What I call my spiritual filter, seemed to have been inoperable early in my life, but that’s to be expected. When one is young and impressionable any knowledgeable appearing person can impact your life: especially if they have the proper credentials and social standing to back up their pronouncements.
I learned early on how to CONFORM: my EFFICACIOUS teachers left a mark on me! 
I stayed within the broad road of my first denominational experience. I embodied the mental image of my teenage years. Since I was raised in a non-Christian from the age of six to sixteen, that decade of wandering taught me to hold tight when I finally got some religious indoctrination to the truth (of my denomination).
Gradually, I discovered that blind faith and the lack of intellectual integrity were too much to supply the answers to life that I needed.
Even more slowly, I began to read books that my denomination told me were “of the Devil”. I listened to men who I was told could “lead me astray”. I even held conversations with people of different faiths whom I was instructed would “dilute my faith”. When you mix dirty water with clean water, you know what you’re going to get!
The problem though, was that I could no longer CONFORM to the rules, rituals, dogma, doctrine, creeds, and customs that once seemed to right! My inner voice, the spirit within me was calling me elsewhere. I was to later see that spirituality was much different than religion. It didn’t have to be that way, but it was!
It was Dietrich Bonhoeffer who wrote, “Jesus Christ came to abolish religion and the need for it altogether.” Wow, did that ever send my head spinning.
Religion can be a good starting place. Religion can embrace some of the best of spirituality known to man; however, more often than not, religion seeks to have its members CONFORM to whatever the denominational RULES are- that’s why it’s called a denomination.
“Seek first the Kingdom of God”, and “put away childish things” now have far more life than they once did. Are you experiencing the ABUNDANT LIFE (which isn’t the popular sermon of just material wealth)?
I love Blake’s take on religion, as found in his work “Jerusalem”: “I know of no other Christianity and of no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination. Imagination, the real & eternal World of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow, & in which we shall live in our Eternal or Imaginative Bodies when these Vegetable Mortal Bodies are no more.”
William Blake was defintiely not cut from the same cloth as most! It’s too bad that most religions want everytone to wear Saul’s (theirs) armor.
Exactly! I am increasingly coming to find that in this proverbial “Kingdom of God”, there is no need for armor, whether that armor be a dogma, creed, or defense.
Perhaps to live Authentically is the purest form of spirituality there is.
jbf wrote about: no need for armor in the Kingdom of God.
I had not thought about that. Think of never having to do another quick rehersal of self-defense of any kind…. whether words or actions or only thoughts. That makes the place of total trust and surrender all the more inviting. Only our fear blocks that entrance. Sure makes “self” look all the more stupid and petty when I think of it like that.
I remember in my Social Psychology class in college, when we were reading about psychopathic personalities, that the description fit Jesus almost to a T!
Rich: Oh yeah! In so many ways Jesus was NOTHING like what the church has become. Jesus was a subversive teacher as an example, while the church has doctrinally dumbed-down the Kingdom with either religious peyote or dogmatic opiate as Karl Marx declared.