to be happy and fulfilled. The moment we think that we have enough, we decide that we want more.
"Since there is 'not enough' of whatever it is we think we need to be happy, we must 'do stuff' to get as much as we can get. Things are required of us in exchange for everything, from God's love to the natural bounty of Life. Simply 'being alive' is not enough. Therefore we, like all of Life, are not enough.
"Because just 'being' isn't sufficient, the competition begins. If there's not enough out there, we have to compete for what's there.
"We have to compete for everything, including God.
"This competition is tough. It is about our very survival. In this contest, only the fittest survive. And to the victor go all the spoils. If we lose, we live a hell on Earth. And after we die, if we are losers in the competition for God, we experience hell again-this time forever.
"Death was actually created by God because our forebears made the wrong choices. Adam and Eve had everlasting life in the Garden of Eden. But then, Eve ate the fruit of the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and she and Adam were driven from the Garden by an angry God. This God sentenced them, and all their progeny forevermore, to death as the first punishment. Henceforth, life in the body would be limited, and no longer everlasting, and so would the stuff of Life.
"Yet God will give us back our everlasting life if we never again break His rules. God's love is unconditional, it is only God's rewards which are not. God loves us even as He condemns us to everlasting damnation. It hurts Him more than it hurts us, because He really wants us to return home, but He can't do anything about it if we misbehave. The choice is ours.
"The trick is, therefore, to not misbehave. We need to live a good life. We must strive to do so. In order to do so, we have to know the truth about what God wants and does not want from us. We cannot please God, and we cannot avoid offending Him, if we do not know right from wrong. So we have to know the truth about that.
"The truth is simple to understand and easy to know. All we have to do is listen to the prophets, teachers, sages, and the source and founder of our religion. If there is more than one religion and, therefore, more than one source and founder, then we have to make sure to pick the right one. Picking the wrong one could result in us being a loser.
"When we pick the right one, we are superior, we are better than our peers, because we have the truth on our side. This state of being 'better' allows us to claim most of the prizes in the contest without actually contesting them. We get to declare ourselves the winners before the competition begins. It is out of this awareness that we give ourselves all the advantages, and write our 'Rules of Life' in such a way that certain others find it nearly impossible to win the really big prizes.
"We do not do this out of meanness but simply in order to ensure that victory is ours-as rightly it should be, since it is those of our religion, of our nationality, of our race, of our gender, of our political persuasion who know the truth, and therefore deserve to be winners.
"Because we deserve to win, we have a right to threaten others, to fight with them, even to kill them if necessary, in order to produce this result.
"There may be another way to live, another thing that God has in mind, another, larger truth, but if there is, we don't know it. In fact, it is not clear whether we are even supposed to know it. It is possible that we are not supposed to even try to know it, much less to truly know and understand God. To try is presumptuous, and to declare that you have actually done so is blasphemous.
"God is the Unknown Knower, the Unmoved Mover, the Great Unseen. Therefore, we cannot know the truth that we are required to know in order to meet the conditions that we are required to meet in order to receive the love that we are required to receive in order to avoid the condemnation that we are seeking to avoid in order to have the everlasting life that we had before any of this started.
"Our ignorance is unfortunate, but should not be problematic. All we need do is take what we think we do know-our cultural story-on faith, and proceed accordingly. This we have tried to do, each according to his or her own beliefs, and thus we have produced the life that we are now living, and the reality on Earth that we are creating."
This is how most of the human race has it constructed. You each have your minor variations, but this is, in essence, how you live your lives, justify your choices, and rationalize the outcomes.
Some of you do not accept all of this, yet all of you accept some of it. And you accept these statements as the operating reality not because they reflect your innermost wisdom but because someone else has told you that they are true.
At some level, you have had to make yourself believe them.
This is called make-believe".
None of this is real.
Lindaland
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posted November 18, 2008 12:12 AM
posted November 18, 2008 08:01 PM
posted November 19, 2008 09:44 AM
I suppose we might limit ourselves to uncritical, unquestioning comments only, but that's not the direction we've all taken. Maybe that's not so bad after all. Might as well be honest, right? 
posted November 20, 2008 06:33 PM
Have you read St John the Divine?
posted November 21, 2008 05:58 PM