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The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision; not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought.

                                             William Channing

Editor's note: My search for God has been a long and torturous one. I suppose everyone could say that. I was once a "good little boy," kept in line by threats of eternal hellfire if I were to miss mass. To the displeasure of my parents, I began to read the Bible at age 15, but understanding hardly a word. My searchings, ill-advisedly, for many years, would lead me to association with a strict and doctrinaire Old Testament theology-based Christian group. I would attend their Bible college. For some decades I continued to research the Scripture for answers to life's big questions; but with mixed results. Eventually, Life would offer teachers instructing me toward a better understanding. Finally, I found the "rosetta stone" of insight which would be most help of all, "the scientific evidence for the AfterLife." You'll want to know about this, too. I write of my journey toward the Light in my Personal Statements: CLICK HERE. See examples of my articles listed below. Wayne Becker

Personal Statement #3: An Introduction to The Scientific Evidence for The AfterLife - "I'm not allowed to tell you too much about what it's like over here, because some of you might try to end your mortal lives just to get here a little faster"

Personal Statement #7: Love In The AfterLife: The Love Story of Elmere and Franklin: Summerland, Where Dreams Come True

Personal Statement #12: True Confessions II: There Is Something Immoral About Denying Your Own Judgment  

Personal Statement #21: How To Know If You Belong To A Cult: Why The Lying Teacher Always Comes Dressed As A Lamb

Personal Statement #22: Things You Don't Wanna Know:  Saving the Scripture from Superstition: How Literalism Has Ruined the Spiritual Message of the World's Greatest Book!

Personal Statement #23: Part 1: Forgiveness, The Final Battle: What I Learned From Father John Kuhn

Personal Statement #31: Finding Healing From Religious Abuse: The Nature of Authentic Spiritual Authority: What I Learned From Father John Kuhn

Personal Statement #34: What You Need To Know Before You Die: How Your Religious Beliefs Can Hurt You For Hundreds Of Years To Come: How I Helped A Departed Relative, Trapped In Fears Of Judgment, To Go To The Light

Personal Statement #42: The Fear of Death and the Meaning of Judgment in the AfterLife: We Cannot Escape our Responsibility to Unfold the Spirit, to Evolve as a Soul, to Love Ourselves! I'm not afraid of dying, but I am afraid of losing you!

Personal Statement #46: Love In The AfterLife: Romance at the Pinnacle of Existence! The Ultimate Dualistic-Halves of Eternal Twin-Soul Love! Why Your Deepest Yearning is the Voice of the Universe Proclaiming Its Truest Cosmic Message! I will love no other! no other!

Personal Statement #47: Reincarnation on Trial: Fantasy or Fact? The Central Issue: Whose Memories Are They? When I tire out, I'll come home to you!

Personal Statement #49: Can Morality Be Reduced to a Set of Written Rules? An Interview With Francesca of Madison County: The Good Little Girl Strikes Back!

Personal Statement #62: The Awesome Power of Sacred Directed Purpose: How to call into Being the deepest desires of your Soul! Why all seemingly impossible obstacles will eventually bend to your Sanctified Targeted Intentions; and why Jesus said, Embrace this God-Life, and no Mountain will dare stand in your way! It's as good as done! You cannot be stopped!

Personal Statement #63: Love In The AfterLife: Summerland: Where Dreams Come True, Part II: How You Will Yet Find Healing from the Devastating Losses of this World! Long, long shall I rue thee, too deeply to tell

Personal Statement #66: Imprimatur! Let it be printed! A Priest Speaks Out from The AfterLife! The Testimony of Father Robert Benson

Personal Statement #67: The Nature of Evil! Would you recognize it if you met, on the street, or in the mirror?  

Editor's Essay: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Scarlet Letter, Chapters 16-19, "Redemption in the Forest"

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler: Syntopicon essay, God

Dr. Mortimer J. Adler: Syntopicon essay, Angel

A Real-Life Encounter With An Angel a story submitted by a Word Gems reader   CLICK HERE TO READ

A Course In Miracles

What The Bleep Do We Know?

Atheism

the Church

Faith

God

Heaven & Hell

Jesus Christ

Law & Grace

Near-Death Experience

Prayer

Science & Religion

the Scripture

the Search for Truth in Religion

Suffering

Thomas Paine: "The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion."

Sri Aurobindo: "[We must not] attach ourselves even to the truths we hold most securely, for they are but forms and expressions of the Ineffable who refuses to limit itself to any form or expression."

Calvin & Hobbes cartoon: "It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning."

Religion through the eyes of children, The National Review, 1996-Dec-31:

    "The seventh commandment is 'thou shalt not admit adultery.'"

