It is almost impossible to make peace in the Middle East. War has been there since the dawn of time, so why should it be any different now?
Therefore we need a plan to make it even it slightly possible to make that goal attainable.
What are we dealing with? We are dealing with the home of three major religions, all the controversy of territorial dispute over a heritage we all share.
In order to share this heritage, we need a common platform, a theoretical basis we all share, if we do this, we have somewhere we can meet.
This is really the basis of the peace negotiations. The process of constructing a superstructure, or rather a shared basis we all can draw on, from each of our religious perspective. It should not be a controlling superstructure, but a pool of ideas and shared beliefs, designed to make a solid frame we can share to understand each other.
This is really the project right now.
It seems to me, that there is a common motivation for this process now. From Judaism, over Christianity to Islam, all religions realize, that this is now, if we want to boost the role of religion in the world. Already we have come far, in all the three religions, but we can reach the goal of total realization of all the basic tenants of religion, if we continue over this course. It is attainable within our lifespan. After that, we will have something for future generations to refer to.
G-d bless the will to regain strength in the world of pure and beautiful religion.
There are a variety of reasons that can be behind the founding of a religion – some are good, and many are bad. Thus both good and bad religions have been created. There are religions that started as a means for worship. Some to help people improve themselves, spiritually or otherwise. Others were specifically created just to control and have power over the people. But even many religions that started with good intentions, degenerated over time into self-serving power structures whose main function was to control people, and to make money. (And the profit shall lead them). They vary in their methods and functions. Most offer their members personal salvation through following the religion’s tenets (beliefs, rituals, scripts and dogma). And thus, they insinuate you will not find God or salvation, if you don’t follow their particular religion/scriptures.
Many also aim to fill an emotional, intellectual or psychological need in people’s hearts and minds. They generally each have their own ‘dogma’ – answers to spiritual questions about God, who we are, and the rules that we should live by. Some religions control by using people’s insecurity, and have even been formed based on the insecurity of an ignorant society. Some were based on fear. There is the fear of hell (religion as ‘fire insurance’). There is the fear of God. It is religion that basically comes from the idea of needing to worship and serve a God, or some kind of powerful supreme being, because you actually need to fear Him if you don’t – because He is all powerful and has negative emotional attributes, commits atrocities when angry or jealous, and allows great suffering and disasters when He could easily stop them.
Worshipping that kind of God is not much different than being respectful to, and paying homage and taxes to, an evil king, or warlord of the realm, because if you don’t, he may come burn your hut or your fields, or kill you or your family, rape your wife, etc.. In fact, that is precisely what many religions did, and how they used their concept of God. But as opposed to being just a King or a warlord, people were told it was an all-powerful being, like a super powered evil alien from outer-space, bent on taking over and controlling all the people of this planet Earth. And of course the next step in such a religion, is dealing with the abusive power of its leaders.
The religion’s leaders, being self-appointed representatives of such a God, would even torture and burn people alive for not ‘believing’, or behaving precisely as they dictated, or precisely as the ‘God’ they represented, dictated that they live. Millions of people have been murdered, burnt and tortured as the result of this.
Let’s just say for now that people throughout time, and of various religions, have used their particular God, or even their particular ‘name’ for their God, as an excuse to control, torture, and murder. That’s one reason we prefer to call God ‘the Universal Spirit’, rather than anything that personalizes, or segregates the concept. But there have been legitimate or sincere reasons and beginnings for religions too.
Some have been formed based on faith in, or the moral ideas of the religion’s founder. Some have been based on visions or insights of a great spiritual teacher (unfortunately, when the founding visionary dies, usually dogma, manipulated scriptures and ‘religion’ take over). Others provide a more direct means for personal salvation, within the framework of dogma.
But remember….The root meaning of the word religion is re-binding, or re-connect or re-establish or re-ligament or re-combine or re-unite, or re-join (Again becoming One). This clearly indicates that the purpose and objective of all religions was ment to somehow re-unite man to the Creator, and man to man. It also indicates something previous, that we once were connected and now have to re-connect again.
Religion was apparently ment to explain to us, show us, and teach us the way to achieve this re-connection. That is why it is called “Re-ligion”. On this issue, all religions have clearly and sadly been utter failures, every one of them, and to the detriment of mankind as a whole. People simply don’t know the truth, and now, they crave it.
