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Where religion goes wrong (as I see it… humbly)
Unfortunately, it’s easy for people to get turned off from spirituality and faith because of religion. Religion, we must remember, is a purely human invention. At its best, religion can be an aid in helping us learn our spiritual lessons. At its worst, religion can be used by unscrupulous people to push an agenda of violence and hatred. This agenda is clearly directly in contradiction with the spiritual reality in which we are all connected.
It is amazing to think how many wars have been waged in the name of religion. From the Crusades to the modern unrest in Northern Ireland and the Middle East, people have killed each other in the name of their God. People have genuinely believed that they were pleasing God by killing infidels. This despite the fact that every spiritual leader and sacred text is clear on one thing: killing is wrong. I’m not going to go into a litany of the reasons why murder is a sin. What I am going to point out, however, is that under our understanding of God, if we are all connected, when we kill another person, we are killing a part of God. We are also killing a living being that we are connected to. For that reason, killing another is particularly abhorrent to the almighty.
At least in many of these cases, the people involved in the war truly believed that they were doing what God wanted. There is the example…
