The System.

There are no bad people and no bad things. Only people and things that we have called bad.

We have different values and different understandings. We have made judgments and God doesn't make judgments.

God doesn't forgive anyone. This is because there's nothing to forgive. Forgiveness is only required when someone has been hurt or damaged. We can't hurt or damage God. God is All. There's nothing he needs or wants, nothing he requires to be happy. He doesn't need us to do, or not do, something. He doesn't need us to have, or not have, something. He doesn't need us to worship him, or fear him, or love him.

There's, in fact, nothing he needs from us, hence he doesn't ask anything of us.

Do you think he's up there making up rules for us to follow, regulations for us to adhere to ? We are making those up.

Since He can't be injured in anyway, He has no reason to ever feel angered or upset. Forgiving us for something we have done is unnecessary, because nothing we have done could ever injure Him, and in the absence of injury there's no need for retribution or justice.

He understand why we have done everything we have ever done in our life. He knows what we were thinking and why we did it. Anger is not something God is capable of. The level of his comprehension does not allow it as he knows and understands everything.

We must seek forgiveness from those we have hurt and seek forgiveness from ourselves.

There's no Judgment Book. God is not Santa in the Sky, making a list and checking it twice so that He can find out who is naughty and who is nice.

Our religions have taught us about separation, need, superiority, failure, judgment and condemnation.

But God is not an isolationist, nor an intolerant. God is largely a figment of our collective imaginations. He doesn't condemn anyone for anything.

Heaven isn't a place, but an intimate relationship with God that can be experienced partially on Earth.

God can't be enclosed in Heaven, God hears human prayers, intervenes in human history. Eternal damnation is not a punishment inflicted by God from outside. It's an internal state of separation from God.

Most of our religions believe that there's only One Way to God, and that their Way is this One Way. They believe this - and teach this - so fervently that they feel themselves to be superior in His eyes. They have accepted as real the illusion of superiority.

Many of them also believe that they must convince others to believe as they do, and that in doing this they are meeting their responsibility to God.

Finally, some religions and their followers believe and teach that persons of religions other than their own are His enemies and so must be converted, removed and eliminated.

These thoughts and ideas have produced justifications for ethnic cleansing, religious intolerance and so-called holy wars.

These ideas spring from a belief in an entire set of illusions around which humans have built their understandings of life, their philosophies, their religions, their political systems, and their economic systems.

These illusions are not real, but they have been made to seem very real because of the power that humans have given to them.

The world exists inside of a belief system of fear, insufficiency, and false superiority. Most of our worldwide institutions - not just religions, but politics, economics, education and social constructions of every variety - exist inside this paradigm, operate in this setting.

That's why there are so many wars over who has the right and correct religion, who has the right and correct political system, who has the right and correct economic system, who has the right and correct amount of the things on Earth of which we think there's not enough.

It's the struggle to gather the stuff of which there's not enough - into which category, sadly, we have also put God's love - that produces wars.

Most people believe in one God. Their God. To them, their God is the Only God. And everyone else's God is a false God. Regrettably, this idea has resulted in the killing of a lot of people - in the name of God.

Now, it's natural for people to wish to express themselves in ways that allow them to experience their individuality. The trick here is to see if members of human race can find a way to not let their individual expressions separate them and cause them to feel righteous or superior.

Righteousness and superiority about our expressions of individuality - whether religious or political or philosophical or economical or social or sexual - can lead to insane behavior.

We are all One. Ours is not a better Way, ours is merely another Way.

Religion, as with everything else, plays the role that we give it.

We could give it the role of bringing people closer to God and closer to each other. But religion has done just the opposite.

Nothing has done more to separate people from each other and from God than organized religion.

Religion is an institution and spirituality is an experience.

Religions are institutions built around a particular idea of how things are. When those ideas become hardened and set in stones they are called doctrines and they become largely unchallengeable. We either believe them or we don't.

Spirituality in its freest form doesn't require us to believe anything. Rather it continually invites us to notice our experience.

Our personal experiences become our authority rather than something that someone else has told us.

If we had to belong to a particular religion to find God, it would mean that God has a particular Way or means by which we are required to come to Him.

But the idea that God has only One Way of approaching Him or one particular means of returning to Him, and that this Way and Only this Way will work is a fallout from the illusion of requirement.

Is saying a rosary better than saying a savitu ? Is the practise called bhakti more sacred than the practise called seder ?

No, obviously not.

It's helpful for religions to imagine this because it gives them a tool with which to seek, acquire and retain members - and thus to continue to exist.

We cannot get to heaven. There's no place to go. Yet even if there were and we were looking for dimensions for directions to heaven, religion could be a very confusing place from which to get them.

There are many different religions on Earth, and each one has its own set of directions reflecting its best idea of how God wants it.

But God's ego is not so fragile that he must require humans to bow down to Him in fearful reverence and grovel before Him in earnest supplication, in order to God to find us worthy of receiving blessings.

What kind of God would this be ?

That's the question we must honestly ask ourselves.

We have been told that God has made humans in His image and likeness, yet it's possible that religions have fashioned God in the image and likeness of humans.

There's no place called hell. There's an experience of hell which is separation from God, but we can end that experience whenever we wish.

We no longer have to worry about how or whether we can get back to Him. We no longer have to feel abandoned or afraid. That's because God is here, with us, around us, in us. We no longer have to feel alone when we understand this.

God is You. God is Me. God is Everyone.