Life Beyond Religious Belief Systems
Religion has failed us. By ‘religion’ I mean the popular use of the word to convey institutionalized, religious belief systems and as I am English I am talking mainly of the religious belief system traditionally current in this country.
When anything gets organized, as religion has been, you should know or at least suspect that it has been organized for someone else’s benefit and not for the people who follow it and often blindly.
We have one national belief system dividing groups of people from another group of people with another belief system when, in reality, we are all the same – simply one people sharing one Earth. That should not even need stating but unfortunately, and obviously, it does.
Generally, regional societies have been believing in religious belief systems for well over 2000 years and these beliefs system have produced countless killings, countless wars, repression, fundamentalism, separatism, divisions, deportations. The quality and the freedom of societies sinks lower and lower at an ever-increasing rate. We become less religious in the true sense of that word, less ‘enlightened’ and more selfish, grasping, limited and unhappy simply because we believe what others with authority tell us - that we have to worship some mythical being who knows... The truth is plain to see if you only take time to look.
We need to find ‘true spirituality’ not some hierarchical, politically-based belief system handed down, second-hand, from people like us but who profess to know better than we do.
Over 400 years ago an intelligent thinker saw this. “Man cannot make a worm, yet he will make gods by the dozen.” (Michel de Montaigne, 1533-1592.) How long does it take people to realize this simple fact?
Outdated, institutionalized, religious belief systems are simply not working for the people. A sane alternative is to go away and simply think it through but most people don’t want to do this. It takes time and commitment.
Another and probably better way for most, is to spend time in an intentional community (also known as ‘Spiritual’, ‘Personal Development’ or ‘Ethical’ communities) where people can meet and explore with other like minded people in comfort and safety, which seems to be a more suitable alternative to being led into a corrupted and corrupting mass belief system that promises health and wealth after death and after putting up with the horrors of contemporary society all our physical life – working hard for the system that controls us – until we die – a myth that is no longer useful to intelligent people.
True religion is simply seeing the reality all around us – the ‘what is’ but not the ‘what has been’ or the ‘what might be’. If we see that we are all one then we see instantly that we need another way of living and that we have to stop doing everything that is divisive – that forms different tribes and all the conflict.
We need a better way for we people to give ourselves time and take charge of our lives and of our own thinking. Then we will stop believing the lies that people with authority tell us is true, not only in organized religion belief systems but also in politics, commerce, banking – see the truth in the wholeness of life.
Class: Engaged Philosophy.
Tags: personal development, religious belief systems, right-living, spiritual development, spirituality, true-religion, truth, ethics.
Published: 2014-03-27.
