In scrolling through Facebook this morning, I encountered a post by Jim Palmer that a friend of mine shared. The post was about “14 things that the misguided religious establishment doesn’t want you to know.” The post caught my attention because I wanted to see if Jim shared any of my thoughts about organized religion.
Disclaimer
I want to make a disclaimer before I delve into the contents of the post. I want to share my orientation about God (or whatever name you refer to a creator) before I share more about the post, dear reader. I believe there can only be one master creator, or there would be chaos in the functioning of the universe (reality). I believe that something had to have had a grand idea about this physical universe and set in motion the creation of it. For the rest of this article, feel free to substitute whatever name you like for “God.”
I further believe that there is one God and many legitimate paths to understanding God. We can allow those beliefs to shape our humanity and help us, hopefully, live better lives in this human plane of existence. The many organized religions and religious philosophies of this world can only seek to describe a God that is indescribable because there is so much that we have yet to understand about our creator and possibly cannot understand with our propensity to finite thinking.
Religion
Humanity has created many different ways to describe God and interpret who and what God is, how we should interact with God, and what this relationship means to our human lives. Religion attempts to offer a formula for how to live and what rules God has created to govern how we should live. My belief is that no human-made philosophy/religion about God is necessarily the “right one.” How can we know that it is the truth with certainty when we cannot see reality from God’s perspective? I propose that only God can know this. So, we do the best we can to describe a philosophy that is helpful to humankind.
Back to Jim Palmer's article
The author of this post, Jim Palmer, used to be a Christian megachurch pastor. He has renounced his former beliefs in a pretty powerful way. The post, in my opinion, seeks to impart a view that organized religion may have an agenda that is not based in truth. I highly recommend that you read this eye opening post for yourself. I want to take a closer look at two points that Jim makes in the article.
In point #11, Jim says, “A healthy religion is one that helps us own and integrate the shadow side of human nature for the good of person and planet…” This opposes the organized religious view that a specific religion tells us how to live and that we should just blindly accept it. My view is that a healthy religious philosophy can guide us to heal the fractures in our psyche, heal the belief in separation from God, and to know our inherit unity with all of life, especially other humans!
Point #14 is so juicy, I reproduce the whole point below:
You are capable of guiding your own spiritual path from the inside out and don’t need to be told what to do. You naturally have the ability, capacity, tools and skills to guide and direct your life meaningfully, ethically and effectively. Through the use of your fundamental human faculties such as critical thinking, empathy, reason, conscience and intuition, you can capably lead your life. You have the choice to cultivate a spirituality that doesn’t require you to be inadequate, powerless, weak, and lacking, but one that empowers you toward strength, vitality, wholeness, and the fulfillment of your highest potentialities and possibilities.
My theology envisions a God that lives within me and through me. God views life through my unique experience and the lives of all God’s creations. God “enjoys” looking at life from my unique perspective. Jim tells us that we have the inner resources to live a good life and heal anything that stands in our way of living a stellar life. I believe this resource is God Itself. We have all the wisdom of this physical world and the divine world at our disposal through the voice of our intuition. We must listen to this small, still voice and integrate what works for us individually using critical thinking.
Your individual path
I support everyone’s individual path to understand and have a relationship with God. It is important to take what religious leaders tell you and run it through your own inherit wisdom that flows from your own personal connection to God. Feel free to question the motivations of religious leaders as you think critically about what you are being told to believe and do. Cultivate a personal relationship with God, Spirit, the Universe, Mother, Father, or however you refer to the Creator.
You can read more Facebook posts by Jim Palmer here. Thank you, Jim, for this enlightening exposition about organized religion.
