Untitled Document
"The Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion"
Lie #1
'If you live a moral life, deny yourself pleasure,
follow the prescribed rituals and give us enough money,
you'll have a decent shot at being accepted by God.'
~~~
Lie #2
'You are not smart enough or good enough to think for yourself. We will do your thinking for you.'
~~~
Lie #3
'God is huge and unapproachable, and He wants you to labor, struggle and live in guilt.'
~~~
Lie #4
'Women are spiritually inferior and must submit to the authority of men.'
~~~
Lie #5
'There is no single truth. Everyone needs to explore and find a truth that works for them.'
~~~
the Ultimate Truth.
~ It's impossible for all religions to be true.
In other words, if Islam is essentially true, then Buddhism, Hinduism and Christianity are not. If Buddhism is essentially true, then Islam, Christianity and Hinduism are not. And so on.
Hinduism states that divinity is present in everything.
Christianity, Judaism and Islam all assert that God is distinctly separate from what he has created.
It's logically impossible for both views to be true. Truth is, by nature, exclusive. Either you follow reason, or you do not.
On the other hand, if you diligently search, seek out the facts, and your spiritual journey brings you to a place where the pieces fit in place - if everything makes logical sense and it feels right in your heart - then you should not hesitate to share your joy with others. If we possess the truth, it doesn't give us the right to be unkind to those who disagree. What it does give is the right - and the confidence -
to go out into the marketplace of ideas and test our Truth against the hard scrutiny of the Reasoning Mind. Truth is its own best defense.
C.S. Lewis was talking about this very thing when he said,
'You don't need to defend a Lion. You just need to let him out of his cage.'
In our modern, sophisticated culture, spirituality gets locked up in a cage. So nobody talks about their spirituality. Or what is at the core of spiritality ... (the Core)
The result?
Some folks harbor ideas and notions that make absolutely no sense, but because those ideas are never brought out into the light of day, they are never questioned, they are never tested.
Great wisdom, like all great skills is out there. It must be revealed, it must be prooven, and like all virtues people will seek out the greater, most beautiful, most good, form of the Truth.
~~~
Lie #6
'The Bible is out of date, inaccurate and over-rated. People in the 21st century are way too smart for that.'
~~~
Let me ask you something: Don't you think it's a lot easier for a leader to sneak in his own agenda when there's no outside authority to compare it to?
Mortimer Adler, one of the greatest living literary scholars, spent decades researching a book called 'The Great Ideas.' He read every single major piece of literature in Western history, and his book explores the 102 most influential ideas that have defined Western culture.
In the first chapter, he talks about 'The Twentieth Century Delusion.' What's that? It's the fact modern people *think* that we are more enlightened about all subjects than people were 1000 years ago.
Are we more enlightened about techncality of the sciences?
Yes.
Are we more enlightened about morality, philosophy, politics of liberty, the purpose of Life?
No.
We are willfully ignorant of the great wealth of Knowledge already produced by the Mind of Men, and tested true again and again for 1000s of years. All that is needed is to translate it into the contempary language and context. (... the Proverbs) The question is not that is it really the word of God. Does it matter? Judge the fruit of the truth of its sweetness in your mouth. There is greater authority than yourself as to what you know in your heart and mind.
Are we really wiser in the 21st century than people were thousands of years ago?
Solomon, the author of Proverbs, said 'There is nothing new under the sun.' Many people have laughed at that statement. But he wasn't talking about technology. He was talking about the issues of the human heart. Malcolm Muggeridge said, 'News is old things happening to new people.'
So is the Bible a translation of a translation of a translation?
Could it be reliable? Is it worth taking seriously?
For centuries, the oldest existing copies of the Old Testament were from 1100 AD. Because so many prophesies in the O.T. had come true, many scholars declared that it was written after the fact.
For example, Isaiah described the cruicifixion of Jesus with remarkable precision, 700 years before it happened. Daniel predicted the rise and fall of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman empires, in sequence, including remarkable details - in 550 BC.
Astonishing stuff.
The skeptics had the upper hand in this debate until a boy threw rocks into a cave in the Qumran valley in 1947 and discovered what are now known as the 'Dead Sea Scrolls.'
Not only did these scrolls date back to 200BC, proving that these astonishing predictions were written BEFORE the events took place, but the text was virtually identical to the later versions.
Similarly, we have 5,000 ancient manuscripts of the New
Testament, some of them dating back to ~60 A.D. The text is unquestionably solid.
There are plenty of people who say that the Bible is flaky and full of holes, but honestly, the facts simply don't support that conclusion.
Take the 'Gospels' -- same-generation accounts of Jesus' life in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. There are *no* other events in ancient history that are documented as well as Jesus' life.
If we can't believe those history books, how can we believe any other ones?
Of course the only reason anybody doubts this stuff is that it talks about miracles. Jesus feeds 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. He heals the blind and the lame. He himself rises from the dead.
Can this be believed? Or was it just a big conspiracy?
Well, that is THE question.
Right?
Chuck Colson, a former US Government official who went to jail for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, tells this story:
“Watergate was a conspiracy to cover up, perpetuated by the closest aids to the President of the United States.
