The role of organised religion
Organised religion was meant to play a positive role in the world. It was meant to educate human beings for personal responsibility before God. It was meant to set man free, educating man to understand and use his free will in the right manner.
Man was meant to be educated to understand the Will of God and adjured to follow this Will. Man was meant to understand the importance of personal responsibility for every single action knowing that he is responsible for everything that emanates from him and that there are consequences to every decision.
The lack of this awareness is what has led to the chaos and disaster we have before us. The consciousness of apparent impunity led men to believe that they could do whatever they wanted and that there was no one to call them to account. If men knew that they were accountable for every single action, then we probably would have taken things a bit more seriously. This delusion of impunity which no one until now has recognised is one of the greatest traps for humanity.
If organised religion had played its role as a facilitator then things would have evolved differently. Organised religion thrust itself before man and his God and bound him to itself. It cultivated servants and slaves for itself, for its own riches and earthly advancement instead of liberating man and teaching him to be free and pointing the way which lies in each individual recognising his role in Creation and adjusting himself to fit this role. The Church barred the way of the human spirits to the Luminous Heights.
Instead of telling human beings that the way to God laid in the activity of the spirit in terms of exerting himself to bring purity to his thoughts, words or deeds, it removed this effort by telling them that there was no need to exert themselves. That the Church could pray for the forgiveness of sins as long as some form of payment was made to the Church. That the Church could even forgive these sins. Human beings therefore became indolent and complacent since there was no longer any need to exert oneself. Why go to all this trouble of thinking purely and doing good deeds if there were no consequences? Even if there were consequences we could pay the Church to pray for us and they could even forgive our sins.
The spiritual effort was thereby removed from men. All this opened wide the floodgates to evil. Everyone could do as they wished. The Commandments could be abandoned without any consequences. The Laws of God could be disregarded with impunity, without any consequences. All this so that the Church could become rich and influential.
Men whose main fault was the indolence of their spirits welcomed this new theory. We would rather give a percentage of our earnings to the Church if it promised easy forgiveness of sins. We could do anything as long as we went to the Church to confess and gave the Church a portion of our ill-gotten wealth. The Laws of God could easily be moved and bargained-with we thought. After all the Church fathers said so and they knew best since they were God’s representatives.
In accepting this theory that was put forward by leaders of organised religion, we gave up our freedoms and we put ourselves in their power. What followed historically as a result is there for all to see in the mass murders and oppression that characterised the Middle Ages.
The Laws of God cannot be bargained-with. It cannot be moved by so much as a hair’s breadth irrespective of what people say. Whatever we have given rise to through our thoughts, words and deeds we will still have to account for. No outside party has the power to forgive sins. The sins that we commit we will have to shoulder and work off ourselves and by no-one else and certainly not by Jesus the Son of God Who came to show us the way out of sin in His Teaching.