CURRENT FEATURE ARTICLE ………… FREEDOM AND RELIGION

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Freedom and Religion
by Owen Waters

While religious organizations are filled with many leaders who
are pure of heart and uplifting in spirit, there are also
leaders whose agendas are more self-serving. People often give
away personal power to large institutions, religion included,
and this attracts unscrupulous leaders who wish to pursue their
quest for power over people.

In the pursuit of power through religion, the primary weapon
of conquest is fear. When fear has driven love from the hearts
of their followers, then hatred can be installed in its place.
Once a person hates other groups of people, then they become
trapped within an emotional prison from which there is no
escape as long as they accept the original messages of fear. It
then becomes essential that the creed being presented is a
rigid set of rules and behavior, as flexibility could open a
gateway to freedom.

As people are drawn to religion by the deepest of all human
drives, which is to consciously reconnect with God, their
greatest fear is to be cut off from such a reconnection. That
fear is exploited by self-serving leaders using threats of
eternal hell and damnation for people who reject the attempts
at control to which they are being subjected.

Another ploy to drive the love out of people's hearts has been
to tell them that they are miserable sinners. This allows
self-hatred to creep in and makes it even more possible to
instill hatred of other groups of people. These other groups
include not only people of other religions, but often other
sects within their own religion.

Fundamentalist groups are famous for insisting that theirs is
the one and only correct flavor of the truth and that all other
variations on the same theme are wrong. They go on to claim
that members of the other groups are destined for a hell which
is based on Dante's imaginary Inferno.

The lowest of the spirit realms do exist, as do the heavens,
or higher spirit realms, but they are nothing like the fantasy
versions. Unlike the physical world, the spirit realms are
segmented by frequency of consciousness. There are twelve
realms, or layers of existence, within the spirit world. People
reside in the realm that best harmonizes with their normal
frequency of consciousness and spend their time among others of
like mind and spirit.

There is no judgment by others when you pass from the physical
world into the spirit world. There is, however, a self-review
of your life where you assess what you learned in your physical
life, see what needs to be healed or integrated, and start to
think about what you would like to focus on in your next
incarnation.

The objective of life in the spirit realms is to integrate the
lessons of the physical life experience - to heal the
conflicts, release the negative emotions and become at peace
within. The spirit then becomes ready to move on beyond the
spirit realms and into the soul realms, where in-depth planning
for their next physical incarnation eventually takes place.

There is a reason why every snowflake is unique and every
person is unique. Infinite Being created infinite diversity in
order that an infinite variety of experience may be gained.
This is why there are as many paths to spiritual oneness as
there are humans upon the face of the Earth.

Trying to force people to live and act the same, according to
someone else's set of rules, is an attempt to interfere with
the Creator's principle of infinite variety. As I pointed out
in my book "The Shift," any attempt to coerce people into
conformity with the standards of another person, or another
group of people, is actually a violation against the will of
the Creator.

Humanity will reach unity and a lasting world peace when,
paradoxically, people accept the diversity of humanity. There
will never be a one-size-fits-all, world religion which demands
the conformity of everyone, simply because one size of anything
never did fit all people. What there will be is a worldwide
acceptance of human diversity and the fact that there is a
limitless variety of spiritual paths back to God or Infinite
Being, the one source of all life.

The freedom to pursue your own unique path back to original
oneness is a fundamental right endowed upon you by the Creator
of all life. As a living being, you have the inalienable right
to be who you are, and not what someone else wants you to be.

As we move away from the Old Reality and further into New
Reality consciousness, it is appropriate to celebrate our
uniqueness and the individual paths that we have chosen to
tread. Life is a cycle of experience and its ultimate purpose
is to learn how to reconnect with the spiritual joy which
radiates from within our inner beings.




This article was written by Owen Waters, author of
"The Shift: The Revolution in Human Consciousness"

Available in hardcover or via immediate download at:

http://www.infinitebeing.com/theshift

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