Religion, man made, is our silly little attempt, as oblivious human beings, to comprehend the incomprehensible- ‘God’- through mere storytelling. This being in complete opposition to spirituality, which is the truth of God and which, through spirituality, the whole of existence came into being…
‘Whereas spirituality offers us the truth, religion offers us nothing more than a concept.’
There are increasing numbers of people who are, today, labelling themselves as ‘spiritual’- ‘spiritual but not religious.’ Some people question; ‘how can this be?’, arguing that spirituality is religion- ‘new age’- but, I have to disagree, wholeheartedly.
From my perspective, as someone who identifies as ‘spiritual but not religious’, spirituality and religion are polar opposites. Whereas religion is fear-based, organised in such a way that we are, essentially, scared into submission through the concept of judgement and sin and karmic punishment, telling us that we will be ‘punished’ if we do not follow a moral code, spirituality is love-based.
Not as in religion, whereby some external figurehead is worshipped- ‘God’- who we are told is a man, spirituality tells us that we are God. That God is within us all- internal. Not something to seek outside of ourselves, but something within, our inner consciousness. Spirituality makes us understand this- that ‘God’, is, in fact, the power that resides within us all- the very nature of us all- one of unconditional love. Unconditional love which sees us all being one. Again, this being in stark opposition to religion, which is so often centered on ‘anthropocentrism’- a philosophical world view whereby humans are seen as superior to other living and non-living things, separate from the universe, when, the reality is that; not only are none of us ‘separate’ from the universe, we are not even a part of it, we are the universe itself, for, separation doesn’t exist.
‘Separation’ is merely an illusion, you see, albeit a very convincing one, which is used to divide us, assisting in the creation of ‘hierarchies’, which allow us to control and be controlled…In the same way that the ideology of there being a man in the sky, looking down on us all, judging us and condemning some of us to hell based on things as superficial as who we love, is all about control…
There is no ‘man in the sky’, it is our ego which makes us think this, our ego which makes us believe that a single human being could’ve created, from what we can observe, 93 billion light-years of universe… How ignorant, how self entitled, we all are… I feel sorry for us, really, I feel sorry for our naivety in even thinking that ‘God’- the creator of the whole universe for which humans occupy but a mere speck- could possibly be a ‘man’- a human. But, more than anything though, I feel angry. I feel angry because, it is this attitude- anthropocentrism-which is seeing us, quite literally, destroying the planet. Our ego driven attitudes seeing us all condemning ourselves to a living hell. How ironic, when it is this- a condemnation to hell- that we so desperately seek salvation from in religion, and yet, through our blind conformity to religious ideology, we end up condemning ourselves to…
And so, this is why I say that I’m ‘spiritual but not religious’, because, I know that there has to be more, but, I don’t claim to have all the answers, or any answers at all, even. Spirituality is incomprehensible, so to try to comprehend it, something which religion solely exists to do, is completely futile. A life wasted trying to find the answers for something which our tiny human brains will never understand, a life wasted praying to a man who doesn’t exist, it’s just that- a waste.
It’s about time, then, that we all realise that us humans are NOT the ‘be all and end all’, that we are NOT the ‘superior species’, despite what religion so often leads us to believe… No, the fact is that, actually, us humans are but a mere speck of dust in the grand scheme of the universe and, like a speck of dust, we know nothing, about anything. Don’t let this fact scare you, though, let it liberate you.
A(ironic)MEN.
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