My thanks to God and Neale Donald Walsh. From "Conversations with God (book two)".
God says 'FORGET RELIGION, RETURN TO SPIRITUALITY"/God makes a scathing attack on religion
"FORGET RELIGION, RETURN TO SPIRITUALITY"
- In order for organized religion to succeed, it has to make people believe they need it. In order for people to put faith in something else, they must first lose faith in themselves. So the first task of organized religion is to make you lose faith in yourself.
- The second task is to make you see that it has the answers you do not.
- And the third and most important task is to make you accept its answers without question.
If you question, you start to think!
If you think, you start to go back to that Source Within. Religion can't have you do that, because you're liable to come up with an answer different from what it has contrived. So religion must make you doubt your Self; must make you doubt your own ability to think straight.
- The problem for religion is that very often this backfires - for if you cannot accept without doubt your own thoughts, how can you not doubt the new ideas about God which religion has given you?
- Pretty soon, you even doubt My existence-which ironically, you never doubted before. When you were living by your intuitive knowing, you may not have had Me all figured out, but you definitely knew I was there!
- It is religion which has created agnostics.
- Any clear thinker who looks at what religion has done must assume religion has no God! For it is a religion which has filled the hearts of men with fear of God, where once man loved That Which is in all its splendor.
- It is religion which has ordered man to bow down before God, where once man rose up in joyful outreach.
- It is religion which has burdened man with worries about God's wrath, where once man sought God to lighten his burden!
- It is religion which told man to be shamed of his body and its most natural functions, where once man celebrated those functions as the greatest gifts of life!
- It is religion which taught you that you must have an intermediary in order to reach God, where once you thought yourself to be reaching God by the simple living of your life in goodness and in truth.
- And it is religion which commanded humans to adore God, where once humans adored God because it was impossible not to!
- Everywhere religion has gone it has created disunity-which is the opposite of God.
- Religion has separated man from God, man from man, man from woman - some religions actually telling man that he is above woman, even as it claims God is above man - thus setting the stage for the greatest travesties ever foisted upon half the human race.
- I tell you this: God is not above man, and man is not above woman-that is not the "natural order of things"-but it is the way everyone who had power (namely, men) wished it was when they formed their male-worship religions, systematically editing out half the material from their final version of the "holy scriptures" and twisting the rest to fit the mold of their male model of the world.
- It is religion which insists to this very day that women are somehow less, somehow second-class spiritual citizens, somehow not "suited" to teach the Word of God, preach the Word of God, or minister to the people.
- Like children, you are still arguing over which gender is ordained by Me to be My priests!
- I tell you this: You are all priests. Every single one of you.
- There is no one person or class of people more "suited" to do My work than any other.
- But so many of your men are just like your nations. Power hungry. They do not like to share power, merely exercise it. And they have constructed the same kind of God. A power hungry God. A God who does not like to share power but merely exercise it. Yet I tell you this: God's greatest gift to the sharing of God's power.
- I would have you be like Me.
MY COMMENTS:
Concerning "the opposite of God"
We are all a part of God and God is Love. As such we are united with God.
We need tp treat each other as loving brothers & sisters, since we are Children of God.
I know I have not been very loving at times during my life.
The Lutheran Church Missouri Synod does not allow women to be preachers.
The priesthood of all believers.
God is a creator (I think of an artist). In turn God wants us to create for ourselves and for others. If we mess up, just start over again.