    "Paul preached holy acrimony, which is another name for marriage."

    "One of the opossums was St. Matthew."

    "Joshua led the Hebrews in the battle of Geritol."

    "Jesus was born because Mary had an immaculate contraption."

    "A Christian should have only one wife. This is called monotony."

    "The Jews had trouble throughout their history with the unsympathetic Genitals."

    "Lot's wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball of fire by night."

    "Moses went to the top of Mt. Cyanide to get the 10 commandments."

    "Unleavened bread is bread made without ingredients."

    "Solomon had 300 wives and 700 porcupines."

Jesus became God in 381 C.E. - that's the year that the "church fathers," one group of them at least, mafia-like, finally succeeded in excommunicating and, whenever possible, murdering their opposition. The process took close to 200 years with the "Jesus as Man but not God" faction leading the controversy much of the time. They eventually lost. The circumstances surrounding the final doctrinal decision, one that would frame and define ensuing Christianity for thousands of years, were not pretty and, upon close inspection by an objective reviewer, would not inspire confidence in the truth-promotion process. Our knowledge of the details of that ancient debate is fragmentary with information scattered over a wide array of sources. Jewish historian, Dr. Richard E. Rubenstein, invested 15 years or more tracking down these various sources and piecing together a picture revealed to be a tawdry state of corrupt church politics. The stakes were high. Ecclesiastical demagogues knew full well that if they allowed the common people to view Jesus as a Man who could grow and develop and progress - well then, this, of course, was a threat to the church's power over people - because if people can change and grow by themselves and appeal to the Father directly for help in life, why then, the people will surely conclude, do we need the church to save us? This book is only for those who are ready for the truth. Be prepared for some cognitive dissonance as it will alter your view of yourself, your view of Jesus, and how you fit into the divine cosmic plan. I would also recommend a book by my old professor, Sir Anthony Buzzard, The Doctrine of the Trinity, Christianity's Self-Inflicted Wound. Professor Buzzard reveals what the original languages of the scripture actually say about the nature of Jesus and why the early church, for the first few hundred years, saw Jesus as a Man, not as God!

Bishop Desmond Tutu: "When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land."

Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind."

Thomas Merton, Opening the Bible: "Religious thought does not move from question to answer but rather from question to question with each new question opening a larger field of vision."

Mahatma Ghandi: "If it weren't for Christians, I'd be a Christian."

Thomas Paine: "Of all of the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny of religion is the worst."

Archbishop William Temple: I believe in the holy Catholic Church, and I deeply regret that it does not presently exist.

Oliver Stone: Religion is for those who are afraid of hell. Spirituality is for those who have been there.

Jesse Ventura, Governor of Minnesota, 1999, in an interview with Playboy: "Organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers. It tells people to go out and stick their noses in other people's business."

Galileo Galilei: "I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."

Will Durant, The Age of Faith: "In Constantinople, more Christians were slaughtered by Christians in the years 342-343 than by all the persecutions by pagans in the history of Rome."

William Shakespeare: "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose."

Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce (c. 1840-1904): "We do not want churches because they will teach us to quarrel about God, as the Catholics and Protestants do."

Rich Jeni, on reasons for religious wars: "You're basically killing each other to see who's got the better imaginary friend."

Lord Acton: "Fanaticism in religion is the alliance of the passions she condemns with the dogmas she professes."

Stewart H. Holbrook: "Almost everyone who has read history in a more than casual manner knows that when the great figure of God appears in a controversy, the shooting cannot be far off."

Tom Wolfe: "A cult is a religion with no political power."

Voltaire: "If you have two religions in your land, the two will cut each other's throats; but if you have thirty religions, they will dwell in peace."

John Heywood: "The nearer to the church, the further from God."

Adrian Desmond, Huxley: "Perhaps the greatest lesson [Huxley] learned from reading Carlyle was that real religion, that emotive feeling for Truth and Beauty, could flourish in the absence of an idolatrous theology."

Emerson: "The religion that is afraid of science dishonors God and commits suicide. It acknowledges that it is not equal to the whole of truth, that it legislates and tyrannizes over a village of God's empire, but it is not the universal immutable law. Every influx of atheism, of skepticism, is thus made useful as a mercury pill assaulting and removing a diseased religion, and making way for truth."

Twain: "A man is accepted into church for what he believes - and turned out for what he knows." "In religion and politics, people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination."

Edward H. Ashment: "I've come to the conclusion that there can be little or no dialogue between 'proclaimers of truth' (religious and secular ideologues) and 'discoverers of truth' (empiricists). The former tend to debate, the latter tend to discuss."

