Religion is of Man, Not of God

Religion, though inspired by God, is a creation of man,* not of God.   When a great God-like soul comes to earth and shares his teachings, his divine presence, and perhaps even a miracle or two, with the masses, all is well until he departs from the earth. Then his followers will  try to canonize him, codify,  publish and disseminate his teachings, and establish an institution of faith around his name.  Thus a religion is born, and  thus, all the trouble begins.

If you have ever come into contact with an enlightened being, you will know that the experience is ineffable, indescribable. Try as you may, you will not be able to convey the totality of the experience in a way that people will fully understand, especially people who are spiritual novices, or worse, non believers.

An old spiritual teacher of mine, Hilda Charlton, warned her students against trying to share personal spiritual experiences with those who have no belief in such things.  She said that each time you do that you will diminish your own experience.  This proved to be true.  Every time I tried to relate some amazing encounter or meditative experience to a nonbeliever,  I felt as if a chunk of the energy from the experience had gone out of me.  I also found that it was difficult, if not impossible to reclaim that energy.  Imagine then, the difficulty the disciples of Buddha or Jesus had in trying to relate their experiences of seeing miracles, hearing divine teachings, and being in the auric presence of these great ones, to the flocks of seekers that gathered about them!

Do you remember the game of "telephone?" You line up a dozen people, and the first one in the line whispers a phrase or sentence into the ear of the next one in line. Then, that person whispers what he heard to the next one, and so on down the line to the end. Then the last person tells what he or she has heard. The two versions are, more times than not, so different that you all have a good laugh about it!

Now imagine the distortion in the teachings of Jesus after fifty years of his teachings being passed down as an oral tradition! Yes, it was fifty years after the crucifixion of Jesus that the first elements of Christian scripture became written word!  Some of the Gospels were written as much as one hundred years later! 
 
Four hundred years passed before Buddha's teachings were put to the pen!  As these teachings were passed down through the years, how many numerous distortions must have been made in both of these cases just from the fact they were passed orally? Of course the religions formed around these teachings will make claims like, "the Bible is the unaltered Word of God, and there have been no distortions from man as the writers were divinely inspired!"   If you know a little bit of biblical history you will know this to be impossible. So much has been changed or removed from the Christian scripture by various councils, papal edicts, kings, emperors and editors. Roman Emperor, Constantine, changed the new religion in some pretty drastic ways in order to fit his own agenda. He insisted upon these changes before he agreed to allow Christianity to become the official state religion of Rome!

The Buddhists maintain, that because teachings were accompanied by a "spiritual transmission," given by the enlightened teachers that came later, the teachings have been preserved in their purity.  But if that were the case, why are there so many different sects of Buddhism with disparate practices and teachings?   I have personally heard members of one sect decry another's authenticity, sometimes inferring that the other was not Buddhist at all!

Religions often lose their way by the actions of their followers. Practices are changed or ignored altogether!   My guru, Sai Baba, tells the story of the Hindu holiday "Ganesh Chaturti," where the god "Ganesha" is worshiped both in temples and in the homes of its adherents.  Ganesh is the beloved and benevolent elephant headed god who is propitiated at the beginning of any endeavor for a successful outcome.  During this holiday it is customary to offer a platter of milk to a picture or statue of Ganesh upon the family altar. But first, the family cat must be rounded up and placed under basket.   Then a rock is placed on top of the basket to ensure that the cat can not escape and drink the milk on the altar.  As time went by, little by little, the prayers and the milk offerings to Ganesh were dropped. Nowadays, Sai Baba continues,  Ganesh Chaturti is observed each year by putting a cat under a basket for the day, and nothing else!  So, the original practices of the holy day were sadly lost. and were replaced by an absurdity!

Besides this sort of cultural distortion, there also have been purposeful changes made to religions, done for worldly and not spiritual reasons. These changes have supplanted and sometimes eliminated the original teachings or beliefs. For example, many believe that the doctrine of reincarnation is found in Buddhism and Hinduism alone.  But it turns out that it was also a tenet of early Christianity, as it was,  and still is, a tenet of mystical Judaism. Now the early Christians practiced as mystical Jews, so it follows that they would believe  in reincarnation! Nothing in the Gospels denies reincarnation.   When Jesus asked  the disciples, "Who do you think I am?" They answered that many said he was John the Baptist whom King Herod had put to death, come back to life.  Others  said he was Elijah, who according to tradition would return before the Day of the Lord, and still others  said he was a great prophet like Jeremiah.   These answers would imply a belief in the doctrine that those who die can return to earth in another form. These Jewish followers would not have answered in this way if reincarnation was not an accepted part of their religious paradigm.  

Reincarnation was removed from Christian doctrine in the 6th Century at the Second Council of Constantinople. Today, if you were to mention reincarnation to a fundamentalist Christian, they will tell you that it "is a lie of the Devil, and was never a part of the Word of God!"

Why did the Church remove reincarnation from the faith?  Reincarnation implies that a soul can eke out salvation by working towards it over many lifetimes. Meanwhile, the Church had spread the dictum far and wide that they were the one and only path to salvation available to mankind!  The problem was, that because the doctrine maintained that man could attain salvation by himself, reincarnation could eliminate entirely the people's need for the clergy and the Church altogether!  What would this do to the Church's monetary income they made from the tithing of their flock?  Or for that matter, what would it do to the immense power the Church held over the people?  The possibilities were just too unacceptable for the Church, so  reincarnation was out.  Edit!

