Saturday, April 01, 2006

A conversation with God: Enlarging your beliefs

I have no doubt that the fundamentalist-literalist faction of Southern Baptists would, if they controlled the world, annihilate those who disagree with them in much the same way the Catholic Church did during the Inquisition, and in much the same way that Hitler tried to exterminate the Jews in the 20th century. No other sect / cult of Christianity is as intolerant of differing theological viewpoints as Southern Baptists are.

In the previous post, we reported that Russell Moore, senior vice president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, called non-Baptist Christian denominations as well as other faiths "the Anti-Christ," indicating that his theological viewpoint — Southern Baptist literalism — is the Only True Religion.

A student at the very same seminary, Josh Buice, has long been the Southern Baptist cult's cheerleader and is our favorite anti-Mason. In a comment he made to the previous article, he praised Moore's anti-Christ comments, adding that he hopes Moore will target Freemasonry in his next hate-filled public announcement.

I can't see any difference in the Southern Baptist's mindless shouts of "Glory to God!" and the "Allah be praised!" of a Muslim terrorist with a bomb strapped to his back. They both want the world to be the way they think God wants it, and they don't mind doing some pretty strange things to accomplish their goals. Those crazy people protesting soldiers' funerals and urging death to gays are Baptists, you know, members of Westboro Baptist Church.

How can these "men of God" who claim to "love the Lord" speak with such venom against fellow humans who are following Paths they believe to be godly? Why is it so damn important for them to, as George Carlin once said of missionaries, "nail sandals to the soles of the natives' feet"? Why are they so intolerant, so egotistically determined to make everyone else believe as they do, and if they cannot, then to curse them as hellbound?

Because like all humans, they believe they are right, and they do not want to be wrong. In the case of these Baptists, this "need to be right" is taken to the nth degree. Their entire belief structure — their very raison d'etre — is held together by their literalist fantastical universe of a Vengeful God who, since He's made in their image, is as petty, as demanding and as irrational as they are. If for one second fundamentalists used their God-given powers of Reason instead of adhering to an irrational Blind Faith, their whole shadow-world would crumble.

Buice recently wrote on his blog that he has no desire "to grow outside of what the Book [the Bible] says!" Elsewhere he has written, "I will reject your allegorical method of interpretation. The Word should not be interpreted through allegory!"

God doesn't just speak through ancient texts. If He was real then, and was "inspiring" mere mortals to write down His Words, then chances are, He's still doing it.

Neale Donald Walsch has presented the world with a series of books called Conversations with God. In 2002's The New Revelations: A Conversation with God, we are told by God that all our problems, both personal and planetwide, are not political or economic or military in nature, but are spiritual.

He tells us that none of our spiritual or religious beliefs are necessarily wrong, that we should not necessarily discard them, but that to solve our problems we should transcend them!

God says:
Transcending means to go beyond, to move past. It does not mean to completely reject or totally destroy. You do not have to destroy a thing in order to move past it....

"Transcending" does not mean always being "other than," it means always being "larger than." Your new, larger belief system will no doubt retain some of the old — that part of the old belief system that you experience as still serving you — and so it will be a combination of the new and the old, not a rejection of the old from top to bottom.

Can you see the difference?
God continues:
...Stop your resistance.

Rejecting completely your present beliefs would be to discredit so much of what has been taught, so much of what has been understood, so much of what has been done — and so much of what has been good.

It would make too much of the world feel "wrong." It would make ancestors "wrong," it would make entire scriptures "wrong," it would make present-day lives "wrong." People would have to admit that all of the spiritual aspects of the human experience have been a mistake, a misunderstanding.

This is more that most people can acknowledge. It is more than they should acknowledge, because it is not true.

In fact, you don't have to declare that you were "wrong" about anything, because you weren't. You simply didn't have a complete understanding. You needed more information.

Transcending current beliefs is not an outright rejection of them; it is an "adding to" them.

Now that you have more information that you can add to what you presently believe, you can enlarge your beliefs — not completely reject them, enlarge them — and move on with your lives in a new way.

A way that works.
Stay with Him, folks. God has more to say. Why didn't He speak this clearly 2,500 years ago when Isaiah and Jeremiah were proclaiming His words?
You are facing now a new and startling danger — a danger posed to your entire species. A threat to your very survival posed by the combination of a split in ideology and an advance in technology, which makes it possible for you to seek to resolve your differences with tools of human destruction unlike anything you may have heretofore dreamed of in your worst nightmare.

There are five things you can choose now if changing your world, and the self-destructive direction in which it is moving, is what you wish to achieve.
  1. You can choose to acknowledge that some of your old beliefs about God and about Life are no longer working.

  2. You can choose to acknowledge that there is something you do not understand about God and about Life, the understanding of which will change everything.

  3. You can choose to be willing for a new understanding of God and Life to now be brought forth, an understanding that could produce a new way of life on your planet.

  4. You can choose to be courageous enough to explore and examine this new understanding, and, if it aligns with your inner truth and knowing, to enlarge your belief system to include it.

  5. You can choose to live your lives as demonstrations of your highest and grandest beliefs, rather than as denials of them.
These are the Five Steps to Peace, and if you take them, you can shift everything on your planet.
Behavior cannot be changed, unless there is a change in beliefs, "because beliefs create behaviors."

—Widow's Son

God's Words quoted from The New Revelations: A Conversation with God, by Neil Donald Walsch.

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5 comments:

  1. Very well put. I enjoy reading your blog, and it would be much better if more people spent their energies expanding their spituality instead of bashing others.

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  2. Why do the majority of your rants have only one or two people who seem to care about what you write?

    If you are correct, it would seem that people would be listening to what you have to say!

    I base my views on the Bible. You base you views on whatever way the wind is blowing tomorrow.

    Josh Buice

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  3. I think each individual should find their own truth and on that found their own personal religion. It is myopic and spiritually sophomoric for one to think that they alone have all the answers to everyone's spiritual questions. If everyone thought the exact same thing, there would be redundancy and no growth - the antithesis of life.

    Life finds a way.

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  4. You really bash the southern Baptist, and this is ok for you, but many people, like me, deplore the masons, and all they stand for. The words you speak are flowered with eloquence, and littered with contempt. Where is your love, masons have no love but for themselves, and their evil grand masters...no love,,, I don't know what you think it is but you sound like a self righteous Pharisee.

    ReplyDelete

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