Adrian Desmond, Huxley: On Huxley encountering natives on a remote island... "Untouched people; not necessarily noble savages, but apparently happy ones. They lived in a land of plenty, ready to share their bananas and guavas and coconuts. They were to be envied for their 'primitive simplicity and kind-heartedness'. Where was that 'malady of thought' afflicting industrial England? [Huxley] realized that 'civilization as we call it would be rather a curse than a blessing to them'. Huxley knew the fate in store for them, slamming the 'mistaken goodness of the Stigginses of Exeter Hall, who would send missionaries to these men to tell them that they will all infallibly be damned'."

Thomas Jefferson: "I never told my religion nor scrutinize that of another. I never attempted to make a convert nor wished to change another's creed. I have judged of others' religion by their lives, for it is from our lives and not from our words that our religion must be read. By the same test must the world judge me."

Thomas Jefferson: "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot ... they have perverted the purest religion ever preached to man into mystery and jargon, unintelligible to all mankind, and therefore the safer engine for their purpose."

Thomas Jefferson: "But a short time elapsed after the death of the great reformer of the Jewish religion, before his principles were departed from by those who professed to be his special servants, and perverted into an engine for enslaving mankind, and aggrandizing their oppressors in Church and State."

Will Durant, The Story of Civilization: "That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel!"

Dr. William James: It does not follow, because our ancestors made so many errors of fact and mixed them with their religion, that we should therefore leave off being religious at all. By being religious we establish ourselves in possession of ultimate reality at the only points at which reality is given us to guard. Our responsible concern is with our private destiny, after all.

Dalai Lama: "This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness."

Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond: "To sum up: Let us not be discouraged by simplicity. Real things are simple. Human conceptions are not altogether misleading. Our view of the Universe is a partial one but is not an untrue one. Our knowledge of the conditions of existence is not altogether false - only inadequate... Nor let us imagine that existence hereafter, removed from these atoms of matter which now both confuse and manifest it, will be something so wholly remote and different as to be unimaginable; but let us learn by the testimony of experience - either our own or that of others - that those who have been, still are; that they care for us and help us; that they, too, are progressing and learning and working and hoping; that there are grades of existence, stretching upward and upward to all eternity; and that God Himself, through His agents and messengers, is continually striving and working and planning, so as to bring this creation of His through its preparatory labour and pain, and lead it on to an existence higher and better than anything we have ever known."

Barry McGuire, Eve of Destruction: "hate your next door neighbor, but don't forget to say 'grace'"

Jean Rousseau, The Social Contract, 1762: "But I am mistaken in speaking of a Christian republic; the terms are mutually exclusive. Christianity preaches only servitude and dependence. Its spirit is so favorable to tyranny that it always profits by such a regime. True Christians are made to be slaves, and they know it and do not much mind; this short life counts for too little in their eyes."

Leo Tolstoy, The Kingdom of God is Within You, 1893: "But Christ could certainly not have established the Church. That is, the institution we now call by that name, for nothing resembling our present conception of the Church - with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and especially its claim to infallibility - is to be found in Christ's words or in the conception of the men of his time."

James Madison, A Memorial and Remonstrance, 1784: "The religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate... Who does not see that the same authority which can establish Christianity, in exclusion of all other Religions, may establish with the same ease any particular sect of Christians, in exclusion of all other Sects? While we assert for ourselves a freedom to embrace, to profess and to observe the Religion which we believe to be of divine origin, we cannot deny an equal freedom to those whose minds have not yet yielded to the evidence which has convinced us."

Kenneth Woodward, Jan. 13, 2006: "When word went out from Rome recently that the pope's theological advisers were prepared to abandon the idea of Limbo, it was clear that the medieval notion of a place where unbaptized infants, among others, go was as good as dead... The Catholic habit is to let outworn theological idioms disappear through benign neglect. That appears to be what has happened to limbo." Editor's note: It is ironic that institutionalized religion throws in the towel on this one (after centuries of demanding blind obedience) just when a great deal of empirical AfterLife evidence becomes available regarding post-death limbo-like states of existence (albeit temporary in nature) for those of less than sterling character.