The traditional understanding of the Creation story, the theory of evolution, as well as the bizarre intelligent design suppositions, are stories originated from highly intelligent and specialized people, but with a limited Spiritual grasp lagging comprehension and having a different or primitive world view, if any and most lived a very long time ago. However some metaphors used by the different organisations may be correct if truly understood, but the true messages in their metaphors were mostly lost over time.
And the evolutionists must ask themselves, how could conscious awareness, compassion, kindness, appreciating beauty and love evolve from molten lava 20 million years ago. Both creationist, evolutionists, scientists and philosophers are all silent on this issue.
It has become painfully clear even for the most discerned, that we have been deceived and lied to for hundreds even thousands of years about the truth of our origin and our real history, hence mankind as a whole have failed to become enlightened. Things are not as we have been told by any stretch of the imagination neither in religion, philosophy, science or history and specially the daily news and sadly, they all had some very bizarre reasons for not telling us the truth. You see, if you had been told the truth you would long since have reached some sort of perfection, so we know ‘they’ deceived you. Every lie you have heard shall be exposed by truth.
All the insight and understanding that has ever been hidden, have always been hidden for one purpose only, so whoever hid it, could take advantage of the people it was hidden from. That which is hidden (Occult) is what they don’t want you to know, because then they can’t bamboozle you. When people are unaware and ignorant it is easy to take advantage of them, and stab them in the back, and they really do.
It is easy to underpay and overcharge and since many people are trusting and/or gullible, they will mostly believe any well-presented lie or deception. When you don’t know what is real, your reaction to a given situation will always be flawed and less than perfect. Hence, keeping you ignorant has been a priority for The Religious Powers That Be.
Darwin’s theory of evolution, your school teacher told you about, are mostly made-up stories and wishful thinking and only a THEORY that are not EVOLVED very much. And the Creation story in the Bible your priest told you appear mostly like some accidental rabbi’s fairy tale interpretation, stretched with a lot of creative and imaginary thinking. (Seven days? – Adams rib? Talking Snake? Get real) They simply don’t know the truth about the creation, they just hope and have faith that their scripture is the truth, so they stick to the story in the Bible, or Darwin’s theories as well as stopping people from looking elsewhere. Lately they threw the bizarre intelligent design story into the mix. The physical brain obviously need to exist before any intelligence can manifest.
New versions of the Bible come to light every day. In English there is about 37 versions that we know of and in most of those Abraham spoke for 2 minutes and Jesus only spoke for about 16 minutes in his entire life. So please understand that there are more words of wisdom than the many very different Bibles present.
All religions have been, over many years, influenced by liars, using splinters of Truth as bait, to trap us and to dictate to us what Truth is. Of course the package sold to us is meant, in reality, to blind us to the whole Truth.
All the Masters, including Hermes, Enoch, Melchizedek, Abraham, Krishna, Buddha, Zoroaster, Tao, Confucius, Jesus the Christ, etc. etc. gave us spiritual guidance in order to awaken us, to liberate us from untruth, and to set us on the Path to Truth. Not one of them came to bind us into the falsehoods of constraining religions or their scriptures.
You see, when people know the truth, then all Priests, rabbis, scientists and philosophers become redundant. They lie when they say that they know the truth. They don’t have the truth, and sadly lack wisdom, reality and reason to think clearly and logically, all of which keep you less informed about how life really is if you listen to them. Because as long as you are ignorant, and don’t know more than they, then it is really easy to take advantage of you, and control you. And they really have and do.
The Religious Powers That Be make sure that you keep asking the wrong questions. That way, they will never have to worry about the real answers. As long as you spend time climbing up the signpost instead of following the direction to which it points, you won’t find anything, or get done what has to be done, before your body dies (which it will, for sure; guaranteed).
Strangely enough, the biggest deception in religious scriptures was the removal of the information from the early Bible of the Pre-existence of the Soul. That the Soul came from somewhere and entered the body close to birth, and left again when the body died. This was the original Christian teachings as taught by Christ as well as Origin who was the greatest of the church fathers before the establishment of the so-called Universal (Catholic) Church.
The removal of the teaching of pre-existence of the Soul (and by default Reincarnation) was done by the perverted Roman emperor Justinian in 553 AD at the second council of Constantinople. He had adopted the pagan religion of Monophysitism (one physical life only) from his prostitute wife Theodora and incorporated it into the dogma of the Catholic Church to stop people from looking at their own true history. Justinian and Theodora even killed two popes to accomplice this. Even today, priests who follow the perverted edict of Justinian will tell you that your Soul will go to heaven or hell, but not tell you when the Soul was borne, when it entered the body, where the Soul came from or what a Soul is.
