The Death of Religion

In the West, religion died some years ago in what could be viewed as a natural progression in human spiritual culture. At the beginning of the New Age of Aquarius new forms of spirituality increasingly rose to be explored and experienced. Through spiritual practice and study, new connections could be made with the Higher Evolution. Previously, the old Mediterranean religions such as Churchianity, Islam and Judaism referred to the Higher Evolution in mythic language. Churchianity articulated a tribal vocabulary including words such as God, Holy Spirit, saints, savior, salvation and damnation.

But what exactly caused the death of religion? What happened was that three of the core concepts of establishment religiosity became untenable to the modern spiritual mind and were discarded. These concepts were scripture, worship, and belief. Once the foundation of the religious mind, these three concepts came to be seen as spiritually injurious. The concept of scripture, the concept that a single human cultural artifact generated by others in a long-gone civilization, can somehow mediate all the decisive, privileged and authoritative spiritual data germane to modern concerns, began to look quaint. It was recognized that better and more pertinent books had been written in the succeeding centuries, and better and more pertinent ideas had entered informed discourse.

An obsession with the Bible was taken as evidence of spiritual insecurity; as evidence of an attempt to give away one's power to an out-of-date male artifact; as evidence of a fear to think fearlessly and creatively for oneself. An obsession with the Bible came to be seen as a coded attempt to reject one's own innate divinity; a refusal to accept that one is made in the image of God; a refusal to recognize that one is a partaker of the divine nature, and can therefore write, think, feel and speak one's own scripture.

The concept of worship also came to be viewed as deeply flawed. Worship was a spiritually debilitating, negative and wasteful behavior. If you were God, would you want your human colleagues to waste their energies grovelling? Of course you wouldn't. Only an incompetent, insecure and evil God would want that. If you were God, you would want your human colleagues to get off their fat worshiping behinds, stand confidently in their own strength and do something useful. You would want them to share the abundance of the planet with those with less rather than spending it on cluster bombs and banksters' bonuses. You would want them to look after home and stop poisoning the planet with industrial pollutants. You would want them to give women and children a chance to be free.

If you were God, you would want your human colleagues to invent a system of democracy where votes were not stolen and where the elected politicians did what was right rather than what was expedient for their controllers in the covert security community. Worship came to be seen as the displacement activity of the spiritually idle; it displaced service. Wasting energy on worship was the devil's agenda.

The concept of belief, likewise, began to look silly and self-damaging to the human spirit. Belief was a sort of elite-controlled filter, self-stuck on the brain and functioning quietly in the background to keep truth out. Belief kept out anything other than itself or things very like itself. Belief obstructed the accurate reception of new revelations. On this view, a belief is a stuck thought-form invented by others and secured by a hold-fast to the intelligence of the believer. There it acts like an aerial attracting energies similar to its own, but only energies similar to its own. All others are rejected.

So if it is a negative or erroneous belief, like most religious beliefs are - for example those which have to do with sin, punishment, salvation, martyrdom, suffering, jealousy, hell, death, sexual oppression, sectarianism, estrangement from God or worship - it will attract in negative energies and negative entities which vibrate with a similar frequency. And the aura of the believer becomes colonized by negativity. The result, over time, is spiritual fear, physical illness and paranoid self-righteousness.

The belief is not freely constructed by the believer, nor is it freely modified by him or her. The believer is used by the belief. The believer has become an unfree religious whore. Such views took root and grew, setting people free. Scripture was an insecure illusion, worship was silly, and belief was unwise. Religion came to be seen as a terrorist behavior. Religion worked by terrorizing the individual first, by inculcating manufactured concepts of sin and fear. These concepts of sin and fear were then used in battle to terrorize other faith communities whose concepts of sin and fear were different.

Religion has no place in the New Age. Only a direct personal relationship with God will lead us out of the wasteland of religiosity that has kept us in the dark for far too long.