But one of them, John Dean, testified against Nixon, to save his own skin - only two weeks after informing the president about what was really going on. Two weeks!
The real cover-up, the lie, could only be held together for two weeks, and then everybody else jumped ship in order to save themselves. What's more, nobody's life was at stake.'
Why do I bring this up? Because conspiracies planned by
big groups of people always fall apart. Somebody always narks.
Well in the case of Jesus, eleven disciples were crucified, tortured, stoned to death and burned to the stake because they stuck to their story.
They were all ABSOLUTELY CONVINCED that Jesus rose from the dead.
The historical narrative reports that the first witnesses to the resurreciton were women. Given the legal standing of women at that time, nobody would have written the story that way had it been made up.
What do you think?
Well, you really can't make an informed decision until you read the story.
Fortunately there are four versions of that story -- Matthew's, Mark's, Luke's and John's. Read one or all and decide for yourself.
If you don't read the story, you're not in any kind of position to decide. Examine the evidence so you can make an educated decision.
~~~
Day #7:
'If God was really powerful and good, he wouldn't allow so much
evil and suffering to go on.'
~~~
This is raised by just about everyone: Priests and ministers, college students and housewives, butchers, bakers and candlestick makers.
It's one of the hardest questions anybody ever asks.
Just a few days ago, a close friend of mine, Laurin, passed away after a fierce 18 month battle with cancer. What a horrible experience this was for him and his wife Diana.
I've visited the slums of Sao Paulo Brazil, where 500,000
homeless street kids sniff glue and steal for a living. Sometimes the police hunt them down and kill them, just to reduce the crime rate.
Last year my wife spent a week in Mozambique where she saw an infant in her mother's arms, dying of pneumonia in a hospital waiting room. She met hundreds of other kids with malaria and malnutrition.
We've given some money for a medical clinic, and every bit helps. But the problems are so huge, what little you try to do still seems like a teardrop in the ocean.
If you took all the parties, the humor, the success and happiness in the world, and put it side by side with the suffering and pain, the comparison would be almost absurd.
There's a lot of sickness and sadness in this world.
How can God let it go on?
Well, I can't give you an answer. I can only tell you a true story.
~~~
A certain man threatened the Religious Gestapo, who in
turn convinced the Roman government that He was a threat to them, too.
His followers were disappointed that He didn't overthrow
the Romans and declare himself King, like the Messiah was
supposed to do. So they abandoned Him.
The ancient Romans pioneered what was possibly the most cruel form of torture ever devised by man: Crucifixion. They would drive spikes into their victim's ankles and wrists, smashing his nerves. He would hang there in blinding sheets of pain, slowly suffocating and dehydrating for days, until he finally expired.
Jesus was whipped and beaten, literally beyond recognition, then nailed to a cross between two common criminals.
One of these criminals was cursing and shouting at Him in a fit of rage: 'HEY! If you're the KING, why don't you get yourself down from there! And US, TOO!!!'
The other guy went along with this... for a little while.
But he saw that Jesus wasn't hurling insults at his torturers. Instead He was asking God to forgive them (?!).
He sobered up. He said to the other criminal, 'Hey dude, you and I are here because we deserve it. But this man Jesus has done nothing wrong.'
Then he said to Jesus, 'Remember me when you take charge of your Kingdom.'
Jesus simply replied, 'Today you'll be with me in Paradise.'
~~~
Stop the camera.
What you have here, in this brief conversation, is a snapshot of the entire world.
You have two criminals who have gotten themselves into a horrendous, awful mess. And you have the Son of God, who has not only chosen to live with us in our world of pain and suffering, but has personally taken all of it upon his own shoulders.
Even though he is completely innocent.
One thief refuses to accept any responsibility for his actions. He's unwilling to admit that he created the very mess that he's in.
He lives in denial until the bitter end. He grits his teeth and dies in his sin.
The other thief comes clean. He recognizes that Jesus possesses divine authority. He admits his guilt. He is required to do nothing, other than to let go of his pride.
He asks for forgiveness.
Forgiveness granted.
Jesus' pardon doesn't make the cross or the agony go away. But finally the struggle ceases and this man crosses the Great Divide. The intense pain dissolves and he steps into a New World, designed by God Himself -- with renewed body and soul.
That's a picture of the entire world, right there.
You and I are in this mess together, and we've all contributed to it.
We've all rejected God in some way or another, we've all
committed some kind of crime, and we all experience suffering.
The situation is what it is.
So we have a simple choice: Accept that fact that God has suffered with us -- or mock him and be furious because the suffering exists in the first place.
Which way do you want it???
The decision is yours. You and I will never get a true 'answer' about the pain and suffering we experience in this life. But in the midst of our pain, we have a companion. You and I can have the same conversation with Jesus that this criminal had, and we can experience the same forgiveness. All we have to do is ask, just like the thief on the cross did on that sad day.
~~~
This is the last of the Seven Great Lies of Organized Religion.
I pray that I've helped to strip away all the baggage that the Religious Gestapo adds to the story and reduce it to the bare essentials. I hope this has stirred your mind and your heart.
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