First, let’s assume for the sake of clarity or just for fun, (as you shall see) that the Soul does exist, that your Soul is some sort of individual entity, and that the Soul continues in some form after your body dies and goes somewhere or does something.
Well about 98 % of all people on earth believe that the Soul survives dead of the body and is somehow immortal. All major religions concur on this as well. (However, Talmudic Jews, Zionists, Jehovas Witnesses, Barbarians and atheistic materialists supposedly do not believe in any form of Soul and Soul pre and/or afterlife). What a Soul is, where it came from, when it was borne or created, and why it is here was never explained either, and we ask, what could be more important for you to know?
If we as a species do not know where we have been, or our true history, we simply don’t know how to move forward. The result is that we are destroying our planet. When we realize that our total history and belief systems is contrived – and false and when we understand that we are the stewards and caretakers of our planet, then the destruction will stop and we will know without doubt how to move forward. This is not about religious mumbo-jumbo, it’s about Spiritual truth, history and reality.
Do not look to any other person, priest, rabbi or scripture for your connection to the Creator. This is only available to you through your mind and heart. You must be able to hear and feel God. It will be in your mind that the voice of God will guide you. It will be with your heart that you will feel His Great Love. No one can be your connection to God, neither can you be the connection for a loved one.
It is the responsibility of each individual to seek his own connection to the Creator. There is not a connection to a tribe, or a country or a family. It is one connection per individual. Others can show you their way to connect. They can teach you their prayers or meditations, but in the end each person will be on his own. “When people call out here, here is the way to God.” You will know in your heart, because in your heart and through your mind is the only connection made by you to God. Your connection is from within.
Keep in mind that any teachings, including these, aren’t as important as simply applying Unselfish Love, kindness, and compassion in your life, regardless of the source. This is where many have gone wrong – making the teachings, or the leaders, or the religions, or its scriptures more important than the point of what they were really here for in the first place.
According to the lesson of the Fibonacci curve, in order to evolve without destroying life, we must know our real past. Hence…
Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Our future depends on the choices we make, and on what we have learned from our past.
I am
Rene’ Descartes
Dear Rene 🙂 very nice to hear from you again, you really do have evolved. Your writings are clearer, and it seems to me, that your ethical ideas are evolving and getting clearer, as well.
As I see it, religion is, as any organization and man made structure either good or bad depending on the people who inhabit them, and the theoretical basis they work from. Man is easyli swallowed by all the dark sides of man, and people who work in a religious framework are very prone to this, because the step from goodness to badness is smaller, than the step from neutrality into badness.
The basis of the monotheistic religions are the Jewish lore, that goes all the way back to Abraham, you can delve deeper into this in the teachings of Kabbala. Actually the text above is inspired by a great kabbalistic Rav (teacher) called Rav Ashlag.
My point is, that the basis of Jewish thought, and hence Christianity and Islam, is EXTREMELY positive. It is all about mercy, justice, love and compassion. These teachings can be abused or used for good, some religious institutions use it for good, others not. Take the the new pope Francis. He is an example of the good of religion, and my point is, if he can be good, why can’t other religious leaders also be good.
Concerning the scientific basis of religion. Well, as you mention yourself neither Darwin nor intelligent design seem conclusive. They are both too simple to explain the wonders and the complexity of the world.
Then we can turn to natural science and physics, here neither is very keen on discussing metaphysics, but they do not exclude the possibility of a G-d, in fact most true physicist believe in a G-d.
It is an evolutionary thing. We need to realize the basic tenets of our world, and make a more logical and coherent framework from what we have. We can do that, in fact it is not that difficult, considering the fact, that we were much more evolved in the classical times than what we are today. We just need to dig up the classics and understand them again. But perhaps we can evolve even further? Perhaps we can enhance our knowledge from the outset of the classical world. This is where we should work, and use all the sources we can get hold of. As a Jew, Kabbala gives a lot of answers, and this is a window wew can use as well.
Love and kindness 🙂
Asger
Hello Asger: Good people do good and bad people do bad things, but for good people to do bad thing takes religion.
I am
Rene’