Dr. Leslie D. Weatherhead, The Meaning Of The Cross: "The worst penalty of sin is that man is separated from God, his spiritual senses dulled, his spiritual desires lessened. Such separation involves progressive deterioration of character, which, if unstayed, may indeed involve such a disintegration of personality that the latter ceases to be recognizable... both our Lord and [Paul] use the word 'dead' ... to describe [this wayward soul]... The words of Jesus about His suffering and death reveal that He willingly committed Himself to some mighty task, costly to Him beyond our imagining, but effecting for all men a deliverance beyond their own power to achieve, and that in doing so He knew Himself to be utterly and completely one with God the Father." Editor's note: I have noticed, too often, when communicating with childhood friends of decades ago, that many of these former bright sparks of personhood, now, as if walking casualties of the war that is this life, have lost much of their heart, tragic examples of Weatherhead's "disintegration of personality."

John Adams: Near the end of his life, the second President offers a few lines in summation of his spiritual outlook: "Admire and adore the Author of the telescopic universe, love and esteem the work, do all in your power to lessen ill, and increase good: but never presume to comprehend."

Elizabeth Fry, testimony from the Other Side: Fry speaks via Leslie Flint, direct-voice medium: "Christ himself had no intention, no desire, to found any religious organization. This is completely, absolutely, a man-made thing - which over the centuries has misled mankind." read more here

Ellen Terry, testimony from the Other Side: Terry speaks via Leslie Flint, direct-voice medium: "I would say that this [life on our side] is the natural life and yours is the artificial, and that the truly natural life is the spiritual… the material life is only a pale reflection of the reality... Here there is no restriction placed upon expansion of expression; here you assimilate knowledge and experience; here you throw off more and more of the old self and become truly free... It is the narrow confines of earth which prevent individuals from becoming spiritual beings" read more here

John Adams, 1780: His leaking ship having made an emergency stop at El Ferrol; crossing the Pyrenees on mule-back en route 1000 miles to Paris; resting in a Spanish village; newly-appointed US Ambassador to France, John Adams, records in his diary: "Nothing [in Spain] appeared rich but the churches, nobody fat but the clergy... We saw the procession of the Bishop and of all the Canons, in rich habits of silk, velvet, silver and gold. The Bishop ... spread out his hands to the people ... [they] prostrated themselves on their knees as he passed. Our guide told us we must do the same, But I contented myself with a bow. The eagle eye of the Bishop did not fail to observe an upright figure amidst the crowd of prostrate adorers: but no doubt perceiving in my countenance and air, but especially in my dress, something that was not Spanish, he concluded I was some travelling heretic and did not think it worth while to exert his authority to bend my stiff knees."

Albert Einstein: "Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."

Author unknown: The word "lent" comes from an Anglo Saxon word meaning "lengthen," as in, the days are getting longer - it will soon be spring! In times past, this meant that grain bins were nearly empty, having been depleted by the long winter, and supplies of food were running low. People at this time of year were cutting back in order to conserve what was left. But the coming of spring meant that crops would be planted, with the promise that food might once again be plentiful. Denying oneself now meant plenty for later. Traditional Christianity tells us that Lent is a time of denial and giving something up, but such abstinence was originally based on necessity not design. If we choose to abstain from anything this time of year let it be done in this spirit: abstain from judging others, indulge in God's view of them; abstain from emphasizing differences, indulge in tolerance and the unity of all life; abstain from thoughts of illness, indulge in the healing power of God; abstain from bitterness, indulge in thoughts of forgiveness; abstain from hopelessness, indulge in the joy of this present moment.

Victor Zammit: COMMENTARY, April 29, 2011: WORLD CHRISTIAN LEADERS WRONGLY STATE IN THEIR EASTER MESSAGE, "PEOPLE ARE MOVING AWAY FROM GOD." Just because people are no longer going to conservative Christian Church services does not mean they are abandoning 'God.' In a court procedure a lawyer would stand up and call out "OBJECTION - that is an inadmissible statement" because what the Christian leaders are stating is an 'interpretation' not a 'fact'. It can equally be said that people are protesting with their feet because conservative Christianity needs a radical reformation to remove all the absurdities, all the dogmas, all the irrelevant doctrines. This applies especially to the Catholic Church. For example, even today a divorced Catholic woman who remarries is told by the Pope that she will be ETERNALLY DAMNED and spend billions and billions of years in 'fiery hell' if she dies! That is a most absurd doctrine. People these days, especially youth, want MEANING, want EVIDENCE, want RELEVANCE to their life on earth and the conservative Christian Church does not seem to be listening to the people. Somebody has to tell the Pope and the Cardinals that we live in the twenty first century and the essential message of Christianity of love, service to others and belief in an afterlife are being submerged in doctrines that are thousands of years old and totally meaningless. People are absorbing the information and the teachings that come directly from credible afterlife sources because they have value, relevance and meaning to our life on earth here and the afterlife. Editor's note: Compare this to John Heywood's, "The nearer to the church, the further from God."

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