Religious doctrine, as we find it today,  has been transformed to something unrecognizable  because of the "telephone," effect it has passed through. In this "game" of telephone, we are the last person in line!  Additionally, the already distorted message has also been changed by the leaders of the faiths, to suit any purpose they deemed necessary to maintain their power and influence over the people!  The ability to shape their religions to their own ends gave it's leaders  great power to shape and control the faith and religious ways of entire civilizations!

No religion can convey the original spiritual energy experienced by the few people who had the immense good fortune to actually see,  hear and feel, first hand, the message and presence of the enlightened ones. Without that experience, the religion's message becomes vapid, empty,  easily misconstrued and potentially twisted into errant forms. The experience of that spiritual power is the only true touchstone of authenticity.  Teachings either convey that energy or they don't. When they don't, as has been the case in so many of today's religions, what we are left with is a message sometimes entirely different from the original.  And this time, no one is laughing!

Christian evangelical preachers use special techniques to induce mass trance and bring a crowd into a state of religious "hysteria."  Special music and lighting, inflections of the preacher's voice, and other hypnotic techniques are a part of the dog and pony show they run for their unsuspecting crowds, who, in their own way, are yearning for spiritual succor.  They perform, "healings" upon their flock on stage, using the endorphin inducing hysteria, and then wonder why their so-called healings don't stick when the person gets home.  Typically, they will blame this relapse of affliction on a lack of  faith in the recipient, saying their belief was just not strong enough to hold the healing.  People are brought up in wheelchairs in so much arthritic pain they cant walk or properly use their fingers.  The preacher comes over and whacks them on the forehead and before you know it they are up and dancing around the stage.  "A miracle," the crowd oohs and ahhs, but endorphin is the body's natural oxycontin and when that much is flowing, for those few minutes, the wheelchair bound seeker is "healed."   

The energy that is whipped up in this crowd is attributed to, "the presence of the Holy Spirit," but the same energy is whipped up in a rock concert where God is not being invoked at all!  Energies or "vibes" carry qualities.  An energy can carry the qualities of love or it can be one of hate.  Its all energy.  But, the spiritual power that an enlightened one carries whether he is in front of a crowd or alone is an energy of universal peace and love. The energy an enlightened one exudes is a byproduct of their Self Realization, not something that is conjured in a hypnotic trick.


The pristine energy of Jesus or Buddha in its pure form can not be described  in words,  let alone by a religious doctrine. Language can only allude to it.  Scripture can point to it.     Enlightened beings exist in it. 

So then,  religion today is an archaic admixture of tainted spiritual doctrine, combined with with a moralistic and political dogma as contrived by the writers, pundits and preachers of the faith, that is designed to meet the needs of the  institutions that they have formed around the name of the enlightened founder of the sect. For the institution and not the people.  For political and social ends, and not the original intent and spiritual message.  

So many Churches of different beliefs,  all claiming to be Christ's "true Church!"  So many Jewish Synagogues and sects with different degrees of adherence to the principles of Judaism, all claiming to be the "true Jewish tradition."  The differences in these various Churches and Synagogues are made by men and not by God!  They have arisen to suit the different desires of the worshippers, and sometimes just of the hierarchy of the particular sect alone.  This is just more of man changing and distorting teachings for his own purpose. This is not of God.  God is the changeless Reality.  

Man's ego is huge.  A spiritual ego is worse and is more potentially dangerous than a worldly one. When sects deny other sects, or what's worse, when they deny other religions, it is the epitome of delusion and egoism.   

Innate in man is the desire to draw closer to the ultimate reality that religions call God. This is a spiritual yearning in everyone's heart. Whether people realize it or not, their need to fill themselves with comforts, possessions, wealth, sex, good food, etc.,  is a misplaced desire to find their own spiritual nature or God. This,  according to the enlightened ones, is the true  fulfillment of life!  When a religion instead  leads man to separate himself from others, or to feel that has a truth that others don't, and that he shall forcibly share this "truth" with others, whether the others like it or not, that religion is not helping people find the God within, they are instead instilling a false sense of separateness and  ego.

What is worse, is that God today, and through the ages, has been used to justify all kinds of behaviors that no Buddha, Christ or Avatar would condone: Genocides, wars, crusades, inquisitions, and  campaigns of hatred towards others who don't follow their way are the horsemen of this apocolypse.  All this, in the name of these religions of men, and in the name of the Messiah, Prophet or God they purport to represent!  

Man, in his greed and thirst for wealth and power and not for the presence of the "lord within," has co-opted the teachings of the enlightened ones.  Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Mohamed, Moses, all pristine in their connection with the One God, have all been and are still being used to quench man's thirst for self gratification.  Those with ulterior motives have twisted the original teachings and spiritual principles so badly that they don't make logical sense today! People are then forced to believe the absurd and the magical which require huge leaps of faith, so much so that the adherents to these doctrines become easy to radicalize. The modern versions of these religions are perverse shells of the true spirit of their founders,  and are but a dim indication that at some time, the light of God has reached out and touched mankind, but that man has drastically failed to meet the challenge and responsibilities of that contact.  By its very nature,  religion is evolving to a state where it is simply not of God!  Perhaps, by its very nature, it never can or will be!  

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*I am using the word "man" to indicate "mankind."  It is coincidental that the majority of the problems inherent in religion have been created by men and not women.  We are in a patriarchal religious cycle.  This may account for all of the violence and wars perpetrated because of, or in the name of religion.    

Next time:  Spirituality.  What is it?  How does it differ from religion?  What is the spiritual secret that can change your world?



Namaste, Mitakuye y'oasin, Peace,
Freddie Blue Fox
Interfaith Minister